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How the Matrix Changed My Life
Until about a year ago, if I thought about the Matrix, I would be envisioning the 1999 Keanu Reeves movie in which a computer hacker learns that the world is not what he thought it was. But all that changed when Planning Center Online, our online worship planning software, added a new weapon to its arsenal: the Matrix. Not only would that word begin to conjure up a completely different image, it would also drastically simplify the way I plan my services and schedule my volunteers.
So let us begin with the exact question Keanu's character Neo asks in the film: "What is the Matrix?" If you are at all familiar with Planning Center Online, you know that among other things, it organizes your services into plans where you can add all the elements of your service, schedule your volunteers, and even provide notes and files for your users to download. The primary way to access all of this information is in plan view, which generally consists of one unique service flow. The Matrix is a separate view that enables you to access many plans at once. But the Matrix is actually much more than just a separate view; it is also an intuitive way to interact with your data.
Each column is comprised of the elements in one of your plans, broken up into sections, which can be collapsed or expanded. At the top are the plan dates that link to the corresponding plans and the plan and series titles. I love being able to load all the weeks in a message series into the Matrix and then quickly set the titles for each.
The songs section contains the song titles, arrangement names, and keys for all the songs in each plan. There are also buttons to add songs to your plans exactly like you would add them in plan view. In addition, you can drag and drop songs from plan to plan. My church has satellite campuses that do the same songs as our main campus and the Matrix makes it so easy to facilitate this. When I load a month of plans from multiple campuses, Planning Center puts each campus column in its own color to easily differentiate them. Then all I have to do is drag my songs from a plan in my main campus to another, and my linked files and notes are copied over as well.
The plan items section give the titles of every other element in your plan, like the Message or the
Announcements. If you have other items that are the same from week to week, you can edit their description directly from the Matrix.
The last sections are the people sections. Since there are different sections for each category of people, I can choose to only view the people in categories I want to see. I love scheduling my band from the Matrix. There is a separate row for each position so I can easily see who is playing what for many weeks at a time along with their status. If their name is in black, they are confirmed, grey means they haven't responded yet, and crossed out means they have declined. Just like songs, I can add people using the familiar add buttons, or I can drag people from plan to plan, even to another position. When I'm ready to send my email notifications, I can do so directly from the Matrix and send a single email with requests for multiple plans.
The Matrix plays such a major role in how I use Planning Center Online that I was shocked to recently find out a coworker of mine who could really benefit from it, didn't even know it existed. It reminded me of the pivotal scene in the movie where Neo was presented with two options; choose the blue pill and go back to your life as normal, or choose the red pill and let the Matrix revolutionize your life. As for Planning Center's Matrix, that might seem like an overly dramatic statement, but you never know what you could be missing.
For more information, visit
planningcenteronline.com.
This is an excerpt from Worship Leader magazine. To read more articles like this - click here to subscribe.
