When you need to collect general information from your congregation — like a welcome card or prayer request — you can use a form in People. And when you need to collect signups for an event on a specific date — like VBS or weekend gatherings — Registrations is your best bet.
But maybe you’re creating a signup for baptisms, and people aren’t assigned to a specific date until later. Or people are signing up for ongoing volunteer opportunities, where registration is always open but you only need a certain number of volunteers per ministry.
With features to manage assignments and capacities, Registrations seems like the right tool, except that signups in Registrations are always for a specific date.
But not anymore!
With a new update it’s much easier to use Registrations to manage all your signups in one place — both events and ongoing opportunities — and display them on a single page in Church Center.
Currently, this page on Church Center is called Events by default. Next month, the default name is changing to Signups. Read more about this change at the bottom of this article!
Now, when you create a new signup, you can specify whether it’s for an event or an ongoing program.
And just in case you’re collecting registrations for an event that’s TBD, you can always add or remove dates later.
If you also use Planning Center Calendar, ongoing opportunities won’t appear on your church calendar (since they don’t have dates and times) but they will appear alongside your dated events on Church Center.
Church Center as a whole helps people connect with the life of your church, and since signups are a significant part of connection, we want to make it easy for your congregation to find them. We hope that this helps people get involved with your church — whether they’re serving, searching, or simply attending on a Sunday.
Transitioning from "events" to "signups"
Starting now, you'll notice that we've shifted from talking about "events" to talking about "signups" in the Registrations admin, to better speak to all the signups you collect in Registrations. If you have any pages in Registrations bookmarked, they'll continue to work — but you'll notice the word "signup" in a variety of places where "event" appeared before.
On March 1, we will be making this same shift on the Church Center side of Registrations. By default, the navigation item for Registrations will then be called Signups instead of Events.
If you still want this item to be called Events — or if you want to name it something else altogether! — you can sign up for Publishing and get more powerful Church Center management for free.
