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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