29 Worship Tools for Under $29, Part 7

By Jon Nicol

If I had to pick my top five of these 29 tools, Planning Center Online would be in that list, hands down.

PCO is a cloud-based communication tool, distribution hub and scheduling genius that allows you to plan your services down to the minute. I was actually expecting to find a feature that took my Maltese-Dachshund mix out for his evening poo.

Apparently PCO draws the line at dog-walking. So I got rid of my dog. (Actually, we did get rid of it, but PCO had nothing to do with it. But if they did have a dog-walking service…he might still be shedding on the Nicol’s couch.)

I will admit, the learning curve for PCO is a little steep, but only because it does sooo much. You'll find the tutorial videos helpful and the customer support (although only email-based) is prompt and thorough.

Except for my ticket I submitted about the dog-walking stuff. That did not close to my satisfaction...

Here’s PCO’s pricing:

It’s nice that you can pay for this monthly, unlike a few of the yearly-only subscriptions that we’ve looked at in this $29 Tool series. I currently use the Basic and haven’t hit the ceiling, even when we were a multi-campus ministry. (We’ve since launched each campus as it’s own church – I know, crazy, huh? While everyone else going multi, we went mono-campus.)

The screen shot didn’t catch the best news for very small churches. That’s a free plan. Many churches under 100 could probably utilize this plan for awhile. The only downside is storage space.

There’s a lot more that can be written about the benefits of PCO, you can try it all out for yourself with their 30-day trial. Just do yourself two favors:

1. Make sure it’s not like two weeks before Easter. Give yourself some space to learn the program. And then

2. Make sure you have the “Rehearsal License” from CCLI. With that, you'll have a reasonably clear conscience that the music you upload to (and your team downloads from) Planning Center will be legal. More on the Rehearsal License in an upcoming $29 Tool post.

Until then, tell me what you like about Planning Center Online.

And if you're using one of the other players in the worship planning game, tell us about it.

March 7, 2012