If you have a campus that needs to become its own church, you must create a separate Planning Center account for it. With some planning and preparation, you can make the transition smooth for everyone affected by the coming changes.
Special Church Plant Pricing
An organization administrator in the new church plant account can contact the support team to receive six months free for the 1st or 2nd pricing package of any of our products.
If you have some changes in leadership and administrative roles, share the Preparing for Staff Transitions guide in an email to transitioning staff members and volunteers as a checklist of everything they need to hand off before they leave. This will help keep any current processes they were responsible for from breaking.
Tip
If some people will be active in both churches, they can link their Planning Center accounts to switch between them easily.
Even if you're still physically meeting in combined spaces, have people interact with the system using their "home campus" to prepare for the switch.
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Make sure everyone is assigned to a Campus.
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Create a custom field in People to track who plans to attend the new church plant or change to a different campus.
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Ask people to make sure their profiles and households are up-to-date. Use the new custom field in a form to gather the answers and additional info from members.
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Create a list of people based on their assigned campus, and then send them an email or text with a link to a form. You can also use this list to keep them up-to-date on progress with announcements.
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Re-create any custom fields you'll need in the new church account so you can easily export the data from the current church and Import the data straight into the new account.
Set up Giving in the new account and communicate when the switch will happen. Between now and that time, you can consider how or if you need to transfer donation history.
Decide if you want to move donation history from one campus to another based on answers to these questions:
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What time of the year is the new church starting?
You may need to consider issuing end-of-year statements from each church for the donors that move.
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Do you need the previous donations to show up on the new campus?
If so, you can transfer members' donation history using a third-party import tool or by entering donations into batches.
When you're ready to accept donations at the new church, you can get the word out to your transitioning members.
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Create a list in People of everyone assigned to the transitioning campus.
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Send out the link to the new church's donation form.
Most will already be familiar with the system, so they can log out of the current account in Church Center and log in to the new one. From there, they can give online, access transferred history, and recreate recurring donations.
If you're using campus tags in Calendar, you can export events with that tag, and then import the events into the new account.
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From the Table View, filter the events by the ones with the church plant tag.
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Export the events to an iCal Feed.
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Import the iCal feed into the new account.
Manually create any rooms and resources in the new account and assign them to the imported events.
Use reports to see details about any rooms and resources you need to recreate in the new account all in one place.
Tip
Copy text from the reports to paste into Calendar to speed up the recreation process.
Due to information ownership laws, most of the data for Services in the original account can't be shared or exported, so it must be recreated manually in the new account.
Here are some things you can do to make the process as easy as possible.
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Create the teams, service type(s), templates, plans, and songs you'll need to use when the church launches. Check your Services subscription level to make a plan that fits within its limits.
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Manually copy Music Stand annotations in the new account.
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Export a list of the songs in the original account as a list to work from while adding songs to the new account.
Tip
Expand the columns menu to choose which information you want to export about each song.
Once all the data has been transitioned into the new church account, you can remove it as a campus in the original account's settings.