Bible Plan Basics
On This Page
- What are Bible Plans?
- YouVersion Content Guidelines (1-minute read)
- Essential Elements for Your Bible Plan (3-minute read)
- How to Submit Your Bible Plan (1-minute read)
What are Bible Plans?
Plans provide daily devotional content rooted in Scripture. They help our global Community study, understand, meditate on, and apply biblical truths to their lives.
Bible Plans are available in the Bible App and on Bible.com.
YouVersion Content Guidelines
At YouVersion, we believe that excellence honors God and inspires people, and we expect Plans to exemplify this.
To increase the likelihood of your content getting accepted, please make sure your Plan closely adheres to our quality, mission, and purpose guidelines.
Clear Mission
YouVersion exists to encourage and challenge people to seek intimacy with God every day—not to advance personal platforms, positions, or politics.
The content we choose to publish will reflect this.
Content that is mission-focused will:
- Appeal to a global audience. Ask yourself, “Will this Plan resonate with people coming from various backgrounds, cultures, and life-experiences?”
- Be a helpful friend. View yourself as a guide coming alongside someone as they explore God’s Word.
- Avoid sharing personal opinions about controversial topics. Our platform is not the place to start a debate or spark an argument, and we reserve the right to not publish any content that tries to do so.
High Quality
Please keep in mind that any content that does not meet our quality standards will likely not be published on YouVersion.
All content must:
- Be free from grammatical errors. (You may want to use tools like Grammarly to help with this.)
- Be ready for publication at the time of submission. Please have someone review your Plan and offer suggestions before sending it to us. Due to the number of Plans we receive, we cannot edit submissions.
- Be encouraging. Try to avoid any language that could be interpreted as condescending, judgmental, offensive, or assumptive.
- Follow our formatting requirements (more on this later)
Shared Purpose
The core purpose of our Plan content is to meet people where they are as they explore Scripture while offering insight, context, and encouragement.
Content that shares this purpose will:
- Stay grounded in biblically-based truth. YouVersion is a digital ministry of Life.Church, and adheres to Life.Church’s Essential Beliefs. We expect content from our Partners to also uphold mainstream Christian beliefs.
- Avoid promoting or tearing down a person or political platform. To help build our Community up in love, we want to focus on our commonalities, not our differences.
- Lead someone to take a next step in their faith. Your YouVersion Plans should accomplish this through the devotional content you’re sharing within the app—not by linking to other sites or by promoting other unrelated resources. (You can use one Call-to-Action link at the end of your content, but we’ll cover this later.)
How to Submit Your Bible Plan
Once your Plan has been finalized, edited, and proofread, here are the 4 steps you’ll need to take to submit your Plan to YouVersion for review:
Sign into the Partner Portal
Once you’re in the Partner Portal, click + Add a Plan to create a new entry. From here, you will input your Essential Plan Elements (listed in a later section).
Upload Optional Elements
Optional Plan Elements (listed later) are not required to submit a Plan, but they must be uploaded at this point if you want to include them.
Add new Plan Days
To add a new Plan Day, click the + Plan Day button underneath the Plan info section (you may need to scroll down on your web browser to see the button).
Submit your Plan.
Once you’ve added all your content, click the Submit this Entire Plan button. This will now trigger our review process.
You will be unable to change the Plan once you submit it for review. Comment fields in the Partner Portal are the best way to connect with our team if you have content questions, and we’ll also leave comments there if edits need to be made.
Elements You Must Include in Your Bible Plan
Plan Title
In 50 characters or less, create a title that accurately reflects your Plan content and hooks your audience. Please follow the most common title guidelines for your language. For English Plans, titles should be capitalized according to AP Style. (You can use capitalizemytitle.com to do this.)
Plan Description
Help our Community understand what your Plan is about by describing it in 70 words or less. Please do not advertise or include calls to action.
Partner URL
People can learn about you by tapping a link to your website on your Bible Plan’s “About” page. This link will appear in the Publisher section where we thank you for providing the Plan. You must provide this link when you submit your content.
Bible References
Every Plan day should be built around a verse or passage. Scripture is central to YouVersion’s mission, and it is central to Bible Plans. Take the time to intentionally pick out several verses that are relevant to your Plan’s topic, and create Plan days centered on those passages. Please include at least one Scripture reference for each day.
Images
Bible Plan images provide visual appeal and help people decide what content they want to view next. We need two image sizes for your Plan: 1440 x 810 pixels and 320 x 320 pixels.