On Line Calendar Setting -- Doodle.com When is Good.net

Welcome to Planner's Pointer's Planners Pointers is a blog and talk cast to help beginning event planners with their event planning. Give them ideas on planning better events, books to read and websites to discover.

You get into your office and look at your to do list.  There are two items: 1. emailing your executive committee to schedule a date for a committee conference call.  2. Herding cats.  You decide on the second choice first because it's easier and less time consuming.

Take heart!  Help is on the way!  There are two, and probably more, ways of scheduling meetings, conference calls and other one to one meetings on the Internet.  One is Doodle.com and the other is WhenIsGood.net.

Here are the easy things to remember.  Both are free, but you can purchase subscriptions from the companies.  Both are easy to use, although WhenIsGood.net seem a little easier than Doodle.

Where they differ is that Doodle has you create an account, WhenIsGood doesn't, although you can.  By creating an account you can keep track of the scheduling that you have done.

Another way they differ slightly is WhenIsGood gives you a range of dates and times in which you simply select the times, while Doodle.com gives you a range of dates to select, but you have to do an additional step of adding the times.  Both gives you the option of creating the email response yourself with the information, or selecting to have them send the email.  If you choose to have the program send the email, both methods call up your email account with the information and you add the email addresses.  I like this choice myself since the url information will be correct and I don't have to cut and paste or worry about typos.  Doodle goes one step further and allows you to both Tweet and add the info to Facebook.

Doodle sends email updates when someone responds to the poll automatically, WhenIsGood has that as an option.  I like the updates since it keeps me informed about who has responded without logging in the website.

Give these tools a try! I like both of these website tools.  They save me time and frustration. 

Planner's Pointers is produced by me, Mary Pam Kilgore, of Kilgore Business Services, LLC  You may reach me through my website www.kilgorebusiness.com  You can find my blog at http://plannerspointers.blogspot.com/  You can reach me by phone at 412-260-4178.  Follow me on Twitter @marypam