Experience.FellowshipOne.com

Has anyone used PlanningCenteronline.com?  It’s made for churches, and I have a few people within our staff that insists we use it.  We’re new to F1 and I was hoping to just use fellowship.  F1 has planning features in it too, but some of our staff is set with the fact that the other system will make their lives easier.  I’m not too familiar with Planningcenteronline, but I was hoping if you’re using F1 to schedule your ministries, track volunteers and events, could you help me explain to my fellow staff, why sticking with F1 would be easier for all of us?

God Bless,

Todd

We use Planning Center Online for our Childrens/Youth and Worship ministries.  Before starting w/Planning Center Online, I contacted Fellowship Technologies to see if there was an easier way than maintaining 2 databases (the same questions you're asking now).  Unfortunately, I was told there was not. 

To use F1, we must run a query on each of the 5 service times for each of the ministry areas in our church, then send email reminders to our volunteers.  Through Planning Center Online, I simply click "Send", and an email is sent to the volunteers, asking if they will be serving.  On Friday, another email is automatically sent, letting the volunteers know they are scheduled...simply "reminding" them one last time that they are scheduled.  PCO makes it simple, quick...and is very affordable.

The real "drawback" to using PCO is it's a second database to maintain.  If a volunteer changes his email address in PCO, for instance, I have to "catch" it to update F1. 

I wish you the best!!!

Like the response from Chula Vista, we also use Planning Center for all of our scheduling.  We had the same discussion with Fellowship One and had the same problems that Planning Center has solved.  We are very pleased except for the running 2 data bases issue.  Once you get people put into the Center it is very easy to manage.  Our hope (dream) is in the future for Fellowship One to put something in but for now we are using both. 

Journey Fellowship

Lacombe, LA

Wow,

It appears I’m losing the battle.  Thanks for the responses; I’m quite grateful for them.  I must admit, I was hoping for an “F1 does it all” response.  But I realize that we do not live in a perfect world.  PCO seems to be quite easy for managing lots and lots of people. 

The issue at hand is the same noted in the other posts, as our staff doesn’t want to run queries for 15 different serving ministries for 3 different campuses each month and email volunteers to remind them that they’re working noting the time, location and specific job. 

If PCO does it all automatically, this would save a huge chunk of time.  I love Fellowship and would love to have our whole staff use just one system. But when our staff has more time for the important stuff, such as using another system that takes no extra clicks of a mouse, it's the the trivial point where I will lose this debate. 

Thanks again for your advice.
Todd

 

Maybe we could nag Jeff Hook to buy PlanningCenterOnline…….

We are yet another church who uses F1 but also uses Planningcenter.  We use PCO for our service scheduling, since that is what it is designed for.  We kind of use F1 for childrens ministry.  

I'm still waiting for the day when F1 lets us get at our data in a more usable manner.  I.e. the RESTful programming they spoke about.  Once this is done I could see keeping the data in F1 but exporting it to PCO.

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Mark Spidle - IT Director
Point of Grace Church
markspidle@pointofgrace.com
www.pointofgrace.com

We also use both.  For worship services planing there is no better tool.  Even if F1 had a better e-mail out method or auto sent e-mails (which they really need to do) what PCO does is very specialized.

 However F1 has a PHP api now and PCO also has one.  There are peopel on the PCO forums who have a basic UPDATE process running to "SYNC" the contact data between PCO and F1.  I currently have a programmer working on it for us... but it will be about 3 months or so before its done as we are working on multiple projects.  You can look at the API help info on PCO website.

 

-Jeff Cox

Chruch on the Hill, McMinnvlle, OR

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Jeff Cox
Business Administrator
Church on the Hill
McMinnville, OR
www.hillchurch.com
jcox@hillchurch.com

This note was made by Curtis Simmons on May 20, 2009.  Has anyone heard any new news?:

Yes, the team at Planning Center Online is pretty far along in their development against our new RESTful API. We should know more about their timeline in the next couple of weeks.

Curtis Simmons

VP, Customer Effectiveness

 

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Sherry Donaldson

Database Manager
Shoreline Christian Center