Planning Center Connector Setup

Gather Credentials

You’ll need to make sure you have the following before you continue:

• Admin access to Planning Center
• The google account login you used when signing up to GHC
• The ability to change category names in Planning Center

Basic Configuration

It is important that your Planning Center account is setup in a way that GHC is able to recognise. Follow each step below to for the best insights into your church health.

To get Planning Center ready for GHC complete the following steps:

Members

This is central to our church health design. GHC needs to be able to differentiate who is a member of your church and who is not yet (i.e. a newcomer). We think it best to simply answer the question: does this person call your church home? Regulars/Members are designated by their Membership Type ending in an “” (underscore), e.g. Core. Note this is not necessary for people membership type names that contain "regular" or "member" as GHC auto assigns these.

Exclusions

By default, those who aren't members and have been added to your system in the last 12 months are considered newcomers. However you might have people that fit this description that aren't newcomers and ought to be excluded from your metrics. Any membership types you want completely ignored by GHC (so you don't dilute you statistics) add a "" e.g. Record Keeping

Groups

Add an “” (underscore) to the Group Type(s) you use for discipleship groups e.g. Growth Group

Note: you do not need to rename individual groups e.g. Sam’s group 2023

Professions

People coming to faith in Jesus is such an important aspect of being a healthy church that we request you with some priority to create a custom field to track this.

Create a custom field called "Date Professed" as a Date field and record the date in a person’s profile. Follow the steps here if you need help doing this (you won't need to worry about turbo sources for trends to use this).

Access and improve data

Welcome to your first dashboard, the Health Checkup!

If you’re accessing this dashboard for the first time you will be prompted to:

• Login with your google account
• Authorise the use of google Data Studio
• Authorise access of Planning Center
  • Click 'Authorise GHC' and then Login to your Planning Center when prompted using the admin user
  • Click Allow to approve access to your data.
  • When complete you will be instructed to close the windows.

If you want actionable insights you may first need to do a little work to clean up your data. Don’t worry, this is just standard house-keeping and at GHC we have some tools to make this process much smoother for you. You can check you're set up properly by opening the Setup page in the dashboard.

⚠️ For larger churches, this dashboard can take longer to load. If this is effecting performance you can setup a Turbo dashboard. It improves performance by caching your data (refreshed every 24 hours).

• Turbo setup is a few extra steps. It will guide you through creating a copy of the dashboard into your Google account and will appear under “Saved Dashboards” in your myGHC page.

Analyse data, action insights

Use GHC regularly to:

• Explore your data - we recommend starting at the health gauges - What story do they tell?
• Focus on one area - are there high-level trends? Can you see particular people to prioritise?
• Lead through action - what do you need to do next? Who should you follow up?
• Track the change - use GHC to monitor where you’ve moved the dial

Use pastoral dashboards weekly or monthly and health and strategic dashboards quarterly for best effect.

GHC becomes an even more strategic tool when you’re sharing and discussing insights together:

• Download data as a pdf to share with others.
• Or better yet, create accounts for your team members so that they can access the dashboards as well (requires subscription)