[This post is part of a series on Tips For Taking Your Worship Team To The Next Level. Check out the rest here.]
One of the best changes we ever made was migrating all our scheduling and planning to an online system. Gone are the days of an Excel spreadsheet, individual emails, and tracking 400 email replies.
If you are not currently operating this way, consider this post your kick in the butt 🙂 It will save you time, simplify your life, and help you focus on the “worship” side of leading worship.
For this post, I thought I would offer a simple overview of some of the more popular sites:
I love Quick Worship for its simple tagline: Spend more time in worship, less in planning. We worship leaders all know that scheduling worship teams can be quite time consuming.
Quick worship allows you to upload all of your songs to its database – lyrics, chord charts, and mp3’s. You can also schedule your team, create lists, watch video tutorials, and add customized comments to your tech sheets. The pricing is also highly affordable, based on your church’s size. It goes as low as $5 a month to only $99 a month for the largest church.
Planning Center
Planning Center is rockstar awesome. Upload your songs, create tech sheets, listen to mp3’s, you name it it’s here. Another great feature is the iPhone app which allows you to access and edit your plans on the fly. Also, for all you iPad aficionados, there’s the option of utilizing the Planning Center music stand and do away with printing music.
Really a brilliant addition.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFpZacXIGNA
Planning Center is totally customizable to your worship planning experience. We do all our service planning, worship team and volunteer scheduling, and musician notes in Planning Center. Musicians can simply accept or decline a particular service, which cuts down on last minute cancellations and conflicts.
Pretty sweet, huh?
Frequency Worship
Frequency Worship is a worship resource site founded by Chris Tomlin. The cheapest of all three options, Frequency Worship Planning may just be what you need for its simplicity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxGAoP7lFZI
Similar features of uploading mp3’s and charts, scheduling, set lists, and calendar. For $19.95 a month you get access to all the Worship Planning features as well as the FQ Video tutorials (which are great, btw).
Worship Planning
Voted Editors Pick by Worship Leader Magazine in 2009 and 2010, Worship Planning is another fantastic resource for your team. Centralized plans accessible anywhere, create/manage teams, an iPhone app, video tutorials, a free weekly webinar, and a great support team.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry2fllYfHvA
What I loved about the pricing is that new church plants can use Worship Planning FREE for its first year. As part of a church planting community, I thought that was quite considerate. The highest plan doesn’t go beyond $85 a month, which is very reasonable.
Question: What planning resource do you use for your team? Are there any other “must have” resources that can’t be without? I appreciate your comments! You can leave a comment by clicking here.
We started using elvanto.com last Fall. What I drew me to it was that we could have full access to every feature, regardless of the plan we chose. This was definitely the best option for us at a very reasonable monthly cost.
Thanks Paul! I have not heard of elvanto but will go check it out. Thanks for always posting my writings!
We use Planning Center and love it.
In a world where the young only use an email address to sign up for things like facebook, it’s awesome that you can send scheduling notifications through text messages and connect it up with facebook. Helps to take out the excuse of, “Well I never got the email” . Ha!
That’s awesome. Do you get most of your “replies” through facebook and texting? We haven’t implemented that yet.
I just started using Planning Center after the Leadership Conference at Freedom Valley. It is already simplifying the process and as we’re getting ready to move to a new campus, I’d be lost trying to manage everything manually.
Great! Glad it’s working for you.
Hey, just found your blog. It’s a must-read in my life now.
My campus church uses GoogleDocs to schedule and plan each service. It’s free and is our first step away from 95 emails (though, there have been a few missed updates/replies). I wonder how any text/fbook connections seem work out…
Andrew, thanks so much for reading. Look forward to connecting here. We use GoogleDocs too but not for scheduling/planning. Google stuff is brilliant!
A couple years ago everybody groaned when I had us make the switch to PlanningCenter , but after the (rather extensive)set-up time – it so rocks! Love the transposing feature for charts. They also have a free version that I use for my freelance ministry.
Do you know any PCO resources for tutorials? I was thinking about making some, but I’ve sure other people out there know a lot more than i do about it. Plus, I’m not living in it everyday like I used to.
Thanks for the comparison shopping guide!
I don’t know of any PCO resources off hand, though I searched it on YouTube and saw a bunch of videos. Check them out here. Let me know if they’re any good!
Hi there! Thank you so much for your blog. I get inspired, encouraged and blessed reading it. I am from a small church in Sweden and we just started using box.net. It can be accessed from any computer, mobile(m.box.net), Iphone and Androidapp. It is a simple tool for sharing sheets, mp3, officedocs and pdf. And it is totally free
Christer, thanks for reading! I have some great friends in Sweden! I’ll have to check out the box.net app. Haven’t heard of it.
The planning/scheduling resources you highlighted mention uploading charts, lyrics, and mp3s. According to the FAQs on Planning Center Online, if you have a CCLI license, it covers the distribution of lyrics, charts & self-recorded (your band) audio for most worship songs. But what about uploading the original audio files even for streaming…doesn’t that require licensing? How do you suggest handling that?
I don’t think you need licensing to stream music. I could be wrong, but that’s just my two cents.
I use and recommend worshipteam.com
Price is based on the number of people on your worship team and can go as low as $9 per month. These two features set it apart from all the rest: 1. To my knowledge its the only site that streams the audio recordings, making it the only legally authorized worship planning site. 2. It offers several options for automatic formatting and printing the chord charts of a set list including more than one song per page. It also transposes both chord charts and the audio recording to different keys. There are many other nice features as well. Check it out. (and no, I don’t work for them – I’m a worship leader of a church and a fan who appreciates the thought that went into it).
Thanks for this great comparison! Another great resource and program worth looking at is Ministry Scheduler Pro – Online Service Planning! Features through this program allow you to not only schedule the services, but then upload resources or song items, notes, and item by item plans to your service right online. Volunteers can even comment on a service! Pretty cool!
We have been using quickworship.com for a number of years and love it. They have recently updated the look and features and it honestly rocks. I know with our team we have a wide age group and comfort level with technology. So the easier the system for users the better for us. This system we has been perfect for us, from the young tech savvy members to the 60 year olds who have technology fear, all seam to love it. Also as leader anything that can help keep the team members all on the same page is a bonus for me.
I’d recommend ServiceBuilder, which is a web application I’ve written. 🙂
What about resources in Spanish for worship planning?!!