Communications are core to your church, so we continue to invest in improving that experience by making chat easier to access, more flexible, and more engaging.
Chat will now have global access at the top of Church Center AND will include new team conversations from Services in one unified chat interface. This new chat experience includes improvements like the ability to upload videos, show link previews, indicate typing, read receipts, and more!
Tell me more!
Here are the new exciting features for Groups, available in the Church Center iOS/Android mobile apps:
- Global access: You can now get to chat from any page in Church Center. Once there, you’ll see all the conversations happening in your groups in one spot. This includes chat conversations from Services as well!
- Read status: Know how many people have seen and read your messages.
- Typing indicators: See who is actively typing in the conversation.
- Video uploads: Upload videos from your device to share with the Group! Currently has a 50MB limit.
- Link previews: Share links from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc… and get a nice inline preview to increase engagement.
- Spotify audio playback: If you share Spotify links in the conversation window, the audio will play!
- GIF’s: Giphy integration to share all those funny 🤪 and serious 😑memes with your group to make the conversation more fun!
Other notable differences coming to Church Center iOS/Android:
- All other Group notifications are in “Me”: Notifications for Church Center now live in your Me profile from your avatar at the upper right.
- Chat conversation cleanup: There’s now a limit of 100 active conversations per channel, so your pages stay fast and manageable.
- Conversation freezing: The ability to turn off replies for a conversation is in a different spot, in the conversation details -> freeze conversation.
Our vision for chat at Planning Center is to help connect everyone in your church. This latest chat release is just the beginning and we plan to add features and updates to chat to enhance it even more. As always, stay tuned for updates, we are listening to your feedback, and can’t wait to show you more in the future!
Stay connected,
🧡 Team Groups