This blog could save you several hours each week! What I am going to tell you about isn't free, but it is worth every penny. It's an online tool called "Planning Center" (http://www.planningcenteronline.com) and it is an online volunteer organization tool. We first met the Planning Center team at the Arts conference at Willowcreek church several years ago. We were early adopters in their tool and we have watched it grow into a super powerful volunteer organization tool that we simply can not live without. Before planning center, scheduling volunteers was a tedious chore. Emails back and forth just to find out that our Alto has a weekend road trip planned made a friday afternoon headache a regular occurrence for our worship pastor.
Planning center allows our volunteers to "block-out" dates they aren't available, and for our worship leader to select volunteers from a list of people and the system does the emailing and scheduling conflict resolution automatically. That is just the tip of the iceberg! How do you setup your music each week so that your singers can hear the rehearsal tracks? Do you spend time burning CD's? Not with planning center. Songs that are added to the schedule are automatically added to the online media player for singers to listen to from anywhere via the web.
Listen, this blog isn't long enough to explain all the very very cool and useful features of this tool. I don't work for planning center, I was not asked to endorse their product. I am simply a user that can testify to the usefulness and value of the tool because it saves us countless hours every week and there is no way we will go back to not using this tool. Here is a video from the planning center channel off of vimeo!
As worship leaders we can be very resourceful in the use of everyday items to enhance our weekly worship services! This blog is dedicated to sharing ideas we tried and (mostly) succeeded in creating awesome worship experiences on a budget.
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