Today we are announcing Planning Center Publishing—a brand new product to power your presence in Church Center, the mobile app and website, with custom pages and video sermons!
Church Center is an online experience where your congregation can explore, engage, and stay connected throughout the week. Publishing is how you make this app your own—how you connect with your congregation in unique ways through your own custom content.
Each feature of Publishing gives you options. Church Center is yours. What do you want to do with it?
Create Custom Pages and Navigation
Want people to have easy access to all your social media images? Or a way to share prayer requests from Church Center?
You can use Publishing’s custom page editor to format this kind of content on your very own pages, for both the mobile app and the web.
You can also link to outside pages, like a page on your website or a podcast stream, directly from the navigation icon. That way, you don’t have to duplicate the content, and Church Center is the launching pad for your congregation.
And even if you don’t want or need custom pages, you can use the page editor to create your home page for Church Center. Welcome people and highlight important information about your church, or link to announcements and connect cards—play with it!
Here are what some of our private beta testers did with their home pages.
Publishing is also where you will publish/unpublish the built-in pages you have from Planning Center products, like the brand new church directory from People and the event calendar from Calendar.
When you’re ready to share something with your congregation, go to Publishing!
Share Sermon Videos, Livestream Services
You may host live services with an online church provider or a social media site, and then a separate library of previous messages on YouTube or Vimeo.
The Sermons feature in Publishing is a way to centralize all of that content in Church Center.
While you continue to store videos on your existing platforms, you can link to them in Publishing. This way, people can go to Church Center to see the full library of your content.
You can also broadcast your service live, either from a livestream or by scheduling a prerecorded video, so people can tune in and chat with their small groups through messaging as they watch.
Now you can make it easy for your congregation to engage with teaching and community at the same time. And as Publishing grows, the sermons feature will include more tools for you to enhance the experience and offer more engagement opportunities for your congregation.
Free During Beta
We are releasing Publishing in beta, which means it is still a work in progress. Your feedback is an important part of helping us improve it, and we want to make those improvements before we start charging.
After beta, Publishing will be priced by feature, so by what level of customization you want in Church Center.
A custom home page, publishing your Planning Center feature pages, and arranging navigation in Church Center is completely free. Upgrade to one of the paid plans to get access to additional features—$14 a month for custom pages and $29 a month for sermons.
How to Get Started
Anyone can sign up for Publishing from the new page on the website, and current customers can also subscribe from Accounts.
Whatever plan you use during the beta is what you will pay for when the beta is complete—we will email you at least one month before your first billing date, and you can always adjust your plan.
After you’ve signed up, check out our Getting Started guide. You can use these articles as you follow the steps we outline in Publishing itself!
And, as always, our support team is ready to answer any questions you might have along the way.
In a time where it’s even harder than usual to remain connected, we hope Publishing provides you with new and exciting options to encourage community within your church.
♥️ Planning Center
p.s. If you want to learn how Publishing fits into the Planning Center suite, sign up for our upcoming system overview tutorial on August 5th.
