Streamline Your Church Check-In Process with a Planning Center Check-In Station
First impressions matter, especially when welcoming new visitors and existing members to your church. A chaotic check-in process for families can leave a negative lasting impression and set the wrong tone for their visit. Enter Planning Center Check-In Stations, a game-changer that can transform your church's check-in experience from stressful to seamless.
Why Planning Center Check-In Stations?
Planning Center Check-in stations offer a flexible and efficient solution for churches of all sizes. Here's why they're so popular:
Multiple Station Types: Choose from Manned Stations, Self Stations, and Roster Stations to tailor the experience to your needs. Manned Stations provide personalized interaction, Self Stations empower quick self-check-in, and Roster Stations simplify group management.
Enhanced Security: Generate unique security codes and labels for each child, ensuring safety and peace of mind for parents.
Simplified Volunteer Management: Train volunteers easily and assign them to manage stations with different user permissions.
Seamless Integration with Planning Center’s Church Center App: Allow members to pre-register and check in on the go, minimizing wait times.
Powerful Insights: Gain valuable data on attendance, check-in times, and demographics to understand your community better and inform future planning.
How to Implement Planning Center Check-In Stations:
Getting started with Planning Center Check-in Stations is easy:
Create an account: Sign up for Planning Center (free and paid plans available) and activate the Check-ins feature. The plans are flexible and allow you to grow as needed without rigid upgrade requirements. You can sign-up for Check-ins here.
Plan your stations: Decide on the type and number of stations based on your church's needs and layout. Check-ins offers three types of stations: Self, Manned, and Roster stations. For more information on stations, check out this video series from Planning Center on Stations, found here.
Set up your tech: Use laptops, tablets, iPads, or even smartphones as station devices. Connect compatible label printers for added convenience. We recommend the Brother QL-820NWB printers for label printing. You can find these printers here, and the labels (Brother DK-2205 (2.4 in x 100 ft) we recommend here.
Configure settings: Customize your event, times, locations, labels, and procedures.
Train your volunteers: Provide basic training on using the stations and interacting with attendees.
Beyond the Basics:
Go mobile: Download the Planning Center Check-Ins app for mobile check-in capabilities, eliminating the need for additional devices. The Check-ins station app can be installed on a phone for additional help during those one-off, busy check-in times. Click here to download the correct app for your device type.
Personalize the experience: Customize labels with logos, birthday greetings, or special messages for returning members.
Integrate with other tools: Connect Planning Center Check-ins with other Planning Center apps for metrics, automations and much more.
Create a Game Plan
Once you have tried out Planning Center Check-ins, you will want to develop a process and flow for your attendees. Whether this check-in is for a membership class or your kid’s ministry on Sunday morning, you will want to plan the steps the attendees will go through. With kids ministry, parents must check their children in at a check-in station and then drop them off. What labels will you require? Normally, this is a name tag and a security tag, but consider if any extra labels will be needed. How will you receive the kids at a room or location? Will you also institute a check-out procedure? These are all good questions to consider in developing your check-in process.
Volunteer Attendance Tracking
Planning Center Check-ins can also be utilized for tracking volunteer attendance. Setting up a separate event for volunteers to check into or having them check into the room or location they serve in is beneficial in multiple ways. For starters, it allows you to see the health of your teams. You can also compare who is scheduled verses who actually shows up. Another benefit is to know the frequency of serving in which locations for your volunteers. Volunteer attendance tracking brings clarity, and with the background check feature built into Check-ins, you can also see who isn’t current with their background check.
Students and Youth Check-ins
Sometimes, you don’t need to print labels, but you would like to take attendance and keep track of who is at your event. With Student and Youth events, verifying someone’s attendance is easy with a Self Check-in station. Attendance tracking helps you understand the growth of your ministry area and provides a level of security to verify check-in details later if needed. As mentioned previously, if you combine Check-ins with other Planning Center apps, such as People, you can automate communication with your attendees.
Wrapping it up
Planning Center Check-in Stations are the perfect solution for churches seeking to modernize their check-in process, enhance security, and create a welcoming environment for all. By embracing this technology, you can make a great first impression and leave a lasting positive impact on your church community. You will also gain insight into your attendance statistics across any area that uses a check-in. Measuring age groups in kids ministry allows forecasting and planning as class and age groups grow. It also provides plenty of automation opportunities when paired with other Planning Center apps and wanting to automate updating profile information. If you want to implement check-ins at your church, let us know in the comments below. Your feedback not only encourages us but also helps others in their journey. If you're experiencing any hiccups or need further clarification, please drop a question or comment below as well. We would love the opportunity to reply with some ideas or suggestions.
If you are looking to implement Planning Center Check-ins at your church and could use some help with getting things set up and utilizing the software to its full potential, learn how Threefold Solutions can help contact us here or email us at info@threefold.solutions.
Jason Silbernagel
Co-founder, Threefold Solutions