While planning the Boston Age of Conversation meet-up, fellow blogger Scott Monty introduced me to a handy little site called Doodle. The idea is simple, which is perhaps why it’s so smart.
Doodle is an event-scheduling or choice-making tool for larger groups (or for opinionated individuals with things to do and people to see). I've only used the site for events, so I'll go through my experience.
To create an event, Doodle prompts you through 3 quick steps:
- Provide a title/brief description, as well as your name and e-mail
- Select however many dates you’d like to suggest for the event to take place
- Add up to 5 time/location options for each date
After you've created an event, type in your name and check off each date/time/location that works for you. As the creator, you should be free for all the dates and times you suggested ;)
Doodle will email you a unique link to your event. E-mail this out to all of the people you’d like to invite. They can then enter their name and select all the options that they’d prefer. You get an email every time someone has participated.
Once you see a long column of green check marks under a specific date/time option, you know you’ve got a winner!
Easy! But of course, I have a couple suggestions for the Doodle:
- It’s kind of a pain to e-mail a link from a different site (Gmail, for me). Would be better if you could just send an invite to everyone you’d like to participate through Doodle. That way, Doodle would know the email addresses of everyone on the list and send out updates if the creator has edited the event. As is it now, you have to e-mail the invitees if you’ve added new information to the event.
- I’d like a field for time options and another for location options. Now, you have to cram both in one field, and that looks kinda shoddy.
- The “comment” link should be more prominent, or perhaps even underneath the date/time option. I’d never know where to find the comments, and they are usually important!
- Give participants the option of providing their contact info for the group. That way when you’re actually going to the event, you can just print out the Doodle Event page and have everyone’s cell number (in case you get lost and can’t find any of your friends and don’t have a book safety net… you know how that goes).
All-in-all, I think voting on logistics is a great idea. Doodle has really helped me cut down on those ridiculously long email chains that never seem to get anywhere. Check out the service and let me know what you think!
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Via BuzzFeed