FAQs
General
What is Clean My PCO
Clean My PCO automatically verifies and cleans your PCO. A complete list of cleaning activities is in the “How it Works” section further down this page.
Some cleaning activities require your intervention but most happen without any management or oversight from you…and all can be turned off or on.
Does Clean My PCO work with non-U.S. churches?
Mostly. There are a few cleaning features that only work in the USA but it’s only a couple.
We don’t use Planning Center People. Can we use Clean my PCO?
You’re probably using Planning Center Services only, right?
Clean my PCO only works with Planning Center People. However, if you use any part of Planning Center, you’re also using Planning Center People.
I have a large PCO database. Can you handle it?
Yes. Number of records doesn’t really matter because the app only looks at what changes. It doesn’t look at your whole database.
What if I need help?
Clean My PCO is super simple so you shouldn’t need much help. But worry-not, we’re here for you. Send e-mail to support@cleanmypco.com.
To keep the cost to you as low as possible, we don’t have a big team of support people so give us 1 business day to respond. Deal?
HINT: You can always turn a feature off if you need more clarity on how it works.
This is private attender data. How do we know that you’re legit?
Any time you’re granting access to your data, you should carefully vet the people who hold that access. Write to us at our contact page and we’ll send you a few references.
We have our roots as the IT department at a “mega” church and also built the popular church app, Core Motivations–an app to help you increase your volunteer base.
Can you clean our PCO data one time without us subscribing to the monthly service?
We do offer one time bulk cleaning, but we always recommend following you bulk cleaning with monthly maintenance.
Your PCO data is changing daily. Cleaning it once helps for that moment in time but doesn’t help on an ongoing basis.
However, we understand the need and can accommodate. Send e-mail to support@cleanmypco.com and ask about it.
Give me a really good reason I should care about clean data
Giving: A person’s recurring giving method was recently declined. You want to contact them and remind them to update their payment information but the e-mail returns as invalid. If you had Clean My PCO, you already knew the e-mail address became invalid long before there was a problem with their giving. You would have texted or mailed them a request to update their contact information long before their giving was declined. Instead, you’re possibly losing 1 month or more of giving from that person.
Here’s another
Events: You’re sending postal mail to inform people of an important event or announcement. Each undelivered piece of postal mail is money wasted and that person never reads what you wanted them to know.
Bad data costs you money and keeps you from reaching people. Clean My PCO pays for itself quickly.
I’m the database person. Are you trying to put me out of a job?
If you’re the administrator of Planning Center, you shouldn’t be cleaning data. You should be building workflows, creating lists, visualizing data for your leadership, building and nurturing your volunteer team, and helping staff get the most out of PCO. Your job is to make sure staff is equipped to do ministry rather than staring at PCO data all day.
We created Clean My PCO not to put you out of a job but to allow you to focus on higher level tasks that require a human. Offensive tasks versus defensive.
This all sounds great but I don’t have time to respond to the data you flag for me.
We’ve been on the frontlines of church database management for years so we hear you, we acknowledge you, and we feel the weight you carry.
If we can identify issues and then set up automations to help fix those issues, your database gets significantly cleaner without any work on your part. What if 20% more mailers reached your attenders? What if 20% more e-mails reached people? What if your leadership asked for data and you could tell them that demographic information is now 20% more accurate?
That’s a big move, right? And it was zero extra work for you.
For the people that don’t respond to automatic e-mails, a volunteer or team of volunteers could make some calls, send personal e-mails, and other outreach activities to fix the data that Clean My PCO flagged. That could easily add another 30% or more of accuracy! But that’s not required.
Remember, Clean My PCO is giving you the data that needs cleaned so you can honor yours and your volunteer’s time by going after what you know is an issue. You can’t fix what is not identified as a problem so this data is quite valuable.
Billing
Is there an onboarding fee?
There is no onboarding fee providing you can follow our instructions on how to set up a few basic items in PCO People. If you would like us to set it up for you, and help you make some lists and workflows to alert you of questionable data, we’ll charge you a a $199 onboarding fee.
If you know how to create lists and workflows, you can probably do the setup yourself.
Can I pay monthly by check?
Unfortunately not. Taking checks means having somebody dedicated to billing and that means paying them and that means adding overhead and that means charging you more.
To meet our mission of being simple, maintenance free, and low cost, we only take credit card payments.
Does my payment cover next month or the current month?
We bill 1 month ahead. If we’re in the month of August, your payment in August covers September.
Will you prorate the first month?
Your billing starts on the day you sign up and becomes your billing date each month. No need prorate.
How do your prices compare to other data validation services?
If you look at other commercially available services, the prices are INSANE! You will pay sometimes $1 or more PER RECORD! And, they aren’t working directly with Planning Center. You have to pull the data out, send to the service, and re-upload. Database people, you know that when you do that, DUPLICATES show up.
With us, your data stays inside PCO.
You pay up to 1/100th of the cost of commercial services.
Why are the costs for larger churches so much higher?
Because larger churches have more activity. The costs that we pay to our vendors are based on activity. The more activity, the more we pay.
However, we are still insanely lower than other data validation services so we don’t think you’ll mind the price points. ????
Is there a discount for an annual payment?
Yes. We offer a 10% discount for a full year payment. However, we do not refund any of your annual payment if you choose to cancel during that year. Contact us at support@cleanmypco.com and we’ll set that up for you.
Your prices are low. Do you plan to raise them any time soon?
Prices are low to honor our early customers. As the platform grows, prices will rise. However, early adopters will keep the same pricing tiers as long as they remain active. Again…to show honor.
What if I want to cancel?
We hope you don’t but we understand. Go to the billing page and enter your e-mail address. Make sure it’s the same e-mail you used to sign up. Once you login, there’s an option to cancel. Alternatively, send e-mail to support@cleanmypco.com and we’ll cancel for you.
There are no contracts so you’re free to cancel at any time. Your service ends when your month runs out. We do not refund partial months.
Do you have a referral program?
Yes, but it’s informal so read carefully. If you refer somebody to us, first THANK YOU!!!
Second, send us an e-mail at support@cleanmypco.com and tell us that [[church name]] will be setting up an account and you referred them. (Make sure to tell them to enter their church name when they sign up)
As long as they set up and pay within 30 days of your e-mail, you get 1 free month. (and our love, which has zero value❤️)
If you’re a consultant or other church leader that doesn’t subscribe to the service, also let us know and we’ll throw some honor your way.
MOST IMPORTANT: Refer us because you believe in what we offer, not because you’re getting something from us. We keep our “honor” to you small because we don’t want compensation to be a motivating factor.
Referrals you find on this site are because we believe in the people/products we’re referring.
How it Works
What does the app actually "clean?"
NOTE: All of these options can be turned off or on. Also, not a few of the below features are not available for the initial launch but will be soon.
First/Last Name
- Capitalize first letter of first & last name
- Change All Caps words to proper case. (JOHN becomes John)
- Flag names that need manual formatting (John “Johnny” Doe)
- Remove second word in first or last name field if the 2 words are identical
- Flag names that have 1 letter for first or last name. (J Doe)
Phone Number
- PCO now formats the phone number automatically
- Delete incomplete phone numbers (less than 10 digits)
- Delete phone numbers with invalid area code
- Remove duplicate phone numbers
- Remove if it has words but no numbers
- Remove capital letters
- Verify e-mail address is valid
- Delete clearly invalid e-mails (ex: noemail@gmail.com)
- Alert if the e-mail is a spam trap. (Nobody monitoring the e-mail)
- Identify and fix common e-mail typos
- Remove duplicate e-mails
- Change .con to .com
Other
- Remove any instance of “N/a”
What does the app actually “clean?”
Yes. When information in your database changes, it goes through all of the same checks as new records. Nobody’s gonna sneak by, we promise.
Do you guarantee that it will clean all of my records?
No. We use a technology called webhooks, where PCO tells us when certain things happen in the database. If PCO doesn’t tell us that something changed, we won’t know to check it. But PCO tells us most things so you’ll see a big difference.
How does onboarding work?
Nothing to it. You sign up, you connect your PCO account to our app, and we do the rest. We do not have access to your username and password. We also don’t have access to login to your PCO account. We DO have access to all of your PCO data. (For obvious reasons)
We’re new. Do you clean all of our current data?
Clean My PCO only cleans/verifies data that is newly created or changed.
Let’s say you signed up today. Any data that is in your database prior to today is only cleaned if it’s changed or it’s a new (as of today) record to your PCO database.
However, if you would like us to go through your entire database and clean/verify, we will offer that as a one-time cost in the future.
I don’t want all of your features. Can I turn certain things off?
Yes. Every feature can be turned off. We are constantly adding new cleaning features but you can choose to use as few or as many as you would like. The price is the same regardless.
How about the security of my data?
Keeping your data safe is our first priority. That’s why we only keep the data we cleaned in our database for 7 days. (So we can answer your support questions and continue to refine our service) After that, it’s gone. While we have it, it’s encrypted.
For payments, we use Stripe–one of the best known payment processors in the world. We don’t store any payment information.
You’ll also notice that we don’t ask for much information about you or your church. It’s not because we don’t care. It’s because we don’t want to store data that isn’t necessary.
Any data that we store to show you metrics is stripped of identifying information and converted to data that is not connected to any real person. We assign random ID numbers.
You should also know that we are not in the business of selling data. Your data is not offered for sale to any other company.
If you’re on the nerdy side (like us), you should know that API data is encrypted and we follow best practices for API security. We also use government maintained database and services from large companies as our data sources. We vet their privacy practices.
Bottom line: If we don’t have it, cyberpunks can’t steal it. That’s the best security out there. If we were hacked, they will get some contact information for your church. Maybe they’ll find Jesus.
How do you clean and verify an address?
We verify the address against the United States Postal Service database and change the formatting of the address to match. This assures that when you send postal mail, it’s delivered accurately and quickly.
NOTE: Sometimes the Postal Service formatting looks a little strange. The postal service would disagree.
How do you clean and verify an e-mail address?
Let’s use the e-mail address JohnTheBaptist@cleanmypco.com as an example.
First, we remove any capital letters because e-mail handlers don’t differentiate between lower and upper case.
Next, we contact the domain…in this case, cleanmypco.com. In non-techie terms, we say, “hey cleanmypco.com, does johnthebaptist@ exist as an e-mail with you?” We also check to see if it’s mistyped, a burner e-mail, a role-based e-mail (info@) or some other format that would indicate that something is fishy. If it passes all of these tests, we’re done.
If the answer is no, we create a notification in PCO that alerts you that the e-mail address may not be valid. Notice we said, “MAY NOT.” Sometimes the domain gives us an answer that you later figure out wasn’t true. That’s why we don’t delete the e-mail address. We just flag it.
The person never knows that we checked their e-mail address because we only checked their domain.
Because of privacy laws, there is no e-mail directory we can check to verify that a certain e-mail belongs to a certain person but telling you whether it exists or not is powerful information.
Does the activity tab in Planning Center record Clean My PCO activity?
Yes. You can see what was originally entered and how it was changed in the person’s activity tab. For up to 7 days, you can also look in your account in the Clean My PCO app.
Is it our job to contact the person to get updated information or do you handle that?
We don’t communicate with your attenders. Here’s why: 1.) We communicate our way…not yours. 2.) Your attenders trust you…not us.
For that reason, we alert you to the problem and you reach out.
BUT…we will help you set up Planning Center automations that will attempt to capture information automatically using wording that you choose.
We will also help you set up forms that you can send to your attenders when you learn of invalid data.
In other words, we do everything but actually communicate with them.
Custom Work
You all seem pretty smart. What if I have other PCO questions?
It’s true, we know our way around PCO quite well. For small projects and consulting, use the contact form. We would love to help.
For complete migration from another church database to PCO, we recommend Altitude Team. They are FANTASTIC!
If you are transferring to PCO Giving from somewhere else, we recommend Evan…better known as PCOMVP.
Evan also has a great app called Givflow that gives you insight into your giving data. You won’t find this kind of information anywhere else. It’s crazy good!
If you use any of our referrals, tell them that we sent you. Maybe they’ll send us a Chipotle gift card or something. ????????
What kind of custom work can you do?
There’s untapped power in Planning Center that few churches know about. Using what’s called an API, we can combine the power of other apps with PCO to do some incredible things.
Example: We created a call center that intakes prayer requests. A person calls in, leaves a message, we transcribe the message into a PCO note, and send it to the church leader in charge of handling prayer requests.
Example 2: We created custom attendance dashboards that analyze attendance trends including overall weekend attendance, 4 week moving average, year over year comparison, volunteer attendance by ministry area, and percent to recovery since COVID. All of this is created in interactive graphs.
These are only 2 of the super cool things we can do. Contact us with your dream and we’ll see if we can do it.
Can you help us migrate our church database to PCO?
We CAN but we believe there are some fantastic people doing that already. We happily refer to them. We recommend Altitude Team. They are FANTASTIC!
Why do we choose not to take this on? Because migration is more than a technology job. The right person recognizes that this is also a pastoral task. People don’t like change and somebody has to pastor them through it. Patrick at Altitude Team understands this and helps churches navigate this task.