You can now connect any event in Calendar to Services or Check-Ins using our new Connections feature! Simply head over to the Connections tab on any Calendar event and select the Service Type or Check-In Event you'd like to connect to and đĽ bam â you're done!
With this update, we've finally completed our connection collection of Planning Center's event management products: Calendar, Registrations, Groups, Services, and Check-Ins. Using the Connections menu in the header of these products, you're able to visualize relationships and quickly navigate between them.
Here are two common scenarios where these new connections really shine.
Sunday Service
A lot goes into a typical Sunday. You've got your rooms booked and volunteers scheduled, your printers and tablets are ready, and you've finally honed in the workflows for your Baptism sign-up forms. One problem though: all of those things exist in different Planning Center products.
When details change or a new person joins your team, it can be cumbersome to find all the pieces and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Here's where connections saves the day.
First, let's talk about setup. For some churches, rehearsals happen on a different day or use a different room than your live service. By having separate Calendar events for your rehearsal and Sunday service, you can book what you need when you need it while also only promoting your live service times on Church Center.
With that squared away, you'll connect your Service Type to both the rehearsal and live service events in Calendar. If something has to be rescheduled or you need to change rooms, you can jump over to Calendar with a single click to make all of the changes.
The same goes for Registrations and Check-Ins! Even if you aren't jumping into those products to makes changes as frequently, you've still got a way to conceptualize that these are all parts of the same event.
Special Events
Night of worship? VBS? Marriage conference? Volunteer appreciation event?
Connections have got you covered.
Again, let's talk about setup. You could create a unique Service Type for each of these things, but most churches use a "Special Events" Service Type to house them all so that's what we'll showcase here.
When it comes to Services, Calendar connects to the Service Type (as opposed to individual plans) which allows for all kinds of flexibility. You can connect many, many Calendar events to a single Service Type as needed, and then connect check-ins and sign-ups to those Calendar events as well.
It could be easy to overload your connections menu, but we've planned for that by automatically filtering your options to the connections relevant to the event you're currently viewing. This makes it easier to move quickly and confidently across all of Planning Center!
Stay connected with us (see what I did there? đ) by joining our Slack community.
Happy Calendaring!
â¤ď¸ Kayla, Taylor, Nick, Jared, Tammy, Matt, Zeek, and Evan