Planning Center shares "Workflows are now smarter (and less manual)" (4-minute read), on follow-up steps that now run themselves. Set a workflow step to act automatically and it sends the email, sets a custom field or creates a follow-up task the moment a card arrives, then moves it on. Skip conditions pass over people who already registered, and an overnight snooze holds a welcome email until morning. Workflows are part of Planning Center People, the company's free database.

Editor's note: The worked example is a four-step membership path: email the class details, wait for registration, wait for check-in, mark the member. Start smaller. Pick the one follow-up your team forgets most and automate only that step. If an automatic action fails, the card goes to a backup person you name.

Subsplash shares "What does a church AI policy need to cover? 5 Essential pillars" (8-minute read), laying out five pillars: approved uses by department, prohibited uses, data privacy, disclosure, and a named AI lead with an annual review. The prohibited list is specific: no AI-generated counseling responses, personal care emails or primary sermon outlines. Its 70/30 rule has AI build the first 70% of a draft and a staff member supply the rest. A free ebook includes a fill-in-the-blank policy template.

Editor's note: The privacy pillar is the one to adopt this week, policy or no policy: no member names, addresses, phone numbers, giving records or prayer requests in a public AI tool. One sentence in a staff email does it. Expect a pitch along the way; the article also promotes Subsplash's own products.

Church Tech Today shares "Church Management System Best Practices: 10 Rules That Keep Your ChMS From Rotting" (9-minute read), ten habits for a church database that work on any platform. Give one named person authority over it. Book 15 minutes every week to merge duplicates, clear bounced emails and find people with no household. Put the year in every form title. Each quarter, export everything to a spreadsheet file and actually open it. Free to read.

Editor's note: Rule 7 is the one for visitor follow-up: write what happens on day 3, day 10 and day 30 before you print the connect card. That rule recommends FrontDoor, a free tool co-founded by Church Tech Today writer Kenny Jahng. Start where the article does: put the 15 minutes on this week's calendar.

Churchfront shares "Why Your Church PA Sounds Bad (It's Not the Speakers)" (14-minute watch), in which Spencer Trefzger dissects a hexagon-shaped sanctuary's sound system. Two speaker clusters hung about 15 feet apart overlapped across the middle seats, and two side speakers added more overlap, so the sound changed seat to seat and no mixing could fix it. The redesign widened the main speakers and removed the side ones. It used fewer speakers and cost less.

Editor's note: One check is free: play pink noise (a steady hiss) through the system and walk the room side to side. He says a layout like this one swings in volume at almost every seat, and no tone adjustment fixes that. The fix itself is design work, which Churchfront sells.

REACHRIGHT shares "Your Church Is Trading Members, Not Reaching New People" (9-minute watch), on what it calls the Reach Gap. It cites a Hartford Institute survey of more than 7,000 congregations: of every 100 new people, 69 switched from another church, 22 returned after a long absence and eight had never attended. Its fixes: claim your Google Business Profile, write one page for a nervous first-timer, and offer a next step a stranger can take alone.

Editor's note: Try his test before anything else: open a private browser window, search "church near me" and write down where you land. None of the three fixes needs a budget vote. REACHRIGHT is a church marketing company; the visibility test it links is free and takes about two minutes.

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Correction: last week's issue named Gloo Communications without disclosing our relationship. We use Gloo Workspace's free plan.

In the interest of “shunning the appearance of evil” resulting from undisclosed relationships and/or potential conflicts of interest, we disclose our relationship(s) with the providers mentioned.

We also disclose our own use of AI. This newsletter is researched and drafted with Claude, an Anthropic product. Every issue — the summaries and the editor's notes alike — is reviewed, edited and approved by a human editor before it is sent, and the selections are made by a person, not a model. We are stating this plainly because a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in August ran without such a note and the omission became the story.