Children's Ministry can have many moving pieces, and we've made these pieces easy to track with Services, Registrations, People, and Check-Ins!
Check out this video on Planning Center University:
Set up your children's ministry service and manage volunteers in Services.
When you add them to Services, they can block out dates to make sure they don't get scheduled on days they can't be there and set their preferences to reflect how they want to be scheduled. They can also update their communication preferences in their profile to choose how they want to be notified of their upcoming scheduled dates.
After you've added people to teams in Services, you can schedule them to plans! There are a few ways to do this:
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Schedule your team in a plan.
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Set up scheduling templates if you have the same people who volunteer regularly.
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Use signup sheets to allow people to schedule themselves.
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Use auto-scheduling to schedule people based on their preferences.
You can also use the Matrix to schedule people for multiple weeks at a time.
Registrations is a great way to have people sign up for your children's ministry services or events. Create your signup with add-ons, discounts, and scholarships as needed, and you can gather additional information with questions and forms in your signup. Split registrations allow volunteers to quickly register for specific roles and times they want to serve.
An alternative to Registrations is to collect information about children beforehand using forms in People, so their information exists in your database before they check in. Forms can also be filled out by people already in your database to update information for themselves or people in their household.
Once your signup is ready to go, share your signup with your church! To make it easier, you can create lists of people you may want to invite to join your children's ministry service, and then send them an email or text to let them know about your service, along with a link to your Registrations signup or your People form.
Check-Ins can help you ensure that children are securely brought to your service and picked up by an authorized adult. Set up an event with times and locations that match your service times and classes. You can require Background checks for volunteers in your locations to make sure that only the right people are checking in as volunteers.
Once your event is set up, create a station for people to check into, and they can be checked in on the day of your service. You can also enable Church Center to allow parents to pre-check their children before they even arrive!
Labels are a great way to identify children quickly, have important information easily visible, and make sure children are securely picked up by their parents. You can add name labels and security labels to your event or specific locations. You can also create labels to customize the information on those labels and their appearance.
Enable the Check-Ins and Services integration to make it easier for your approved scheduled volunteers to check in, and utilize the Check-Ins and Registrations integration to easily connect a Registrations signup to Check-Ins to account for each child that signed up.
You can also use lists in People to communicate with the parents of all children who attended or signed up for your service. You can also use lists to find children who might have missed the last few weeks and add them to a workflow to follow up. Finally, to make sure your church's children feel known and cared for, use a list to find children with upcoming birthdays and automate a happy birthday email!
The Church Center app makes it easy for your congregation to engage with your church. You can use Publishing to add important information and updates on your home page. You can configure pages in the Church Center navigation, so people can easily find where to register for events or check into an event.
People can also edit their profiles or the profiles of their Household members and view any upcoming events (like plans or events they've signed up for) from their profile.