[nfbmi-talk] FW: [NFBAffiliatePresidents] Best Practices for Creating Meeting Invitations & Proposed Meeting Times

[Fred wurtzel]

A lot of good ideas, here and timesaving, too.

-----Original Message-----
From: nfbaffiliatepresidents-bounces at nfbnet.org
[mailto:nfbaffiliatepresidents-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Mika
Pyyhkala
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2012 2:42 PM
To: NFB Affiliate Presidents List
Subject: [NFBAffiliatePresidents] Best Practices for Creating Meeting
Invitations & Proposed Meeting Times

Hi,

I'm involved in a number of NFB and external projects, and I notice a lot of
the time, meeting proposals are just being sent via simple emails that are
not technically calendar invitations.  This results in the meeting not being
automatically populated in ones Exchange, Google, or other automated
calendar software which would display on a mobile device calendar such as
the iPhone. Its ok for a few meetings, but once ones calendar builds up, the
chance increases that something will be missed or forgotten.

If you have a Google calendar you can create "real," meeting invitations
which when received by a recipient will get added to their calendar.  Also
if you are in an organization using Microsoft Exchange (typically with
Outlook) you can create meeting invitations that are coded as calendar
invitations that would populate on a mobile device or a desktop calendar.

Another issue that comes up is a group needs to meet, and needs to find a
suitable time when the most number of people can attend the meeting.  Again,
a meeting might also be a conference call or some such virtual mechanism.
The "old school way," is to send out emails where people reply with
different times that they can meet, perhaps mixed in with some phone calls
and voicemails.  Again, if its only 2 or 3 people, it may not be too bad,
but add in even a handful more and you can easily generate 15 to 20 emails
where people talk about the different times they can or can't meet.

A more interesting way is to use tools like
http://www.meetingwizard.com
or parts of (I say parts due to accessibility reason)
http://doodle.com
Specifically on Doodle the polls should be accessible, but not the Meet Me
page.

I'm also thinking a tool like Doodle or Meeting Wizard could be used to
simplify and automate a task like scheduling scholarship interviews either
for national or state scholarships.  Washington seminar appointments are
another possibility that comes to mind, although there may be an issue where
people don't respond to the request if its only sent by email by the various
House/Senate offices.

Also a shared Google calendar or perhaps something in Drupal may be another
way to document the meetings say an affiliate has or participates in in
order to show program activity and participation.

I'm curious if any of you have found good scheduling automation tools, or if
you've encountered successes or challenges in trying to move away from a lot
of voicemails and emails?

I just scheduled our first board meeting in Massachusetts using a Google
calendar invitation rather than a plain email, and have used this also for a
number of recent student seminar conference calls.

Also Tony Olivero has relayed some information on Twitter where by the 2012
convention agenda has been set up in an electronic calendar file that can be
imported in to ones Google calendar or other calendar tool.  I have not
looked at this yet, but plan too.  The beauty of this is you could be
standing in the coffee shop of the Hilton Anatole and just swipe on your
iPhone to for example  see what is going on at 11:00am on any given day
either by speech or refreshable Braille.

I for instance contacted Doodle about their Meet Me function not working,
and they suggested a work around using the poll function, but they did not
yet give an estimate when accessibility would be added to the meet me
function.  They did seem more cognizant of accessibility than your average
web shop, but it sounded as if the meet me function needed possibly a
re-write to make it work with screen readers.

Best,
Mika in Massachusetts








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