From the stage to “we’re going” in two taps.
A four-step wizard, a real registration switch, RSVPs that arrive by text as well as email, and sign-up sheets for the potluck — plus a way to hand one event to one volunteer without handing them your whole church.
The picnic is not the hard part.
The hard part is the sign-up sheet in the lobby, the headcount nobody trusts, and the four people who volunteered to bring chairs in four different places.
Three sign-up systems
A clipboard, a Google Form, and a reply-all email thread. Nobody has the real number.
Email-only RSVPs miss half the church
The people you most want at the retreat are the ones who don’t read church email.
Delegating means over-sharing
To let a volunteer run one event, most tools make you give them the keys to everything.
Events & Sign-ups, in detail.
Four steps, then it’s live
The event wizard walks you through the basics, the schedule, who can see it, and how people sign up. Registration is an explicit switch you flip — never something derived from dates behind your back, so an event can never quietly close itself the night before.
- A four-step creation wizard, not a wall of fields
- Registration on or off is a switch you control, never inferred from the calendar
- Multi-day events where people pick the days or sessions they’re coming to
- Room assignment, so two ministries stop booking the same space
RSVPs by text, not just email
Invitations go out over email and SMS. People answer yes, maybe, or no from wherever they are, add it to their calendar in a tap, and see who else is coming. Events also show up as cards inside chat, with the RSVP buttons right there in the conversation.
- Yes / maybe / no over both email and SMS
- Add-to-calendar, so it lands in the phone people actually check
- “Who’s coming” — visible to the people it should be visible to
- Event cards inside chat with inline RSVP
Sign-up sheets for the parts people bring
Potluck dishes, set-up crew, greeters, drivers. Create slots, let people claim them, and watch the sheet fill in without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet. Slots can be limited to a team, to parents, or opened to everyone.
- Meeting sign-ups for dishes, roles, and shifts
- Slots that fill first-come, with a live count
- Audience-gated slots — everyone, a specific team, or parents only
Hand one event to one person
Name someone the organizer of an event and they get the full manage page for that event and nothing else — the roster, the registrant list, the ability to message everyone who signed up. No church-wide permission, no admin account, no risk. It’s the smallest useful grant in the product, and it’s enforced in the database, not just hidden in the interface.
- A per-event grant that stands entirely outside the normal permission ladder
- Full organizer panel: roster, registrants, messaging — for that one event
- Grants nothing church-wide, ever
- Works the same on web and on the phone
Retreats and conferences, without the spreadsheet.
A weekend away is a different animal from a Sunday potluck: people have to sleep somewhere, get there somehow, and somebody has to account for the money afterwards. Switch on Event Ops and those become part of the event rather than three side documents.
Rooming
Cabins, hotel rooms, or discussion tables — each with a capacity, a room leader, and a policy of male, female, coed or family. Assign people, or let the roster fill. Everyone sees their own room; the organizer sees all of them.
Carpools
Self-serve, where drivers offer seats and riders claim them, or admin-built, where staff assign every seat from the logistics workspace. Your call per event.
Expenses & reimbursements
Log against venue, catering, speakers, transportation, materials or merch, and move each one through pending, approved, and reimbursed. The treasurer stops chasing photographs of receipts.
Multi-track schedules
A real agenda: sessions with start and end times, a speaker, a location, and a track — so “Main Hall” and “Youth” can run side by side without two schedules.
Chats that build themselves
Every room and every carpool gets its own channel automatically. The cabin sorts out lights-out, the car sorts out the petrol stop, and neither of them lands in a church-wide thread.
Fee reconciliation, then a recap
Mark off the people who paid you by cash or transfer so off-platform payers reconcile against the same registration list. When it’s over, an AI recap pulls together what worked and what to change next year.
Off by default, per event
Rooms, carpools and expenses are toggles on the event itself. A Wednesday night dinner never has to see any of it; the winter retreat switches on all three.
No feature tiers, no add-ons, no upsell.
Where this connects
Every part of Churchory shares one directory, one permission system, and one price.
