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Adding people and households

Import a Planning Center CSV, add a family by hand, and let connect cards fill in the rest. The data foundation for everything else in the app.

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What this does

Gets your church into the app as people grouped into households, so attendance, follow-ups, and Monday emails all have something real to point at.

When you’d use it

You signed up, you opened People, and the list is empty. Or you’re moving over from Planning Center and have a CSV in your downloads folder. Or a new family showed up on Sunday and you want to enter them by hand before their connect card lands.

If you’ve been a Planning Center admin, this will feel lighter — that’s intentional. Households are a view of people, not a separate section you have to keep in sync.

Step by step

Path A — Import a Planning Center CSV

Best for moving an existing directory in one pass. Plan on ten minutes the first time.

  1. Export from Planning Center.In Planning Center People, open the list view, click the export menu, and pick CSV. The export includes first name, last name, email, phone, household name, and address — all the columns Ministry Manager understands. Save the file to your downloads folder.

  2. Open the import page. In Ministry Manager, go to People and click Import in the toolbar. You can also land here directly at /people/import.

  3. Upload the file. Drag the CSV onto the upload zone or click to pick it. Ministry Manager reads the header row and shows you a preview of the first few rows so you can confirm the file looks right before committing.

  4. Map the columns.If the importer didn’t guess a column — usually because Planning Center named it something unusual — pick the matching field from the dropdown. The required fields are first name and last name. Everything else (email, phone, household, address) is optional and can be left as Don’t importif your file doesn’t have it.

  5. Run the import. Click Import. Rows that share a household name and address are grouped into a household automatically. You’ll see a summary when it finishes: how many people came in, how many households got built, and any rows that were skipped (usually because they were missing a first or last name).

Path B — Add a family by hand

Best for a single new family, your core team on day one, or a household the CSV missed. Solo individuals use this same path — one-person households are just a household with one member.

  1. Open the new-family wizard. From People, click Add people. You’ll land at /people/new-family with one empty member slot.

  2. Fill in the first person. Type their first and last name, email, and phone. Pick a Role— Adult, Child, or Other. The role is how the household understands who’s a parent, who counts as a kid for events, and who’s a guest in the household.

  3. Add the rest of the family. Click Add another person for each additional member. Their roles default to Adult; switch any kids to Child. There’s no limit on member count — add a six-person family in one pass.

  4. Enter the shared address (optional). The household address is shared across every member. If you don’t have it yet, skip it — you can add it later from the household page. The household name auto-suggests from member last names; edit it if the family goes by something different.

  5. Click Create household. Everyone lands in People as their own profile, and the household groups them on the Households tab.

Path C — Let connect cards do it for you

You don’t have to add visitors by hand. When a family fills out your digital connect card on Sunday morning, the card creates a household and a profile for each person on it — including the kids, with their age group set. The visitor lands in your Follow-ups pipeline at the same time.

See Set up your digital connect card for the one-time setup. Once it’s printed, you’ll mostly stop adding visitors by hand.

What age groups and milestones are for

Two small fields on a person’s profile do quiet work across the app:

  • Age group— Adult, teen, or child. Today it’s set automatically when someone comes in through a connect card, and shows up on the visitor card in Follow-ups so you know if the family on the welcome card has kids before you walk over. In the new-family wizard, the household-member Role (Adult / Child / Other) tracks the same idea.

  • Birthdate and wedding anniversary — Both are optional fields on a person’s profile. They feed the This week’s milestones tile on your dashboardso a 50th anniversary or a kid’s birthday doesn’t slip past you. You can fill them in over time — there’s no need to backfill the whole directory.

If something goes wrong

  • The import preview shows garbled characters. Planning Center sometimes exports CSVs as UTF-16 instead of UTF-8. Open the file in a spreadsheet (Numbers, Excel, or Google Sheets) and re-save it as CSV UTF-8, then upload that file. The garbled rows will read right.

  • Some rows got skipped on import.The summary tells you why — almost always a missing first or last name. Open the source CSV, fix the bad rows, and re-import. The importer doesn’t duplicate people who already exist by matching first + last + email, so re-running on the same file is safe.

  • The import created two households for the same family.Usually the source CSV had two spellings of the same household name (“The Garcias” vs “Garcia Family”). Open the Households tab on People, click into the duplicate, and move members to the household you want to keep. Then delete the empty one.

  • You’re seeing duplicate people, not duplicate households. The Duplicates tab on People finds people who look like the same person across rows (matching name + email, or matching name + phone) and lets you merge them in one step. Run it after a big import and again after a few weeks of connect cards.

  • A family came in through a connect card and isn’t grouped right. The card builds the household from what the visitor typed. If they fat-fingered a last name, open the household, edit the wrong member, and the change is reflected everywhere. Connect-card data is editable like anything else.

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