Training

Welcome to the Flamingo Road Church Magteam Planning Center Training Series. We are excited that you have taken interest in getting to know our Planning Center Online (PCO) a little better. Through the next series of posts we will go through general knowledge of the PCO and will provide you with training on how to access the site, navigate through it and hopefully cover all the basics you will need in order to understand your scheduled dates/times, song lists, lead sheets/chord charts and much more.

Accessing the PCO

We will start by explaining how to access and sign in. You can access the Planning Center Online by clicking the following links:

www.frcmagteam.com
or
www.planningcenteronline.com

If you are a first time user, you will receive an email notification welcoming you to our PCO.

In this email you will find your user id (your email address) and your password. Follow the link. This will take you to the PCO homepage. Enter your user and password at the top right-hand side of the page.

Once you input user and password, click on the “log in” button (if you are accessing from a safe computer, you can check the “remember me” box so that the next time you try to log in, your browser will remember your information).

Now you are logged in.

We will explain how to navigate the PCO.

Navigating

Once you are logged in, the site will look something like this:

At the top right hand side corner, you will see your full name, a link to “my account” and a link to “logout”. On the left hand side column you will see a calendar that will specify the dates you are scheduled. We will go into detail on how to read this calendar in a later post. At the center of the page, you will see the “Plans” for the different campuses you are scheduled for. This is a first look at what you will see once you access the PCO.

Updating Your Information

Please take your time to update your information. It doesn’t matter if you are in the PCO for the first time, or have been accessing it for months, please follow the instructions below so we can have the most accurate information.

At the top right hand side, click on “my account”.

In the next page, click on “here”, right under “My Information”

On the next page, please enter your information, such as first name, last name, main email, alternate email, main home address, home and mobile phone numbers. Click “save” when you’re done.

Calendar and Scheduling

Whenever a pastor or a member of the Mag Team Schedules you to participate in a plan or service, you will receive an email invitation:

In this email, on the top right hand corner, you will find both plan dates and times (service times) and rehearsal dates and times. The main body of the email will explain to you what position you are being requested for. You should click on “accept” if you will be able to attend, “decline” if you won’t be able to make it (a reason why you cannot attend is optional) or “view this service” to go to the PCO and get more information regarding this project, like song list, stage order, etc.

Once you have accepted or declined, you will go to the “Plans” tab of the PCO. Here you will see all the information available for the project structured as Stage Order.

Reading Your Calendar

In the PCO, in the Main Plan page, you have access to your personalized schedule or calendar. You’ll find it on the left-hand side column.

A red tag on a particular day means you either denied the invitation to participate in the plan on that day, or that you have blocked that day in particular because of personal reasons (more on blocking dates later). A yellow tag means you have been invited to participate in a project but you haven’t answered yet. If you see this, go to your email and accept or decline. A green tag means you have accepted an invitation for that day and you are successfully scheduled.

If you would like to have a large view of your calendar, click on the month (in this case, August). You will get a more detailed schedule for the month.

Notice that in this calendar, if you blocked a date or denied an invitation, you will see a red x right next to that plan:

If you have received an invitation and have not accepted or denied, you will see question marks right next to the plan times:

If you have confirmed, you will see a green check right next to the plan times:

Blocking Dates

This is without a doubt one of the most important features of the PCO. We are relying on you blocking your dates as far in advance as you want to, so we can put together the schedule for the upcoming months. Please take your time to block the dates you are not going to be able to accept invitations to.

In the lower part of “My Calendar” click on “block out dates”.

A window will pop-up asking you to specify the dates you will be blocking:

A reason why you can’t make it is optional. Please remember to block out specific days of the week. For example, if you are unavailable on Saturday 9/3, but will be available on Sunday 9/4, make sure you only block Sunday. That way, if we know that you can we can count on inviting you for Sunday only, if necessary.

Accessing Songs and Lead Sheets/Chord Charts

When you view a particular plan, you will see the Stage Order, including the songs:

You can view all the files attached to each particular song by simply clicking on the drop down button right next to the song title.

Click on the file you would like to download. Audio is usually an mp3 file; lyrics, lead sheets and chord charts are usually PDF files.

You can use an mp3 player embedded in the website if you want to, in case you don’t want to download the files to your computer. Simply click on “mp3 player” at the top of the plan site.

You will get a new window with a virtual mp3 player where you’ll be able to play, pause, skip rewind or fast forward the audio files for the project.

Another great tool is the “Download All PDFs” link at the top of the page. This will generate one PDF file containing all the documentation for this plan, including lyrics, chord charts and lead sheets. This PDF file will be downloaded to your computer. This way you don’t have to download each document for each song individually.

This has been a general training look at our Planning Center Online. We are excited to have you as part of the Flamingo Road Church Magnification Team.