Worship Team Administraton Software

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Permalink Reply by David Harrell on January 5, 2010 at 12:02pm

I am curious what your objection would be to an online service. We use www.planningcenteronline.com and it does everything you have said you are looking for. I know several other large churches that are using it and it is working very well for them. We have a guy in our praise team that is good with html, and he has even been able to customize some of our reporting. I attached an example of one of our spreadsheet that we print from the site.

Attachments:

• Worship Plan 12-13-09.pdf, 48 KB

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Permalink Reply by Brenda Hannah on January 5, 2010 at 7:01pm

I actually do not have any objections about planning center, and actually it is one of the best programs out there, but it is an on line service which means there is a monthly fee, and with the volume of people that we have on our team that we need access for, we would have to have the largest package which would be very expensive. So what I was trying to find was program that is comparable that could handle the volume of people that we have.

I did find a program a few days ago that I have been researching, it is called www.setpicker.com, the program is much like planning center, and to buy it would be less than what it would cost for one month of the premium package on planning center. It is about $89.00. And planning center is about $99.00, for one month. In the next 6 months to a year I will have over 200 people in our worship team, that includes our audio/visual team (sound, lighting, streaming, video, media, worship, choir, musicians), and that would also, include the teams that are in other areas, Youth, Young Adult, Children s Ministry, Women's and Men's ministry, we have full worship teams in all of these areas there are a couple more than that. So as you can see, even though planning center is a great program, and for this many people it might not sound like a lot of money, but it has to be allocated into the budget and that would be over a $1200 a year into my budget. That is a lot of money.

So we have taken another direction to be able to use something that we can carry on our own server that is accessible through our web site.

Does that make sense now. I used to use planning center, so I know the benefits, and that is why I want something that is very close to what they offer. It would be nice if they came up with an actual software that is not an online service, but something that you can buy.

Very good question.

Brenda:)

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Permalink Reply by David Harrell on January 6, 2010 at 12:19am

Makes sense Brenda. You must have an extensive system of servers and that would absolutely support a client-server application. I will be interested to see what you end up choosing.

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Permalink Reply by Brenda Hannah on January 6, 2010 at 12:29am

David,

Yes we have a lot of stuff that is for sure, our church is about 1200 and grew by over 25 percent last year, so you might say we are having major growing pains. Now if my team was smaller and I was just needing schedule our main worship team, it might make sense, but because we are handling so many people, just financially it is just makes more sense to have software that will do what planning center does. We do have a group of people in our church that actually write software, so we are thinking that eventually we will go that route.

Yes, I will let you know what we choose to do, it is fun to look at different things too.

Brenda:)

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Permalink Reply by Brendan Smith on June 18, 2010 at 3:07am

Please share that software when that does happen.

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Permalink Reply by Brenda Hannah on July 29, 2010 at 5:36pm

Brendan,

Guess what? We were praying and the only people who knew about what we wanted to do was about 2 people on our team that never said anything to anyone. My worship pastor walked into a meeting on her birthday a few weeks ago, and as she was walking in she heard the pastor say that we were getting planning center on line for the whole entire church. What an awesome day that was! So now we do not have to do the entire expense as a worship team, but we will share the cost with the entire church leadership and team staff. It will be unlimited at 100 a month.

So with that being said we are getting it next month....I am so excited, it will make my life a whole lot easier. So maybe for you church that is a solution or anyone for that matter, to share the cost with the entire church, everything and scheduling can be managed with it. It sure beats E-mail or G-Mail Calendar.

Brenda:)

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Permalink Reply by David Estes on July 29, 2010 at 3:11pm

Yes, It only cost 4-5 thousand for a small set up. What you describing is an asset/employee management software.
I know a guy that knows a guy who wrote software that some of the fast food chains use. (Sonic, Taco Bell)
He wrote and sells the software and makes a ton of money. It maybe to much of a program for your needs though.
You might want to expand your scope and look at that type of software. Get out of the church and look at business side.

Also if you have a university near by put an add up for some web savvy students to set you up a server site or write you software they may do it as a project for a grade. You never know.

Also if you already have a server there is a patchwork of software's that will do what you need it to do.

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