Planning Center Groups is an online application that will help you manage your members, plan events, take attendance, and share resources. As a Group Leader, you can do most of your group management from Church Center, but there are some leader tasks that you’ll need to do from the Admin side of Groups.
Check out this clip from Planning Center University.
Note
To manage your group from Church Center, you'll need to be logged in to the Church Center web or app.
You can add members to your group from the Members tab.
When the group member requests to join, review the request to add them as a member.
To create an event in Church Center web or app, log into Church Center, go to the group's Events tab, and select the Actions button in the app or the New button on the web.
Select an event to edit it.
You can take attendance for a group event from Church Center web or app starting from 10 minutes before the event begins.
Tip
If attendance isn’t something you’re interested in tracking, an Administrator can disable the reminders on the Settings tab.
If you want to add visitors to the attendance list, you can do that from Groups Admin if your group is set up to allow leaders to add members.
You can communicate with your group members using Group Messaging in the Church Center web or app.
First, make sure that messaging is enabled for your group and decide whether members can create new messages or only leaders.
Note
If you don't see the Group Messaging section in Settings, you can ask your Admin to give you permissions to enable messaging for your group.
You can then start discussions or post announcements for your group members Church Center.
From the Admin side of Groups, you can do most of the same things that you can do from Church Center, in addition to adding resources, managing settings, and viewing reports.
Note
To manage your group from Groups Admin, you'll need to log in. The first time you log in to Groups Admin, you might need to set a password, depending on if you have previously set a password for one of the other Planning Center products.
The table below shows a list of the administrative tasks that you can do from the Admin side of Groups. Click the link on a task for more information.
|
Task |
Description |
|---|---|
|
From the Members tab, you can add or invite new members to a group and also respond to requests to join a group. |
|
|
From the Members tab, you can email or print a list of members, remove or promote a member, and reset the date they joined the group. |
|
|
From the Events tab, you can create and edit an event. |
|
|
From the Events tab tab, take attendance and add new members or visitors (depending on group settings). |
|
|
From the Resources tab, you can view and add resources for your group members. |
|
|
From the Settings tab, group leaders can modify group information such as name, description, and group image, as well as the meeting location and contact information. Leaders can also add tags to help filter groups on Church Center. |
|
|
The Overview report will give you a bird's eye view of how your group is doing as a whole. The Attendance report will give you a closer look at the individuals in your group. As you take attendance during your events, this report will begin to populate. |
Administrators will be able to see any notifications related to them in the Admin Notifications Inbox. You can find this inbox at the top right corner of any page by clicking the bell icon.
If you have login permissions to Planning Center, you will be able to see both read and unread notifications and customize your notification settings.
If you used to find the notifications on the Notification page, you can now see them in this bell.