As you plan to gather in ways that are safe and responsible, you can help your congregation practice social distancing during services by creating an event with strict capacities for each gathering time and location.
Tip
Once your event is set up, you can use the Check-Ins integration and our Touchless Check-In tips to check people in.
If you aren't meeting in your physical church building yet, use a form in Planning Center People to gather information from your congregation.
Here are some sample questions you could ask:
People can register for your church service if you create signup. Include capacity and gather any other pertinent information.
Tip
These instructions will help you create a Detailed Signup, which is great if you need to keep track of who will be attending or if you need to collect payments.
If you only want to know how many people will be attending the service, create a simple signup.
Create selections based on your locations and service times. Don't forget to add capacities if you're limiting attendance for each service.
Tip
Create a selection for your volunteers, so they can register with their families and be included in your capacity counts. They can later be assigned to the location they'll be helping in.
If you schedule your volunteers in Services and want to make sure they are registered in the right place, hide the volunteer selection from Church Center and create a list of those who have confirmed for the next plan, but haven't already been registered for the signup in Planning Center People.
Important
You must be at least a Scheduler for this Team in Services, a Manager for the signup in Registrations, AND permission to create Lists in People to create this list and automation or bulk action.
Use a bulk action in the list results to register your confirmed team members for the signup as the Volunteer selection. Keep and refresh the list to add more volunteers as they continue to confirm.
If you want to provide masks and have a limited quantity, create an add-on for people to reserve them.
Make sure you have spaces to make others feel comfortable and give them the option to sign up for them with additional questions or with an attendee information form.
Once people have signed up, use assignments to track the location or section they'll be assigned to.
Set up an assignment type for Locations based on the places people will be attending or checking in.
Create areas based on the locations and times.
Assign the area based on the selection and other filters, so you can Auto Assign attendees to areas based on what they've signed up for.
Tip
Manually assign Volunteers first, and then click Auto Assign.
Once you've set up the event the way you like it, duplicate the event for families to register for the next service.
As people arrive, you can take attendance to make sure those who registered are the ones who attend.
Filter by the selection to show only those registered for that service.
From the Attendance dropdown, choose to take attendance just for the filtered attendees.
Tip
If you're printing labels for kids classrooms, use the Check-Ins integration instead of taking attendance in the Registration event.
Check the boxes next to the people attending the event.
See who attended each instance by clicking the tab under Attendance.
