Planning Center

I'm Collin Mallery, and I build and host websites for churches and small businesses in Reno–Sparks. This app connects a church's website to the church's own Planning Center. When someone fills out a form on the website, they show up in Planning Center People, where your team already follows up. It's only for churches whose websites I build and host.

What it does

Each form on your website (Plan a visit, Connect card, Prayer request, Newsletter and any others) goes where you choose, from your website dashboard:

• A Planning Center form. The entry becomes a submission on a People Form you pick. Planning Center then does whatever that form is set up to do: emails its subscribers, sends the person a confirmation, adds workflow cards.
• People and a workflow. The person is found in People, or added if they're new, and given a card in the workflow you pick, with an optional note of what they wrote.
• Off. The entry stays in your website dashboard only.

Every entry lands in your website dashboard first, so nothing is lost if Planning Center is having a bad day. A send that doesn't go through tries again by itself for about a day, and each entry shows whether it reached Planning Center.

What it can see and change

• People only. The app asks for Planning Center People access and nothing else: not Giving, Services, Check-ins, Groups, Calendar or Registrations.
• It reads your People Forms and their fields, your workflows and note categories (so you can pick where entries go), and the name of the person who connected. To avoid duplicates, it looks up people whose name or email matches someone who just filled out a form.
• It adds form submissions, new people, a missing email or phone on a matching person, workflow cards and notes, all from what visitors typed into your website.
• It never browses or copies your People database, and it can never do more than the Planning Center user who connected it.

Connecting

1. Sign in to your website dashboard at app.collinmallery.com as an owner, open Planning Center and click Connect Planning Center.
2. Sign in on Planning Center's own page and allow access. The person who connects needs People Editor permission or higher, and manager access to each form you'll pick.
3. Choose where each website form goes and save. Send a test if you like: it makes a real, clearly labeled entry in Planning Center.

Keeping it safe

• Planning Center's access keys are stored encrypted and used only by the server. They're never shown in a browser, put in a link or written to a log.
• Prayer requests and other answers go only to your Planning Center and your website dashboard. The records I keep say that something was sent, never what anyone wrote.
• Only your website's owners can connect, disconnect or change where forms go.

Disconnecting

Click Disconnect on your dashboard's Planning Center page. That turns the access off at Planning Center and deletes the keys on my side. Whatever was already sent stays in Planning Center, and your website's entries stay in your dashboard. Reconnect any time; entries that were waiting go out then.

Privacy

How visitors' information is handled is in my privacy policy (sections 1 and 4). Once an entry is in Planning Center, Planning Center's privacy policy applies.

Help

If an entry didn't reach Planning Center, its page in your dashboard says why and what to do, usually a permission to add or a form to pick again, and Retry sends it once that's fixed. For anything else, email collin@collinmallery.com, or call or text (775) 235-8677. I built this, so you'll be talking to the person who can fix it.