Make a plan and execute it with free tools

PCO's home page

Planning Center Online is the best way to hash out a minute-by-minute event flow.  Whether it’s a church service, a wedding, or just your everyday getting-things-done-to-do list, Planning Center by Ministry Centered Technologies is there for you to plan, coordinate and distribute your thoughts.

PCO (as I like to call it, for short) is specifically designed to help churches plan their weekend services and other activities.  They have 4 different paid versions, but today I’m going to focus on how to use their free version and still get a variety of things done.

PCO's public plan view

The Traveling Musician

Scenario: Adam is a musician traveling to a venue where he will lead a group of musicians he has never met.  There is limited time to rehearse at the venue before they must play.

I find myself falling in to this category a lot.  I travel around, playing at a lot of different places and with a lot of different people.  Since PCO allows you to keep a database of songs as well as see what songs you’ve played over time it’s easy to plug in to different situations.

Solution: Days, weeks or even months in advance, Adam can create a plan that details down-to-the-minute everything from rehearsal’s call time to what songs are being played and when.  He can give access to his PCO account to 10 people, or he can share just the plan via a public access URL.  Since we’re talking about using the free version of PCO only, Adam could use Transposr.com (also by MCT, the makers of PCO) to change the keys of any songs and MP3s.  He could use Google Documents to store and share the chord charts online and drop.io to store and share the MP3s (or any other type of file) with the band.

A Wedding Plan

The Wedding Coordinator

Scenario: Becca is a wedding coordinator (not a planner) who has had trouble in the past getting the bride and groom’s information all in one central place.  Various vendors haven’t got back to her in a timely fashion and the band’s set list is nowhere to be found!

My wife and I actually used Planning Center to plan our wedding, for real.  The screen shot to the left is an excerpt from our awesome wedding plan!

Solution: With PCO Becca can gather all the information about the couple’s day and share it with them online.  She can even give them access to reorder the flow of their wedding.  She can give the vendors access too and set reminder emails so they know the special day is coming fast.  As for the band, she can give them access to put their songs on the plan, or she can put them there herself.

(Personally, I’d love to see a bunch of wedding coordinators take this idea and run with it because I think the makers of PCO would probably be willing to make a more wedding-coordinator-friendly website.)

PCO's mobile site beautifully displaying an itinerary

The Family Day Trip Planner

(I specified Day Trip because PCO isn’t designed for multi-day events per se, though you can have unlimited number of plans, and each day could be its own plan.)

Scenario: Charles and his wife Danielle are heading out on a road trip with their kids Earl, Fran and Gary, but their plans keep changing because they can’t agree on what to do first, second and third!  Each time they switch the order of things, Charles has to manually add up all the minutes and recalculate how long it will take to get from point X to Y to Z.

Give it a try! You’ll have your road trip planned and with a smart or superphone you won’t even have to print it out!

Solution: If Chuck places his plan in PCO, he can easily reorder each particular item and PCO does all the recalculating work for him!  Now he and his family are free to converse about what to do first and switch the order as many times as they want!

The End? No way!

There’s so much to Planning Center Online, I had trouble fitting it all in one article.  I’m thinking about revisiting this subject someday and getting even deeper in to different ways you can GTD with it!

Josh is, what you might call, a product evangelist.  He would like his readers to know that this was not a paid blog post advertisement and it was written purely out of a love of PCO and GTD.  If you have questions, comments, or major upheavals please feel free to leave them in the comments section below.