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Partnership with All About Worship

We are excited to announce a partnership between WorshipPlanning.com and All About Worship.

For those not familiar, AAW is an online resource specifically designed for “equipping and encouraging worship leaders and songwriters”. They do this through podcasts, training webinars, retreats, articles, and much more.

The goal of this partnership is two-fold. First, we hope it will help give WorshipPlanning.com worship leaders easier access to a variety of resources AAW develops. In April we will begin sharing some exciting benefits for WP Planners as part of this partnership. Second, we hope AAW will be a means by which new WP features and benefits will be shared with those that have either never tried WP, or not visited our site for a while.

AAW has a great podcast that can be found on iTunes. Their website AllAboutWorship.com also has a link to the latest podcast, as well as a growing number of other resources.

Keep an eye on our blog and twitter feed to learn more on the fruits of this partnership.

WorshipPlanning.com Site Updates – Version 3.8

This evening we updated WorshipPlanning.com to version 3.8, and we’re quite excited to share with you what these updates include. So, let’s get right to it.

Helpers can view ALL services – If authorized, any of your Helpers can now access service details of all services, not just the ones for which he or she is scheduled. This includes worship flow, assignments, virtual stage, files, and printouts. Authorization is granted on the page where you add/edit the Helper’s information (People >> Helpers tab >> add/edit icon). We’ve added a checkbox that says ‘Can view all services (including ones not scheduled for).’ By default, no Helpers have this checkbox checked.

Worship Flow Edits Improved – If your duties include modifying the worship flow, you’ll notice a nice improvement to the way you add and edit worship elements. The worship detail fields now appear on a small pop-up window on the worship flow page. We’ve also changed the dropdown fields to have an ‘auto complete’ behavior (so you can simply start typing the desired entry, and WP will attempt to auto complete your text). Plus, we have put the Extra Notes on the same pop-up window, reducing the number of clicks needed to get all your information entered.

MyWP Home and Assignments – As we posted in our blog last week (http://worshipplan.wpengine.com), we have redesigned the main page used by Helpers. The redesign makes it much easier for Helpers to access the information they need. We’ve also included a calendar view (that shows by default if they have no pending assignment requests), and some quick links on the home page to frequently accessed functionality, like team files, password changes, and adding text/email alerts. And our video tutorials have been updated, so anyone can always check there (or contact us) should questions arrise. If you’d like to see the updates to MyWP for yourself, you can do so by logging in to http://my.worshipplanning.com using your email address and WP password.

One last thing I want to mention is that our Worship Flow page improvements are really Phase 1 of some exciting plans we have. Phase 2 will likely include drag and drop of people and (hopefully) songs into worship elements. We also know some churches need down-to-the-second tracking of element durations. We anticipate including that in Phase 2 as well.

If you have any questions of issues with these new features, be sure to let us know via our support site: http://support.worshipplanning.com.

A Little Love for the Helpers

In the next week or so, we will be rolling out a major update to the MyWP site that we think your volunteers will really love. I’ll detail it out more in a blog post the evening we roll it out, but here are the highlights, plus a little screenshot to whet your appetite.

  1. Fancy calendar that shows their assignments and rehearsals.
  2. Cleaner assignments page with much more intuitive access to service and team information.
  3. Default worship flow display with Extra Notes for the Helper showing by default.
  4. (and this is a BIG one) Ability for authorized Helpers to view services details of ALL services.

We are in the last phase of testing, so keep an eye on our Twitter, Facebook, and Blog updates for when we roll it out. And we plan on updating our video tutorials in time for the roll-out as well.