Planning Center Labels and Private Info
The default Planning Center check-in label is a powerful tool for churches, event planners, and anyone else looking to keep track of people during any kind of meeting. Recently, they have expanded the capabilities of their label system empowering even further customization and feature use.
The use case I am highlighting is my organization’s desire to present teachers and other responsible parties with information that a child has allergies without exposing that information to anyone casually glancing at a child’s name label or recovering a label from a waste basket. This is possible now!
The check-in system is not able to run a query on whether a person has medical info in their bio, but it can query a Yes/No Custom Field (boolean) in their profile! To add such a field, navigate to people > People, click on the gear (⚙) in the top-right and select Customize fields.
Under CUSTOM TABS, click the Add tab button to keep our customization organized and clean. Name this tab Private Medical. Here, click New field, give it the name Medical Notice and set its Type to Yes/No.
Back in check-ins > Labels, create a new label or edit an existing one. Start by dragging a box somewhere on the canvas and selecting People.
Under Custom Data Field, the field we created, Medical Notice, should be available! For our use case, the When Yes case prints See allergen info.
There are also cases for When No and Unanswered are true. We have decided to leave those blank and default, respectively.
This is great! The label can now query this custom field in the person it’s checking in, but nobody in the database has their field set to Yes unless they were recently added. It could be hundreds or thousands of people which need their field updated.
A Slight Detour
Let’s head over to people > Lists and hit the New List button. We’ll name this list Medical notes exist. For Rule 1, we want + include People Medical notes exist. The list should include exact matches. Hit Submit when ready.
Under the Automations tab, we want to select the following options:
- People
- Private Medical
- Update Medical Notice
- Yes
Make sure the Apply this action to current members on this list box is check and select Save.
That’s it! Everything should work now. Go test it out. While this use-case was designed specifically for allergen information and medical security, you should be able to leverage it for any custom field which needs to be queried before being printed. Of course, we could have created a custom field which contained “See allergen info” or been blank on each Person in the database, but changing that text requires one edit solely on the label and not across the entire user database.
