Planning Center Online Integration & Collaboration with ProPresenter 7

Video Transcription

Churches use Planning Center Online to plan, schedule and manage their services. So the Planning Center Integration and ProPresenter makes it easy to use the services you’ve actually already created to build your playlist inside ProPresenter and collaborate with the rest of your team.

This means that a worship leader or a pastor could build a service in Planning Center, and that an admin could upload a presentation, and a designer could attach some graphics or videos, and that entire service can be turned into a ProPresenter playlist. And if somebody makes a change to Planning Center Online, they actually can see those edits automatically right inside of ProPresenter.

Now, Planning Center has many different tiers depending on what your organization needs, but every single tier can be integrated with ProPresenter. So let’s take a look at how to connect Planning Center and ProPresenter together and take advantage of all of those collaborative features.

First, let’s link up Planning Center Online and ProPresenter. So we’re going to go to ProPresenter and Preferences, and then we’re going to go to the Services tab. This is where we can log into outside services like Planning Center Online and Song Select. So I’m going to log into Planning Center Online, and this will bring up a normal Planning Center login window where you can log in with your email and password. Now you can see that we’re logged in and we could close this out and we could start adding in different Planning Center services. Instead, let’s look at what our Planning Center service actually looks like on the website.

So here you’ll see we have our service set up and we have a header here for our worship set. We have a few different items and songs in here and then we have another header for communication with a host. And then we have our teaching header, our actual teaching, and then like a closing song. So just a simple service that we have here with different headers, items and songs.

So let’s go back into ProPresenter and then we’re going to click on our add, and then Planning Center service. Here, we can choose from our different service types. So I have multiple service types, and you may only have one service type, but we can choose from our different service types. And then we can select a service, so September 26th, and we can select that. And that will add in a Planning Center playlist for September 26th with all of our headers and all of our different items. So you’ll see our worship set, communication and teaching header, and then all of the different items. And all of these items are placeholders that we could drag and drop different presentations or media onto.

But instead of doing that manually, we can do this automatically. So let’s go back to ProPresenter, go to Preferences, and Services, and let’s turn on the match presentations in library preference. What this is going to do is look for any presentations in our library and link them with any corresponding items in our Planning Center playlist. So let’s see how this works. So I’m going to close this out and I’m going to hit refresh and it’s going to look for different items. And you’ll see that it found Promises in our library. And so we have that song in here and we can scroll down and we can see it didn’t find anything for prayer time, but it did find Living Hope, and we can keep scrolling and we can see, oh, it found a file called Host, and so it brought that in, but it didn’t find anything for our teaching notes and it didn’t find this last song. So not only can it link up different song presentations, but it can link up any presentation as long as the name is the same as it is on Planning Center Online.

But it didn’t link up everything. So now we can start manually linking up different presentations. So we could go search for something to link up to Doxology. And so you’ll see that it’s autofilled the search field for us and it’s searching the ProPresenter library for Doxology and it’s not finding anything. But we can switch over to our song select search, and it’s going to again search for our autofilled Doxology and it will pull up all the different options here.

So this first one will work. So we can say import and link. And then I’m going to just edit this because I want to edit the title and do a quick reflow of the song. So we’ll say edit. And I’m going to just change this to the title we call this, which is just the traditional Doxology. And then let’s just do a quick reflow. So I’m going to insert some slide breaks here just to break up the song for us. And so that’s looking pretty good. And now we can import that and automatically link that to our Planning Center playlist. So it was really quick and easy to add that song in.

Now we can also link up different things from our local computer. So I could import an item from our local computer, whether this is a Planning Center file or a piece of media, so we could do that. Or we could create a new presentation to link up. So we could hit that add icon and name our presentation and start creating a new one. And the last thing we have here is our attachment icon. So I’m going to go up to Raise A Hallelujah, and I’m going to click on that attachment icon. And we can see here all of the different attachments that are in Planning Center Online for Raise A Hallelujah. So traditionally you would see things like chord chart PDFs and lyric PDFs and maybe a YouTube video so the band knows what the song sounds like, but we also have here a Raise A Hallelujah ProPresenter file because a ProPresenter document was uploaded to Planning Center Online. So now I can use this ProPresenter document and I can just drag and drop it to Raise A Hallelujah and it’s going to download that and ask me which library we want to import that to. I can say okay and it’s going to link up Raise A Hallelujah.

So now that presentation has been attached to our Planning Center playlist. Now we’re still missing a few different things, but I also see some things in my Planning Center playlist that I actually don’t need in ProPresenter. It might be helpful for our Planning Center plan, but not necessarily in ProPresenter. So we have this welcome item. Now this is just somebody doing a brief welcome while our song starts, but I don’t really need a presentation for that. So what we can do is we can actually right click on this and say, “Hide item,” and that’s just going to remove it from our playlist so we don’t have to see that anymore. The same thing would be true for our prayer time. We don’t really have any media or presentations that we would want to show for that. So I can right click on that and say, “Hide item,” as well. Now if I wanted to get these back, you’ll see down at the bottom it says two additional hidden items, and if I click that, I can unhide a individual item or I can unhide all items. So this is an easy way to see which items are hidden and unhide them after you have hidden them.

Now the other thing that you’ll notice is that we don’t have anything for pre-service. We don’t have an announcement loop or a countdown clock because we didn’t add that to our planning center plan. So I want to add that here in ProPresenter. So I’m going to click on the search icon or you could click on command F or control F to pull up the search window, and I’m going to search my local library for our announcement loop, and I can just drag and drop this right into our Planning Center playlist and now we’ve added in our announcement loop. So we have our announcement loop added in here. So we’ve hidden some things we didn’t want and we’ve added in some things that were missing.

So you can see how quick and easy it is to build your playlist, but what if you don’t have all of the presentations or media? Or maybe somebody else is helping create some presentations for you? We can take advantage of the uploading and downloading options to make collaboration with your team really, really easy. So let’s take a look at some common examples that you might use.

First, let’s say you’re a pastor or an admin who’s creating the teaching note presentation and you need to share that with the ProPresenter team. Well, you could add in a Planning Center playlist and then you could find your spot in the Planning Center playlist. So influenced here, this is where the teaching notes are supposed to go. And you could either create a new presentation or maybe you found one that you already had been creating earlier in the week. So I’m going to search for notes here and I’m going to find my September 26th teaching notes. And we can actually see a preview of what these look like. So we can see, oh, those are the influence notes I created and I can just drag and drop those right there.

So now that’s been attached to my plan, but I want to share that with everybody else. So the way I can do this is I can just right click on this and say, “Upload to Planning Center Services,” And that’s going to upload this presentation to Planning Center Online. And now other users on other computers can download this using the download options. So if we go back to our Planning Center service, you’ll see that our influence has an attachment now and I can click on that attachment, and we’ll see here that it has that September 26 teaching notes.profile. So that’s been automatically uploaded to Planning Center and now we can download that attachment on another computer.

Next you might have a designer who needs to share graphics or videos with you and they can do that by directly uploading those to Planning Center and then you can bring those right into ProPresenter. So I’m going to say that I have a new image that needs to be used for hosting. So I’m going to click on host here and I’m going to go to Files and I’m going to add a new file. So I’m going to click add files, and I’m going to just drag and drop this Bible plan graphic here. And this isn’t really need to be tagged to anything, but we can just say, “done,” for that. And so now this has been attached to this hosting file and now we can go back to ProPresenter.

I’m going to go back here and I’m just going to refresh my playlist and then I’m going to click on my attachment icon here and you’ll see all of our different attachments. I’m going to scroll down to my host and you’ll see now we have our Bible plan jpeg here, and I can simply just drag and drop this right into our hosting presentation and I’ve added that graphic right in there. So now we have our Bible plan graphic that we added right in from somebody who uploaded that to Planning Center for us.

Now all of this uploading and downloading can be done automatically. So let’s say that you created this entire playlist at home and you wanted to send this to a computer at your church. Well, we can go to ProPresenter and to preferences, and then we can go down to services. And we have a couple options that will make this much easier. We have an option to automatically upload our presentations and we have an option to automatically download them. So if we were creating content and we wanted to send it to Planning Center, we would want to select automatically upload. But if we had a computer that we just wanted to download everything that was on Planning Center, but not send anything new to it, we would want to select automatically download, or you might want to have both selected, but this is a way that you can automatically do that. But if you want to manually upload anything to Planning Center, you can always right click on it and say, “Upload to Planning Center Services.”

Now, another way that you’re going to collaborate most likely is with your worship leader. And in Planning Center, worship leaders can create a sequence for their songs in the exact order they intend on playing it in. Then in Planning Center you can use that information to automatically create an arrangement for that song presentation. First, let’s look at how to create a sequence for a song in Planning Center. So I’m going to click on Living Hope here, and we’re going to scroll down to our song settings and you’ll see our arrangement information. And you’ll see I already have an arrangement that’s been created, but we could edit or add a new one. So I’m going to edit this and you’ll see here’s our actual sequence. And then again, here’s kind of all of those groups or labels that create that sequence.

Now I know there’s a couple things that are missing. There’s a couple instrumental interludes that we’ll add in. So I’m going to add a interlude after verse one and another one after the double chorus. But everything else is pretty much in order of the way that we want the song. So we have a couple verses, a chorus, another verse, a tag, and then chorus. So those are all the different pieces as well as our interlude. So we can save that. And so now we have our sequence in Planning Center.

Now we can go back to ProPresenter and take a look at our song Living Hope. So if we look at Living Hope, we can click on our arrangement button, and you’ll see that I’ve created a song and all of the pieces that we have available are the exact same as they are on Planning Center. So we have verse one, verse two, chorus, verse three, tag, intro, and interlude. And that interlude is just a blank slide, and the intro is where we’d put like our motion background, and so that’s what we’d use at the beginning of the song. So we have all of those pieces, and again, they match up to what we have in our Planning Center sequence of all of the different options that we want.

So now we can create an arrangement from that automatically. So we can go to Pro Presenter and preferences and services. And then in here we can say, “Make arrangements from sequences.” So we’ll select that option and then we’ll go and refresh our Planning Center playlist. And you’ll see that it’s created an arrangement for us called the Default PCO arrangement and that’s exactly the way we wanted it to. We got intro, verse, interlude, verse two, double chorus, interlude, verse three, tag, chorus, tag, tag. So exactly the way we want it to be created.

Now again, remember that these arrangements are based on the names of your Planning Center sequence items. So if your arrangement isn’t being created or not being made the way you expect it to be, make sure that you’re using the same name for each part of the song in both Planning Center and in ProPresenter.

Planning Center has a live feature that allows you to step through your plan in real time to keep track of timings, to see your item notes during the service, and to chat with other team members and stay in sync across your entire team. Now you can control Planning Center Live directly inside ProPresenter and add Planning Center Live clocks to your stage screens.

To Access Planning Center Live we’ll go to view and down to Planning Center. This will pull up the Planning Center Live interface where we can engage in the chat right here, we can see our current and next items, take control of the service to switch between items, and you can un-dock this so that this is a free floating window that you can access at any time or put on another monitor. So that’s a really nice feature. Or you can re-dock that by clicking that button there. And if we want to change which service we’re using, we can click here to see all of our different service types and select a different service.

Now to add in a Planning Center Live clock, all we need to do is go to more, and go to our stage editor, and we could create maybe a new stage layout. So I’ll create a new blank layout. And if we go to add an item, you’ll see that Planning Center Live is an option that we have available. And this creates a little placeholder here that’s going to be filled with our clock. So I’m going to make a nice big item here that’s like a quarter of our screen, and this is going to be filled with Planning Center Live, and we have an option for which theme do we want to use and what time format. So there’s a few different time formats that we could add in here.

And so let’s say that’s our new layout with our Planning Center Live clock, and we could see what that looks like, so we can go to our stage display and we could change our stage display view to be that new blank layout that I just created. And you’ll see that this is going to pull in that clock from Planning Center Live. And so if we would go back to our view menu and go to Planning Center, and you’ll see we have our three days here, but if I would take control and go to the next item, you’ll see that we get our clock here on the stage display that’s showing for anyone who’s viewing Planning Center Live, including our people on stage that can see it on our stage screen.

So that’s how you can stop wasting time manually creating playlists and start collaborating with your team to create amazing presentations with the Planning Center integration inside of ProPresenter.