Determining When To Have A Meeting – Doodle.com

Posted by Bruce Ganek on Nov 25, 2009 in Reviews, Software, Web, Web | 0 comments

We’ve all been there, you need to set up a meeting, so you make lots of phone calls and emails until you can get a common consensus.

In the age of the Internet, isn’t there a better way to do this?  Perhaps, with one of several websites that are out there.

They all seem to work the same, you create a schedule grid and then send an email invitation to people to look at the grid and select what are good/bad times for them.  Once you have everyone’s input, you can then schedule the meeting.

Will this eliminate all of your scheduling hassles?  Probably not, but it can help, particularly in the initial stage when you are trying to see what will work.

There are a bunch of sites out there, the one I’m going to talk about is a free service, doodle.com.

What You Can Do In Doodle

Doodle gives you the ability to create an event or a choice.  The main different is that an event has different time frames you are asking people to select, while a choice gives people different options for people to select.  Everything is configurable by you.

After you create an account and log in (without one you can not keep track of what you created), you will be taken to the following myDoodle webpage:

Creating An Event

Creating an event is very easy, here’s the steps:

If you enter an email address you do get notified anytime anyone enters the poll.  Here’s the body of the email:

DO NOT REPLY to this message, please. It was sent by Doodle (and not by Bruce Ganek).

The new participant “Bruce Ganek” just provided her/his information to your poll “Band Rehearsal”. The link to the poll is the following:
http://www.doodle.com/w66xmt7yccfacs6q

Get Branded Doodle: your logo (free!) and optionally no ads http://doodle.com/r/enBrandedDoodle

You may pick as many days as you want, just click on the date to include it.

I like how they set this up, you can put the time in via various formats.  The real time saver is the option at the bottom “Copy and paste first row.”  With that, you can set up the first date’s time options and then have them copied into all of the others.

I’ve always sent the invitation myself, I’m not sure how well the “Doodle sends” option works.

How do you let people know to participate?

Doodle will create a link that you then send to anyone that you are interested in participating (you will also get an email containing the link).  Just email the link to whoever you want to participate and you are done.

What will the user see when they go to the poll?

When the user clicks on the link, this is what they will see:

They simply enter their name in the text box, select their choices and hit the save button.  The one thing I haven’t found is a way to modify my choice once I make it.

How do you end the event?

When you are ready, you can go to the administer option for the event and select “Close Poll”.  You can also see a history if you want to see when people added themselves to the poll.

Making A Choice

Creating a choice is the same as creating an event except instead of time frames, you are entering options.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem a way to allow the user to answer multiple questions at the same time – they need to be created as separate choices.

Reprinted from My View Of Technology