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To help keep meeting schedules on track and events running smoothly, it’s essential for meeting planners to prioritize effective scheduling practices and invest in tools and processes that support organization and efficiency.

Without strategic scheduling, other dangers for planners include inefficient allocation of resources such as meeting rooms, audiovisual equipment and catering services, which can result in unnecessary expenses, underutilization of resources or conflicts over availability. There are a range of basic and some sophisticated scheduling tools available to planners to avoid rushed preparations, last-minute changes, and increased stress for both planners and participants.

Some of the basic options for scheduling meetings and events include well-known programs such as Excel and Google spreadsheets, which offer open access and can be cost-effective solutions. For example, planners can create a shared spreadsheet to track meeting dates, times, attendees and other relevant information. Both Excel and Google Sheets offer free templates that can be customized.

There are more robust apps and programs that have been utilized with success by planners such as Slack, which also offers scheduling capabilities. Integrations with apps like Google Calendar allow planners to schedule meetings directly within Slack channels, making it easy to coordinate with team members without switching between different platforms.

Rose Lanham, president for Players for Good Athlete Speakers Bureau in Atlanta, GA, which connects event planners with seasoned professional athlete speakers, says these more straightforward tools should not be overlooked.

“If you’re planning small event, sometimes a simple option makes sense. You want to track your expenses, who’s in charge of what jobs, and your attendees,” says Lanham. She also suggests planners should choose tools that either are already used by their company or organization, or tools that can be integrated with an already existing Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM).

“It’s helpful to consider existing software investments when selecting an event management system. If you work in a corporate setting, it’s likely the CTO has already invested heavily in a CRM solution, which typically has features for event planning that can be ‘unlocked’ and benefit all parties. Siebel Systems or Salesforce are two enterprise examples common in corporate settings.

Lanham believes it’s most efficient to leverage existing sales CRM software both financially and in order to track your attendees. When your sales team and management can immediately view client event attendance on one familiar platform, it’s efficient for all parties.

“It could track that these 700 people attended our event in Chicago and these 300 attended in New York. Now, we want to target them for our next Chicago event,” she explains.

For smaller events or smaller teams, Lanham suggests using Google tools, which are helpful for people on different teams to get a lot done with a shared spreadsheet.

She also offers some pre-preparation scheduling suggestions, such as checking with the CVBs where planners are considering hosting a meeting to first look at their existing calendar for what else is happening in that city at that time.

“If you’re looking to hold a large event in Chicago, check with the CVB. Do they have a competitor coming in holding their conference? Is there a client of yours that you’re going to collaborate with? Just knowing what else is going on, you can avoid double booking with someone in your industry.”

Scheduling Collaborations

One added benefit could also be collaborating with another similar organization in a city at the same time. “We often did that with conference hotels where we had 1,000 people and we’d always asked who was coming before us and after us. And if I was working in Silicon Valley, there were many tech companies coming to Palm Springs or San Diego; we were all going the same places. Then you could ask, ‘Hey, could we collaborate? Maybe you hire the same band, and they play for one group on Wednesday night and the other group on Thursday night?”

While Lanham believes simple works for helping multiple people communicate in a concise way, in a larger setting where there are multiple layers of management, planners need to have more insight and a robust system. “I would just go back to that first inquiry about what systems have already been invested in,” she says. “Are there features to add to the system that the event planner could use?”

Without a structured system for scheduling and tracking meetings, planners may struggle to monitor progress, track attendance, or evaluate the effectiveness of meetings over time, making it a challenge to identify areas for improvement and optimize scheduling practices.

There are specific attributes planners can look for in deciding on a collaboration tool, such as effective customizable features. Rather than use a program the planner has always used, it’s important to make sure the planning tool caters to the specific needs of the event since each one is different. An example could be whether the tool offers easy viewing of upcoming tasks and deadlines, or whether the tool gives a calendar view for upcoming deadlines or different views to see upcoming tasks.

The tool should be able to integrate with other systems already being used for the event. For example, if the vendor updates the budget on another tool, it should reflect in the planner’s tool. Or if the speaker updates their notes in Google Docs, there should be a Google Apps integration so that changes are always in sync. Another requirement would be for the event planning software to provide templates to get the process started, rather than having to create everything from scratch.

More Savvy Scheduling Tools

One option for meeting professionals is Sprintful, appointment scheduling software that integrates with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and numerous other services. The program offers branding, which can work with large teams and handle more complex processes. Some features include customizing group emails with a specific domain name, automated scheduling, calendar embedding, custom notifications, automated alerts, custom branding and a custom booking page.

Airtable is a flexible database tool that can be used for various purposes, including scheduling. You can create custom calendars and schedules, track RSVPs, and collaborate with team members.

Project management tools like Trello, Monday.com, Basecamp or Asana can also help keep track of meeting schedules, tasks and deadlines. These platforms offer free versions with basic features that can be sufficient for smaller teams or projects.

Asana helps planners organize work into a Kanban board, a visual tool that gives an overview of the current work status and simplifies team communication. Asana can also display tasks in a vertical to-do list format, and view timelines in an easy-to-use Gantt chart format, which are bar charts that show what has to be done and when, very useful for optimizing and visualizing content.

Different groups can work together on projects and tasks using Asana Workspaces. Asana allows planners to add custom fields to add details to the event workflow such as the priority of certain tasks, what stage they are in of completion and related costs.

Trello is used by many teams for event planning, tasks and management. Some top features include task cards where planners can add attachments, documents, images, and other data to collaborate with other teams and external vendors. Trello also has special features like a Butler that lets planners create commands to automate event management tasks including deadlines.

Karen Brown, founder and principal for Members Inc., uses Trello for organizing webinars, as well as meetings and events.

“We have a Trello board,” Brown says. “If something changes, then everybody gets notified on the Trello board immediately. We have deadlines that are set up in Trello that say, ‘this deadline hasn’t been met.’ It sends out notifications to everybody that’s on the Trello board letting everyone know, ‘this action hasn’t been done.’”

Before using Trello, Brown and her team were communicating by email, WhatsApp and text message. “We needed to find one method of communicating about specific things because it’s really hard to backtrack and see where we went off the rails. If I have a text message from somebody saying, ‘Oh, by the way, the CSM came by and said that you’re not allowed to have lanterns out on the deck after 7 p.m., so therefore I’ve killed the lanterns,’ but that message is only a text message to me, and it doesn’t get out to the other 13 people, then it doesn’t work. We needed a way of consolidating all our information.”

When Brown uses Trello for a meeting, the entire team has access to the board. “When something gets moved around or there’s a change in the schedule, the entire team will get notified. There was a perfect example this morning. We changed our arrival date for the conference that’s coming up in May, so I changed the arrival date on the Trello board and the notification went out to everybody that’s on the Trello card that says, ‘Arrival Date.’”

“I’ve got an overall master list of everything that has to happen at the conference. And then I can automate it to create cards on the timeline board so that for instance, if I’m setting up a meeting with our exhibition services company onsite the day before the conference is supposed to start, I’ll set that up on the master board and then make a copy of that card so that when we’re onsite, we’re looking at the timeline board that shows you everything.”

Brown also benefits from the flexibility in ways information can be viewed with Trello. “You can look at the board and it looks like a bulletin board or you can look at it in calendar or in a table view. There’s also a Gantt view, and there’s all these power ups that you can buy or add on. This is just like the master overview way of looking at everything.”

ClickUp is another popular project management software that tracks a project’s status all in one place. The customizable program tracks items such as the overall event budget, how much has been spent, remaining budget and payment status.

Event organizers can use ClickUp for seating chart templates, which can help keep attendee data organized. It also offers itinerary templates to document an event’s details that can be used for any type of event. The templates can help organize hotel bookings, flights, transportation and travel schedules, while also keeping track of the event’s budget.

ClickUp also offers an AI-powered assistant, ClickUp AI, which helps with writing event plans and creating content for the event. ClickUp Goals is another feature that helps measure trackable goals and automate the process of tracking their progress.

One of the main advantages of using savvy scheduling tools is that they can save event professionals a lot of time and money by helping them keep everything and everyone on track and by automating and simplifying communications — having all their team members and stakeholders on the same page.

More importantly, they do what good event tech tools do: allow professionals to spend more time and money on more important tasks — budgeting, venue selection and event promotion — which all contribute to meeting the end goal of driving attendance and creating memorable experiences for everyone. | AC&F |