Planning Center is a church management SaaS company transforming how more than 80,000 churches worldwide—across all sizes, denominations, and structures—engage with their congregations. Their goal is to ease the administrative load on church staff and volunteers, freeing up valuable resources so they can dedicate more time and energy to serving and supporting their congregation and community.
Their software includes time-saving features, such as the Church Center app. This app helps churches easily manage event sign-ups and payments, receive donations, plan services, coordinate facilities, and more.
Industry - SaaS
Company - Planning Center
Website - www.planningcenter.com
Opportunity - Convert Planning Center’s custom video creation experience into a self-serve solution to increase Church Center app engagement.
Challenge - Their proprietary system was expensive to maintain and needed more flexibility and automation to scale custom video requests.
Solution - Leverage Design Huddle’s Video Creation Platform for streamlined automation.
Customer since - 2024
Planning Center’s goal was to expand user engagement with their Church Center app by offering customers a unique marketing video they can use to encourage app adoption among their congregants. Although the company already provided custom videos, the manual process was resource-intensive for Planning Center, limiting them to producing just one video daily. This made it difficult to efficiently scale video output as their customer base grew. To address their challenge, the team aimed to convert the manual video creation experience into a self-serve solution within their CMS, Publishing.
The issue, however, is that their 80,000 global church customers all use different Church Center app features. For example, some churches collect donations and facilitate small group functionality, while others do not. On top of this, Planning Center was still operating on a proprietary system that was prone to failure, hard to update, and required constant staff intervention to create and send custom videos to clients.
Planning Center needed a new, flexible video creation solution that:
👉 Enables customers to quickly generate fully custom videos based on the Church Center app features they use and incorporate their church’s unique branding directly in their Publishing Portal
👉 Streamlines manual tasks by implementing automated processes
👉 Eliminates expensive, recurring maintenance costs
Design Huddle aligns with Planning Center's unique business requirements and offers customers a solution for generating custom videos without relying on internal resources.
Our robust API and creative automation power the custom video experience in Planning Center’s Publishing Portal. By providing their customers with access to create custom videos, Planning Center simultaneously boosts the Church Center app engagement while fostering stronger communication, connection, and participation among congregants.
Planning Center starts by creating video templates using our interface. The team then builds video clips to highlight the various features of the Church Center app. For example, one clip might represent the volunteer feature, while another demonstrates the giving feature. Finally, the video team can easily tag variable elements within the video templates, allowing them to be autopopulated by our API.
Creative automation eliminates the time-consuming process of manually creating custom videos by enabling Planning Center to programmatically populate video templates with customers' logos and branding assets stored in their Publishing Portal. The feature also gives Planning Center’s customers the ability to select the applicable Church Center app features (e.g., groups, volunteer, registration, check-ins, giving, etc.) they wish to highlight in their video. The result? A branded marketing video that showcases the features most relevant to the church’s congregation.
Due to this streamlined process, video production jumped from 1.6K videos on their proprietary platform over four years to 2K videos within the first 90 days of launching Design Huddle. Daily video production also increased from one video to 26 custom videos generated daily.
Design Huddle’s Media Libraries and Resizing features offer Planning Center the flexibility to create multiple versions and updates to their original video - an option previously unavailable to the team. In the past, every update required manual edits, making it challenging to maintain existing customer videos, let alone scale to accommodate more. Now, with Design Huddle, the Planning Center team creates custom videos and implements easy, real-time updates that can be applied across all customers' individual videos.
For example, if a video clip requires updates, the team can upload a new version of the affected scene and instantly provide all customers access to the latest version. Additionally, Planning Center can quickly release a video template in portrait orientation for social media.
Our platform eliminates the expensive costs of hosting and maintaining their proprietary system. Planning Center frees up previously dedicated resources for platform maintenance by offloading product development to our team. With their ability to scale custom video creation with Design Huddle, the company can now focus on exploring additional ways to fuel greater product engagement.