Stop Herding Cats: Use Meeting Wizard Instead.
April 14, 2008 By: almostgotit Category: Uncategorized, friendship, parenting, networking, Management
My mother-daughter book club has been trying to decide when we can meet this summer, and the email has been piling up: there’s just way too many summer camps, graduations, and family trips to work around. Consequently, I have just dusted off a snappy tool I once used to organize business meetings, and you should know about it, too.
MeetingWizard.Com is a free, simple-to-use website that helps a group set up a gathering (of any kind!) in just a few easy steps:
1) The organizer fills in a simple online form (adding email addresses, an event description, and all possible meeting times), and MeetingWizard sends out an email linking everyone to a page containing the response form. Note: once you’ve added email addresses to MeetingWizard, you can re-use them forever.
2) All recipients of the email respond by selecting ALL possible dates (note: not just the still-open dates they prefer – nor will MeetingWizard allow them to do that, clever Wiz that it is!)
3) MeetingWizard collates all responses in one place so it’s very easy to see which date or dates work best for everyone.
4) The Wiz can automatically choose the first date without conflicts, or you can choose one yourself. MeetingWizard then sends everyone an email announcement of chosen date.
5) MeetingWizard can also be set to automatically send out a reminder a day or so before the actual event.
Cool, or what??
April 15th, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Hmmm. Reminds me a bit of Evite. Did you read the column (screed) in the NYT Sunday magazine about Evites? Apparently this person hates them. I felt a little bad because I’ve used Evite invitations for a number of parties.
Here in computer-savvy Seattle it’s considered acceptable, I think.
I wonder if MeetingWizard would meet with similar objection? From some people?
April 15th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Thanks for the comment, and the reminder! I tried using Evite for another social group I was part of several years ago (NOT in Seattle!). And people were a little weirded out. I think I ended up concluding that Evite made my friends feel unloved…
(Technology will never, EVER replace the human being. This is a central truth.)
However, MeetingWizard’s main advantage is that it is collaborative: rather than broadcasting info on an announced event (a la Evite), its main strength is its ability to coordinate an event by collecting and cooperating with people’s schedules. It’s not as cute as Evite, though, and lacks themed invitation designs, etc.
MeetingWizard worked great with absent-minded professor types, but jury’s still out on using it to arrange summer dates for our bookclub — I’ve not yet heard back from most of them, and maybe I’ll find that they don’t feel loved by MeetingWizard, either!