Planning Center Online is a suite of apps built specifically for churches with churches in mind. These are same guys who make the extremely popular Planning Center Services app that so many church worship teams use to plan their worship services, set lists, and so much more.

While their most popular app is called Services, Planning Center also has several other apps that aim to be the best in each app's category.


However, today I would like talk about one app in particular that every church can use absolutely free. This is especially great for smaller churches working on an extremely tight budget. If you are part of a small church, you know that every penny counts. Often times spending resources on software gets put on the back burner, but that doesn't mean that software isn't needed.

Of all the issues that churches deal with when it comes to tracking data, the first bit of information every church needs to track is membership data. Who are our church members, and what do we know about them? Every church needs to have a central place with every members contact information.

This is where PCO comes to the rescue. PCO People is an app from Planning Center that allows you to track unlimited member records and even track custom information for each individual for the great low price of FREE.


Now you might be asking how they can provide a free solution like this and reliably support it. To put it simply, PCO Services is so extremely popular that they have the financial resources to continue to provide PCO People for free. There is no catch. It is absolutely free software. It also happens to be the backbone of the other PCO apps, so if you ever want to add another paid app to your account, all of your people data is already there. However, there isn't a requirement to do so.

My church happened to be using PCO Services before PCO People existed. At that time, we didn't have a software system to manage all of our membership data. As a matter of fact, our contact information was a mess of spreadsheets and word documents. I had spent a ton of time researching Church Management Systems, but I was unable to convince the church board to spend the extra resources on a ChMS. I was frustrated with the was things were. The youth department had one list of people. The children's department had a partial list of people. The church office had a word document with the church membership list, and our accountant had a completely separate list of donors.

That's when PCO released their People app. I was immediately impressed. Check out this video from Planning Center below.


A quick overview of how PCO People can help you organize your ministry.
The best part of the whole app was that it was absolutely FREE. I can do free, and so I started importing the data from all of our systems. Our church staff was encouraged to all use the PCO People app to track member information. Once we had all the information in one place, we realized something. We were missing information on some of our members. So we collect that information. Then we began to realize just how powerful this new system was. When we needed to contact someone, we had one place to go. When we needed to contact a whole group of people, we could filter the people we needed to contact into a list.

Then we realized that we could use PCO people to track even more information about each person. We could track their volunteer information. We could track who has a background check on file. We could track forms like medical releases. We could track dates like salvations and baptisms.

PCO wasn't quite through bringing new features to the table though. Soon they released another feature to the PCO People app called Workflows. With work flows you can set up a series of steps to process people through and assign a staff member to each step. One of the best uses for this is visitor follow up. Your church may find a ton of other uses as well. You could set up a series of steps for becoming a church member. Basically you can track a person's progress through whatever steps your church already uses, and if you don't have a great process for visitor follow up, this is a great place to start.


PCO still had more to announce (and will keep updating their apps with great new features in the future). Recently PCO announced People for iOS. If you have an iPhone, you can now easily access all of your church membership information and contact information on the device you are most likely to contact them with. PCO also mentioned that an Android apps was in the works.



If you are interested in checking out more about PCO People, visit the website below and click the "Sign Up" button.

get.planningcenteronline.com/people

God bless,

Pastor Nate Cress

One of the greatest battles churches face in their day to day operations is getting ready for the Sunday morning service. Scheduling volunteers and making sure everyone will be there can be difficult. Small churches can struggle because each volunteer plays an extremely vital role. One person going on vacation without a backup can be a disaster. Larger churches struggle because services and programs can become more complex and communication can fall through the cracks.

That's not all though. Each week a set of worship songs must be decided on and practiced. The order of service must be planned, and the list goes on.

Enter Planning Center Online



PCO Services is the solution most churches turn to in this space. While there are certainly other solutions, Planning Center Online was the first to develop a solution for this in the local church and really helped to define the catagory. Now many traditional ChMS software companies are adding a Worship Planning aspect to their existing software, and PCO is becoming more and more of a full blown ChMS. With that said, PCO Services is the most mature of all the Worship Planning solutions available to churches, and Planning Center Online continues to innovate and push their software further. Whether you choose to use PCO as your church ChMS or choose to only use the Services app in tandem with your current ChMS solution, you won't be disappointed.

Cost is always a factor in any decision regarding church resources. PCO offers the Services app for free for up to 5 people, so if you have a small band or if you really only want to use this to organize your services and store your sheet music, PCO offers a great free solution. To really harness the power of PCO Services though, you will need to pay for your whole team. You get to decide what that team looks like though, so you can certainly keep costs down to a minimum. When we started using this at our church, we quickly realized just how powerful it was and upgraded to pay for all our church volunteers.

Find out more about PCO Services at get.planningcenteronline.com

Image from www.thefluidapp.com

Back when AT&T had the iPhone exclusively, I remember AT&T produced some commercials with the phrase "There's An App For That." In the years since then, we have seen a major mobile revolution. People who never had access to the internet now have immediate access almost anywhere they go. Things have changed and communication has changed. People text instead of talking. Many young people don't use or even have an email address, but they use SMS and messaging apps. How do we reach this next generation? How do we reach the current generation who are also spending increasing amounts of time on these mobile devices?

Thus, our church began looking at publishing a mobile app for our church. After searching through the many mobile church app companies to find someone to partner with, we chose The Fluid App. I actually found out about The Fluid App from a friend whose church started using it. I was really impressed with the app from their church. The Fluid App features an updating news feed for the home page, interactive messaging groups, a media section for sermons and promotional videos, an events stream for upcoming events (much better than bulletins and emails), and the best built in app donation system I've ever seen. I won't say this app is perfect, but it is a great app, and the developers are easy to communicate with. I love that.

One of the things that I really love about this app is the group messaging feature. If you want people to interact with your app, you need something other than just regularly updated content. Having a feature that allows our church to communicate with existing church groups is a fantastic use of our app, and as far as I know, this is the only other app that has this feature for churches.

Another thing that really sold me on The Fluid App is the price. The app is priced at $29/month plus a one time set up fee of $349. For the quality of app that is produced, this is an excellent deal. Other apps in this price range have subpar user experiences, but The Fluid App knocks pricing out of the park for churches on a tight budget!

Check out our app at onelink.to/thelakes and let me know what you think.

Visit The Fluid App's website to find out more www.thefluidapp.com

While I think The Fluid App is the best choice for our church and many churches, you may find that another app works better for your church.

Other custom church apps that I've looked at include:

• The Church App
• Custom Church Apps
• The Table

I've looked at others but these three were among the ones that I really debated on when we decided to go with The Fluid App. Regardless of which app platform your church chooses to use, I encourage you to utilize this tool for your ministry!

- Pastor Nate Cress