How Hymnologic handles your information

The short version

• Hymnologic is a hymnal for churches that use Planning Center. Your church decides who can use it, and the people and songs in it come from your church’s Planning Center account.
• You sign in with a code we email you. There are no passwords.
• There are no ads, no advertising trackers and no analytics scripts.
• We don’t sell personal information, and we don’t use it for advertising.
• Every email you can turn off has a link at the bottom that turns it off.

What comes from Planning Center

A church admin connects the church’s Planning Center account. Hymnologic reads from it and doesn’t change anything there. It keeps the access Planning Center grants, so the hymnal can keep itself up to date. From that account we copy:

• Songs: titles, authors, arrangements, keys, lyrics, chord charts and links such as reference recordings.
• Service plans: dates, and the songs in each.
• People: the people with the membership types the church’s admins choose. Until they choose, a sample of up to 500 profiles of any type, which is replaced once they do. For each, their name, primary email address, membership type, whether their profile is active, and a link to their profile photo.
• Groups: only groups of the types the admins choose. Each group’s name, image and members, so a songlist can be shared with a group.

Sheet music and other attached files stay in Planning Center. We keep each file’s name and type, and fetch the file from Planning Center when a signed-in member opens it.

Who can get in

A church’s admins choose which Planning Center membership types can use its hymnal. The first time you sign in, we check your email address against your church’s copy of its directory, and only let you in if you’re there with one of those membership types. That copy refreshes from Planning Center automatically.

If you’re removed from your church’s directory, or moved to a membership type it doesn’t allow, you lose access the next time that copy refreshes (if a large share of a church’s members would lose access at once, its admins confirm it first), and get it back automatically if you’re added again. Admins aren’t removed this way: the church’s other admins see them flagged, and its owner can remove them.

What we keep when you use it

• Your account: your email address, your church, and whether you’re a member or an admin there.
• What you make: favorites, songlists, any cover image you upload for one, and who you’ve shared each with.
• The last day you opened the hymnal, so we can see how much each church’s hymnal is used.
• Feedback you send from the app: your message, the page you sent it from, and your browser, screen size and display settings, so we can reproduce a problem.
• A record of the emails we send (which kind, to which address, and when), so nobody gets the same email twice or too many.
• For admins: who confirmed the church holds the rights to show its songs, and when.

Cookies and your device

Hymnologic uses a few cookies, all to make the app work:

• hym-auth keeps you signed in.
• dh_church remembers which church you chose, if you’re in more than one.
• dh_tz holds your device’s time zone, so “today” and “this Sunday” are right where you are.
• When an admin connects Planning Center, three short-lived cookies secure that sign-in.

Light or dark mode, your lyrics text size, the key you last picked for a song, a feedback message you haven’t sent yet (cleared when you sign out), whether you’ve seen a tip, and the last day this device told us you opened the hymnal are saved on your device only. There are no advertising or analytics cookies.

Sharing songlists and links

• To share a songlist, members of your church can see the names, profile photos and membership types of the people in its directory, and the names, images and member counts of its groups. They can also find someone by typing their name or email address; the address itself isn’t shown.
• When a songlist is shared with you, it appears in the app, and you may get an email about it.
• Someone who opens a copied link without signing in sees the church’s name, the title, the list of songs and their recording links, with a prompt to sign in. They see lyrics only if your church has turned that on, and never chord charts or sheet music. A church’s admins can turn these previews off.

Emails

• Everyone: your sign-in code, when you ask for one.
• Church members: when a songlist is shared with you, and the coming week’s songs on Fridays (only if you turn it on).
• People in a church’s directory who haven’t signed in yet: an invitation to the hymnal, when the church sends one, and songlists shared with them.
• Church admins: a welcome, a note when you’re made an admin, a heads-up before a service when a song in the set needs words or something new has joined the hymnal, and a warning if the hymnal stops updating from Planning Center.

Every email you can turn off has a link at the bottom that does it, without signing in. Once you’re signed in, they’re all in your email settings. Sign-in codes and a few account notices for admins can’t be turned off.

Who else handles it

• Supabase stores the data and runs sign-in.
• Vercel hosts the app.
• Resend sends our emails.
• Planning Center is where your church’s information comes from. Profile photos and group images load from it directly.

Your browser also loads the app’s typefaces from Google Fonts, and, for songs that have a recording, thumbnail images from YouTube (and YouTube’s player when you press play). Their own privacy policies apply.

Your church’s admins can see its directory, including email addresses, so they can invite people. A small number of Hymnologic staff can see account and church information to run and support the service.

Getting your information removed

Write to hello@hymnologic.app from the address you use with Hymnologic, and tell us your church. We’ll remove your account, or answer any question about what we hold. A church that stops using Hymnologic can ask us the same.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or about this page: hello@hymnologic.app.