ChurchToolStack
Search

Guest follow-up across two campuses

Each campus runs one guest follow-up workflow in Planning Center People with one named owner: card Sunday, campus pastor email by Tuesday, deacon call by Friday, membership-class invite the next month. The rule exists because a family once got two welcome emails from two pastors in one week.

By Caleb Brooks · Published · Editorial standards · Conflict of interest

Field guide page: steps and costs from hands-on church-tech work, written under a pen name. Church names stay private. See how we write and verify.

What are the exact steps?

  1. Capture the card on Sunday, on every campus

    Guests fill out the connect card in Church Center (the member app), or on paper. The campus admin enters paper cards by Monday morning. Both campuses feed the same Planning Center People database (the church's people system), so a guest only exists once. Search for the household before creating a new profile.

  2. Start one workflow, with one named owner per campus

    Monday, the card kicks off a People workflow (a checklist of follow-up tasks with due dates). Step one is a personal email from that campus's pastor, due by Tuesday. Each campus has exactly one named owner for the workflow. That rule is non-negotiable since the double-welcome incident. Do not run separate homemade workflows per ministry.

  3. Campus pastor sends the personal email by Tuesday

    The email is short, from a real address, and mentions the campus they visited. Replies go to a monitored inbox. If the pastor is out, the named owner reassigns the step the same Monday. Fancy HTML templates underperformed plain notes here, same as at smaller churches.

  4. A deacon calls by Friday

    Step two of the workflow is a phone call from a deacon, not staff. The workflow tracks whether it happened. Deacons get a soft script and a stop rule: leave one voicemail, try once more, then mark complete with a note. Do not pile email, text, and call on the same day.

  5. Invite them to the membership class the next month

    Step three is an invitation to the membership class, the on-ramp from guest to member, timed so it does not land in the same week as the first email. Guests who already joined a group get a lighter invite. Mark the step done so overdue lists stay honest.

  6. Review overdue steps every Monday across both campuses

    The administrator (or the future single cross-campus owner) opens the overdue workflow report Monday morning. Anything past due gets a name and a new due date before Tuesday staff meeting. This is how duplicate welcomes and silent drops both get caught.

Which tools does this church use?

  • Planning Center People Church database (ChMS)

    Holds guest records and runs the follow-up workflow with named steps and owners.

    $0 (free tier)

  • Church Center Communication

    The member app where guests fill out the digital connect card.

    $0 (included)

Common questions

How much does Planning Center cost for a church this size?

This 1,400-attendance church pays $550–700 a month across seven Planning Center products. People itself is free; the rest are tiered, and Registrations is the one that swings. They bump it for VBS in June and drop it in August.

What goes wrong with guest follow-up at a multi-campus church?

Separate workflows per campus. This church's first year, a family visited both campuses in the same month and got two welcome emails from two pastors in the same week. Now each campus has one named owner and both feed one database.

Who should make the follow-up phone call?

Here it is a deacon, not a staff member. The call is step two of the workflow, due by Friday, and the workflow tracks whether it happened.

Before you start

You need one Planning Center People database for both campuses, Church Center connect cards (plus a paper path), and a blunt conversation about who owns follow-up at each campus. Write the owner names on a wall or in the staff handbook. Do not give every ministry leader admin rights in People while you set this up. If you still have leftover workflows from the first year of the second campus, archive them before you launch the single path.

Why they built it

The second campus broke the old system twice over. First, the tool: they came off an older installed system because volunteers at a rented high school needed to schedule and check in from their phones, and it could not. Then the process: in the first year, both campuses built their own follow-up workflows, and a family that visited both campuses in the same month got two welcome emails from two pastors in the same week. The mom’s email about it was very gracious. It was still embarrassing.

The fix was not a feature. It was an org chart. Both campuses feed one database, and each campus’s workflow has exactly one named owner. That is the part the administrator calls non-negotiable. At 1,400 attendance with fourteen full-time staff, kindness without ownership multiplies into noise.

What they’d do differently

They would go further: one guest follow-up owner across both campuses instead of one per campus. The other hard-won rule is about access: do not give every ministry leader admin rights in People. And in Giving, they push ACH hard: cards cost 2.15% + 30¢, ACH is 30¢ flat, and at their volume the difference is real money. They would also have merged duplicate profiles after the first summer of VBS before guests got double emails from that mess too.

Monday checklist

  1. Confirm weekend paper cards from both campuses are entered.
  2. Confirm each new guest is in exactly one People profile (search before create).
  3. Start or verify the campus workflow with the named owner assigned.
  4. Spot-check that Tuesday pastor emails are queued or sent.
  5. Clear overdue deacon calls and membership invites from last week.
  6. Escalate any guest who visited both campuses to the single coordinating owner.

Common mistakes

  • Separate homemade workflows per campus or per ministry.
  • Creating a second People profile when someone visits the other campus.
  • Letting “everyone on connections” own the queue (nobody owns it).
  • Stacking email, text, and call in forty-eight hours.
  • Ignoring the overdue report until month-end.

Field note after the double welcome

A family visited campus A, then campus B two weeks later. Both campus workflows fired. Two pastors sent warm emails the same week. The mom replied once to both, gracious and confused. Staff archived the duplicate workflows that afternoon and wrote the one-owner rule on the whiteboard in the admin office. Embarrassing beats repeated.

Field note after an admin-rights sprawl

Ministry leaders with full People admin exported guest lists for “their” events and accidentally restarted old follow-up steps. Access tightened: campus admins and the named owners keep workflow rights; greeters get entry-only. More admins felt helpful. It created duplicate hospitality.