Smart Meetings

Certain Schedules

Author: Mr. Smart E. Pants
November 2009

Mr. Smart E. Pants

Dear Mr. Smart E. Pants,
My company will be starting a new program next year that will require me to arrange appointments between roughly 150 attendees over a period of three days. It is hard enough to get the attendees to follow basic registration guidelines and my head is spinning at the thought of scheduling that many appointments. HELP!
—Jenny Kim, Dallas

Jenny, I can feel your pain. Setting up specific appointments between attendees can be a frustrating, time-consuming and complicated task. You have to take into consideration the length of appointments, breaks, spreading them out evenly and, god forbid, the dreaded double booking. Luckily there are options now that can make your new program a great success while relieving much of the stress on you.

My preferred tool for setting up appointments is part of Certain Events, a software solution created by Certain Software. Certain Events is an award-winning event management program that is easy to use, comprehensive and affordable. With Certain on your side, you will never have to worry about the double booking monster rearing its unorganized head.


Sample appointment schedule.

Setting up appointments in the software is a fairly easy task. At this point in your program, your attendees have already registered using another tool you provided so you have a complete list of event attendees. With a couple of clicks you can send out an e-mail to the entire group with instructions and a link that will take them to the appointment schedule. There they will see a list of all attendees, and when they click on an individual attendee they will instantly see all of the available appointments between them. They need to simply check the time they desire and send a request for appointment. There is also the option to send a message with the time request.

There is another view that allows the attendees to monitor and manage their appointments. Each available time slot is shown and the status of that slot is listed (accepted, requested, cancelled, pre-scheduled appointment, available or unavailable—the unavailable option lets attendees set aside time that they do not want to have appointments).
As the manager you can manipulate or override the schedules if needed. In situations where I have to make sure everyone has the same number of appointments, I always include a sentence in my original e-mail saying that they are selecting their preferred appointments but changes may need to be made. Some of your attendees might not follow the instructions, so you can override the previous option and schedule their appointments for them. You can also have the software set up your appointments for you based on your specified parameters.

I hope this helps you with your upcoming appointments. If you want to learn more, you can request a demo and check it out for yourself. As for getting the attendees to follow instructions, I wish you the best—we are all looking for that illusive solution.