Church Center is Planning Center's way for congregants to connect with the life of your church. While there are numerous ways to share event information from Calendar, this update is all about making our Church Center presence more beautiful, detailed, and useful!
You can now customize the description of Church Center events to include text formatting (ex: bold, italics, lists, etc.) as well as imagery! This is a great way to emphasize specific information or to include a useful graphic like a flyer or map.
To start amping up your Church Center descriptions today, hop into an event's Settings tab and get to it!
Feeds
If your Calendar account is connected to Groups or Registrations via feeds you've probably noticed the disparity between descriptions in those products and Calendar. That's because they already offered these formatting options while Calendar did not. Now that we've made this change, we're able to sync event descriptions across products to make for a more seamless integration. 💪
Summary vs. Description
We've re-organized an event's Settings tab by grouping together information that is specific to Church Center. You can see here that Description belongs to Church Center, but what is this new Summary field on the top? Great question.
There are some places in Calendar where rich descriptions would add more clutter than clarity. Specifically the quick-view that pops up when you select an event on the Events tab, the event listing in kiosk view, an event's details in iCal feeds, reports where you only need basic information, and various areas of our mobile app. Also, not everyone who uses Calendar also uses Church Center (but you should! 😉).
For those reasons, we're going to have Summary as a basic, plain text field for use in those areas.
When you create a new event in Calendar, the Summary will automatically be copied over to the Description. When you import a feed event from Groups or Registrations, their Descriptions will populate both the Description and the Summary in Calendar.
This way you're guaranteed to have something in both fields so no matter how you share your events, but you've also got the ability to customize the Summary and Description independently of each other.
Talk to us!
We're excited to continue digging deeper into Church Center and would love your input on what would be most useful to you. Shoot us a support ticket with your feature requests or join our Slack community to engage with other users.
Team Calendar,
—Kayla, Nick, Taylor, Greg, Tammy, Jenna, Doug, and Evan