Planning Center
Push your FoxFlow contacts into Planning Center People — matched against who's already there, never duplicated.
Planning Center is your database. FoxFlow is the week before someone becomes a name in it.
This integration closes that loop: the people you meet through follow-up end up in PCO People without anyone retyping them.
What it does
One-way, FoxFlow → Planning Center. It syncs your contacts — name, email, phone and their tags.
Tags arrive in PCO as a custom field called FoxFlow Tags, so you can see in Planning Center where somebody came from and how they were categorised.
Matched, never duplicated
This is the part that matters to a church, because a duplicate-riddled PCO database is a real and painful problem.
Before creating anybody, FoxFlow looks for them:
- Search by email. Exactly one match → link to that person, don't create.
- Search by phone if email found nothing. Same rule.
- No match at all → create a new person in PCO.
- More than one possible match → create nothing. The contact goes into a review queue for a human to decide.
That fourth case is the important one. Faced with ambiguity, FoxFlow stops rather than guessing. You resolve it from the Planning Center tab, choosing to link to an existing person or create a new one.
Once a contact is linked to a PCO person, later updates go straight to them — no re-searching, so the link can't drift.
It fills blanks, it doesn't overwrite
When FoxFlow updates someone already in PCO, it only fills in fields that are empty. Anything already recorded in Planning Center is left untouched.
This is deliberate: your PCO record has been curated by your team, and a form submission shouldn't be allowed to overwrite it. Planning Center stays authoritative.
Connecting
Organization Settings → Integrations → Planning Center. Sign in with Planning Center and authorise FoxFlow's access to People. Then turn syncing on.
Status and troubleshooting
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Not connected | No Planning Center connection yet |
| Connected — sync off | Connected, but syncing isn't enabled |
| Syncing | Working |
| Reconnect needed | Authorisation expired — reconnect |
| Review count | Contacts with ambiguous matches waiting on you |
Reconnect needed happens when the Planning Center authorisation lapses. Reconnecting takes a few seconds and nothing is lost in the meantime — contacts sync once the connection is back.
What it won't do
- It won't pull people from Planning Center into FoxFlow.
- It won't sync leads that aren't saved as contacts.
- It won't touch anything in PCO beyond People.
- It won't change data that's already recorded in PCO.
FoxFlow is not trying to be your church management system. It's the follow-up that happens before Tuesday.
Common questions
- Will this create duplicate people in Planning Center?
- No. FoxFlow searches PCO by email first, then by phone, and only creates a person when it finds no match. When a search returns more than one possible match it creates nothing and queues the contact for you to review.
- Does it overwrite what is already in Planning Center?
- No. FoxFlow only fills in blanks. Existing PCO data is left alone, so Planning Center stays the system of record.
- Does it sync from Planning Center back into FoxFlow?
- No. It is one-way, FoxFlow to PCO.
- Does it sync leads or contacts?
- Contacts. A lead has to be saved as a contact before it reaches Planning Center, which the contact settings on each flow can do automatically.