Children’s Ministry Ideas: Planning Center

This post could save you hours every month.

Every Sunday School Director, Children’s Pastor, or Christian Education Director has volunteers.  Ministry requires volunteers.  By virtue of having a volunteer team every leader has to create some system to schedule and manage their volunteers.  For years I created an Excel spreadsheet to tackle volunteer scheduling but I quickly ran into problems:

• If I sent out the schedule before getting input from the team, I ended up having to make adjustments and resending the schedule.
• If I solicited volunteer feedback ahead of time, creating the schedule meant wading through a pile of emails from every volunteer about their availability.

Then I discovered Planning Center.  Planning Center is a web-based volunteer management tool.  You can schedule and organize your teams, layout your services, and store media.  This tool puts the onus of responsibility on your volunteers to proactively put in their unavailable dates into a calendar, so when you make your schedule you automatically know who is out of town.  With Planning Center you can communicate to your entire team and team members are reminded of their serving commitment via email or text.

In my church context, we use Planning Center for multiple teams: Creative Arts, Celebrate Recovery, Administration, Children’s Ministry, and Student Ministry.  It is well-worth the monthly investment because collectively we save hours and hours of time creating volunteer schedules and the service planning tools are priceless.