Association Management Monday: Doodle.com

Every Monday I will be sharing a tip or trick I use to make my life a little easier.

Working with a national professional association, my volunteer leaders are spread across the country, which means scheduling a conference call can be a torturous affair. For the past few years, this dreaded task has become much easier thanks to a website called doodle.com.

Doodle.com is a free service that allows you to create a quick and easy survey of meeting times which can be sent to the people you are trying to schedule. The service does not require registration and can adjust for time-zones.

Making a survey takes less then five minutes. Simply name your survey, select the days you wish to have the call, pick the times and share the link generated with your call participants. If you enter an email you will be notified each time a person completes the survey. Results are tabulated in a red/green chart that makes reading which day and time is the best very easy.

Tips

• Make sure you enter an email on the first screen to enable notification of when people complete a survey. If you do not do this you will need to make sure you copy the administration url in a safe place, since this will be the only way to view the results (I have used this service for over two years have not received any spam email from them).
• Although the option of having doodle send survey invitations to participants is available, I have had trouble with those invites getting stuck in spam filters. To be safe I always copy the participant url into an email I send myself.
• If you have people in different timezones make sure to enable time-zone support in step two. By default it is turned off.
• Try to keep your options to less than ten. More then that and the survey gets a tad cumbersome to complete.

Final Impression

If you are looking for a quick and easy way to schedule a meeting or conference call, doodle.com fits the bill. The smooth, bare-bones interface makes it easy to setup a survey in minutes and time-zone support takes the hassle out of making sure everyone is on the same page. This tool will transform your 30 chain email string into a simple to read results page.