Steve Dotto here.
One of the biggest time wasters that we all have is the process of organizing meetings.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s lunch with one or two friends or a business meeting where
you have to get a whole large group of people together.
Building a consensus of time and location can just be a massive time waster and an exercise
in frustration for the poor person who has to organize the event.
Now in the corporate world, of course, there are some team calendars that do a fairly job
of managing this process but there’s also a web 2.0 application called Doodle that does
a great job for the rest of us and it even scales nicely into the corporate environment.
Doodle is just effectively scheduling application that also polls the participants of an event
says, “What’s the best time for you to come?” and creates a summary for the person
organizing that poll or organizing that event.
It’s different than applications like eVite which basically wants you to decide when the
event is happening, sends out invitations and allows you to manage that guest list.
This is actually establishing when an event is going to occur and we’ve all been through
it.
We sent out emails and “What’s the best time for us to have lunch?” and then you
get eight emails coming back from all your friends that you’re trying to organize lunch
and their schedules change and it can be a total exercise in frustration.
Not so with Doodle.
It’s free.
You sign up for it with your email address.
They do have paid versions which add some extra functionality and they even have a business
version and an enterprise version available as well so it does scale nicely up into that
space.
Basically if you visit their website, they walk you through the process.
It really isn’t too complicated.
You create a poll.
You invite your participants and then you get your confirmation of what’s occurring.
You have several ways of reaching out and touching those people and asking them the
question.
They have a few other features which I’ll talk about as we move along but I think the
best way to look at this app is to just dive right in and create a an event.
So I’m going to say my family Christmas dinner is always a challenge because with
mixed being with spouses and other people’s families, figuring a time that I can get my
family together, it always drives me crazy on Christmas.
So this Christmas, I’m going to create a Christmas poll.
So what I’m going to do is create the Christmas poll, I go into the next screen, and here’s
one of the really nice things that happens with Doodle.
It synchs with my calendar.
You can synch it with your iCal, with outlook, with your Google calendar.
It synchs with my calendar so when I go in and start to create my poll from my event,
it’s already got my calendar in place.
So I’m not going to accidentally double-book myself as I put together the polls and you
can see I can have access to all of my different online calendar here within this interface.
So I’m going to move way forward into the Christmas timeframe and there I can create
a poll.
Actually I’ve already started with this.
Let me just jump ahead by month.
There, you see what I did is I created four different days that work for me for hosting
Christmas dinner.
If I wanted to add a fifth day all you do is click and it creates that as an option.
Now what this does is that it creates these dates and times as an option in a poll, in
an email which we will send out to the different participants.
Once you have established the times and locations for the meeting or for the event, then you
can move in to how you’re going to actually ask the question.
Now for basic poll, you can just move ahead but you do have some other settings that you
can go in and choose and this is important.
This is the one I like best.
Yes.
No.
If need be.
In other words, this date doesn’t work particularly well for me but I can change my schedule to
make it work.
That’s a really powerful question to ask because you’re trying to get a large group
together.
You can also limit the number of participants, that sort of stuff, all through these settings
but I like to do this: Yes, No, If, Maybe option.
Then once we’re done with that you can see some of the additional features that you can
add if you decide to purchase the Premium package which is I think about $50 a month.
We’ll check on that in a moment.
But you can go for binding participation, you can add some different addresses and phone
numbers and other things to the poll.
I don’t really need to do any of those things so I’m going to go next.
Then I can see exactly how I’m going to send this poll out.
I’ve got 2 options.
I like the top option of sending it using my old email application.
What will happen here is they’ll send me an email with all of the links that I need
to embed in the email that I send over as an invitation and then I use my own email
software.
We can also have them send it and here we can connect our address book and we can use
it.
It’s an online address book, and an online email coming from Doodle for individuals.
I don’t like that option as much as I like the option of sending it myself because if
I’ve got an email list already set up in my email client, I can use that and I also
like to email coming from my own personal account.
I like that idea as well.
So here is the email that I created for this Christmas Dinner.
This is what they sent to me as we go through the process of doing this.
So we can see right here that I’ve initiated a poll and my poll is this.
So what I need to do is I need to copy that link and send that as I frame my email which
is to all my participants saying, “Hey, let’s book our Christmas Dinner.
Here’s a poll that’s going to allow us organize the time.
Please fill in the poll and let me know your best times.”
Once they have done that, once I’ve sent it to my family in this particular case, I
can go back into Doodle and I can look at the results.
This is where it’s really strong for the organizer.
Once we’ve put a poll forward, I can take a look at the participants and I’ve got
six people so far responding.
This is the summary that we’re looking for because here’s how we understand the consensus.
We can see who’s signed up for what times, when they can make it, and looking down here
in the summary, I can see I’ve got five no’s for this particular day.
That’s a bad day.
I’ve got three yeses for the 24th, so far that’s the best, and two if maybe.
So I actually get five people committed to this date on the 24th whereas I can only get
three committed to this day on the 25th, on Christmas Day actually.
So this gives me all the control and all the information I need to create my event effectively
without wasting any of my time.
I’ve got a summary here and as soon as somebody responds to my email, their information is
added.
This works great for this sort of event.
It also works terrifically obviously for business-type, events as well.
Let’s jump back into the landing page for doodle and take a look at some of the other
features that are built in the software because I think some of these are important.
If you do purchase the Premium version, I’ll show you what the pricing is so you’ve got
an idea for that.
So for an individual, it will cost you $39, $40 dollars a year and so you’ve got a little
more customization for it, your polls to look like there’s no ads, and you’ve got some
additional mobility and contact support.
Your friends can include email addresses, phone numbers, and postal codes that sort
of stuff.
For businesses, for $500 a year you can brand things corporately for yourself.
There’s a little more security built in and there’s connection to your Corporate
Calendar.
In Enterprise Versions, they want you to call a line and it costs even more.
So you’ve got three basic different tiers of premium service you can get from Doodle
But the last thing that I want to show you are these two here: Connect my Calendar and
the Meet Me page.
Connect my Calendar is really nice because this allows you to connect your Doodle invite
calendar to your Google, Outlook, iCal, or any other calendar.
What’s really cool about this–let me just grab my calendar and show you because this
does actually create a pretty cool interface–if I look at my calendar here, it automatically
creates the events within my ICal calendar because that’s what I have it synched to
myself.
So that to me is a pretty powerful additional feature and it makes it really efficient because
you’re not double-booking yourself and you’re also not going to go into your calendar and
enter all of that information.
Once you confirm it, it becomes a confirmed appointment within your calendar.
So the Calendar Connect is a nice additional feature and lastly, not necessarily dealing
with groups but again dealing with organizing your time, they have a Meet Me page which
is page that you can embed in your website, you can send people a URL that will call up
your calendar and allow people to book time within your calendar or request time within
your calendar.
Here’s my calendar as it occurs now.
If somebody wants to book a time within this, they can just select a time here and say,
“I’d like to book a meeting with you, Steve, at this point.”
Or if you’re an email conversationalist, I mean they’ll say, “Let’s book a phone
call.
What’s your availability?”
You can just send them the link to this and say pick a time and then you can confirm it
then.
You’ll get a meeting request as per normal and it allows people to book your time this
way.
This is a really efficient way for interpersonal communication and organizing time without
you having to write back and forth saying, “I’m available before lunch on Thursday.
After lunch on Friday.”
This actually works with your calendar.
Of course, the key to this is you actually have to put all your appointments in your
calendar and live by your calendar.
Also try and use as few calendars as possible.
Have one home calendar that you use.
Even if you’re using an online calendar, synch those to whatever home calendar it is
so you have a base calendar that you’re always working from.
So in summary, Doodle is a powerful scheduling tool that will reduce the stress and frustration
of anybody organizing any sort of event if you choose to use it.
I’m Steve Dotto , have a great day.
Steve Dotto0Easy Scheduling with Doodle0September 3, 2012