Picture a pretty normal week in a church office.
On Sunday, a new family fills out a connection card. On Monday, someone enters them into Planning Center. On Tuesday, someone else is supposed to add them to the email list too. Maybe that happens. Maybe it waits until Thursday. Maybe it gets forgotten, and that family misses the next three weeks of announcements while everyone assumes they’re in the loop.
Nobody did anything wrong. The church just has two lists of the same people, and maintaining two lists by hand is a job that quietly never gets finished.
The Real Cost of Double Entry
Typing a name and email into a second system doesn’t seem like much. A minute, maybe two. But it adds up in ways that are easy to miss.
It takes time every single week. Every new person, every address change, every family that moves away is a task that has to happen twice. Over a year, that’s hours of someone’s time spent copying information from one place to another.
It depends on one person remembering. Usually, one staff member or volunteer owns “the email list.” When they’re on vacation, busy with Christmas, or move on to another role, the list stops getting updated, and nobody notices right away.
It creates mistakes. Every time someone retypes an email address, there’s a chance of a typo. A single wrong letter means someone never gets your emails, and you’ll probably never find out why.
It gets left for later. When things get busy, which in a church is most weeks, updating the email list is the first thing to slide. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because nothing breaks right away when it’s skipped.
How Lists Go Stale
The bigger problem isn’t the time. It’s that the email list slowly drifts away from reality.
People who left two years ago are still getting the weekly email. The family that joined last month isn’t. Someone updated their email address with the church office, and the change made it into Planning Center but not the email list. A couple separated, and the list still has their old shared address.
Meanwhile, Planning Center, where your team is actually keeping track of people, is usually more up to date. That’s where check-ins happen, where groups are managed, where the office updates someone’s details when they call.
So you end up with a strange situation: the church knows exactly who its people are, but its announcements are going out to an older, less accurate copy.
That has a cost too. Stale lists mean bounced emails, people who don’t recognize you, and, worst of all, new people who never hear what’s going on right when they’re deciding whether to stay. We’ve written about how these quiet gaps affect a whole congregation in congregation communication gaps.
Start From the List You Already Have
The fix is simple to say: stop building a second list by hand.
Your church already does the work of tracking people in Planning Center. That’s your starting point. Instead of retyping everyone into an email tool, import your Planning Center people, and re-import when your list changes.
When you import instead of retyping:
- A new family entered into Planning Center can be added to your email list with your next re-import, without anyone retyping their details.
- When someone updates their email address with the office, a re-import brings the new address over.
- Re-importing regularly helps your list reflect the church you have today, not the one you had two years ago.
- Fewer typos, because nobody is copying addresses by hand.
The person who used to spend Tuesday afternoon copying names into a spreadsheet can spend that time on something that actually needs a person.
A Few Things to Get Right
Importing your people doesn’t mean you can skip the basics. A few things still matter:
Keep Planning Center tidy. If the source has duplicates or old records, those come along in the import. A little cleanup goes a long way, and it’s easier to do in one place than two.
Respect what people agreed to. Being in your church database isn’t the same as asking for the weekly email. Make sure people have said yes to email and that unsubscribes are honored.
Decide who gets what. Not every announcement is for everyone. Some churches send the main weekly email to the whole congregation and keep ministry-specific updates to smaller groups. Start simple and adjust.
Where Hey Church Fits
We built Planning Center import into Hey Church for exactly this reason. Import the people you’re already tracking instead of retyping them, re-import when your list changes, and write each announcement once and send it to your list.
But whatever tools you use, the principle holds. Your church already knows who its people are. Your email list should start from that, not from scratch.