Hello all,
I wanted to take some time to share about our church's experience with Planning Center Online and the kinds of things we do with it at our church in case it would prove to be helpful to others.
Planning Center Online Services ("PCO") is a subscription based scheduling service designed to assist churches with scheduling and putting together worship services (no, I'm not being paid/reimbursed by PCO). It is based on putting volunteers into a database (you can categorize volunteers by their roles, i.e. ushers, tech volunteers, piano, drummer, etc.) and then scheduling them for dates for which they are volunteering. Each service allows you to input items such as songs and readings for the volunteers to view in preparation for the service (if you link in your church's CCLI subscription, you can import chord sheets and lyrics into the service for viewing and we also link YouTube links to the songs so that volunteers can use them to practice). Our worship coordinator also links the slides for each song from Pro Presenter to each song in PCO so that they're more easily available to be put into Pro Presenter once the order of service has been decided on.
My first experience with Planning Center Online was when I started volunteering with a praise team at our church. I was designated what is known as a "scheduled viewer" and I could see services as I was assigned to volunteer. I had the ability to accept or decline the request to participate. However, I was limited to looking at what was already loaded in the service.
Later on I became the leader of a praise team and was moved to being an editor. This gave me the ability to add songs and other items to the service outline and schedule practices for the team. I also am able to send emails and notices to the whole team from within PCO to let them know information about the service. One of the other things I discovered at this time was that while you can load songs in numerous keys into PCO, you can also load "alternate keys" for the chosen key to ensure that "capoed" music is available. This functionality lead to me using the an application called 'Music Stand' that allows viewing of the chord sheets and lyric pages on a tablet for practice or for Sunday morning. I lead from an acoustic guitar and am able to swipe from song to song and makes notations on the chord charts.
PCO has some helpful videos if you're just curious and want to know what the service is about.
I'm not sure what else to add at this time, but I'll try to treat this as a living document and suggest that you feel free to ask questions you want about PCO and how we are utilizing it at our church and I will do my best to answer.