Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

It’s Friday afternoon, well after reminders were sent and bulletins were printed, and you get the dreaded email: “I can’t serve this Sunday.” And no substitute has been arranged either. Similarly, your Budget Committee is meeting with the Buildings and Grounds Committee next Tuesday and unexpectedly one person can’t make it – and then three more people also back out. 

From parishes small to large, deanery to diocesan events, scheduling can sometimes feel as complicated as being an air traffic controller.

Having served as an administrator and communicator in a parish, I am all too familiar with these dreaded last minute changes that make us scramble to get our schedules back in working order. Thankfully, there is a great tool called Doodle, www.doodle.com, that is both easy and free to use and can help make us more readily adaptable to rapid or last minute changes in schedules.

In this post I will explain using Doodle for meetings. In a following post, I will write about how to use Doodle for scheduling liturgical ministries. For those of you already using Doodle for meetings, this post will contain information you are already familiar with, but consider reading the next post on how to use it for liturgical schedules.

How it works

The meeting organizer selects “Schedule an event” in Doodle, writes in the title (name of the meeting), and selects the prospective dates and times the meeting would start. When finished, Doodle will provide a web link. Copy and paste this link into an email that you will send to those who will be attending. In your email, ask that they click on the link, enter their name on the Doodle page, and select which dates they are available to meet. As people enter their availability, you end up with a spreadsheet showing green boxes for when people are available and red boxes for when they are not. To make things even simpler, Doodle tallies the total number of people available for a date and time and highlights those when everyone can make it.

Why this is an advantage

Doodle helps take some of the leg work out of compiling availability, which can get particularly complex for meetings with multiple options of dates and times. Most importantly, using Doodle saves everyone from having to start from scratch when there needs to be a change. With Doodle, you likely already know if there were other dates that worked, or you can go back and check the chart to see what works.

Know your people and be flexible

Remember that this is putting a new system into place and you’re asking people to change their routines. Be patient and allow time to teach and integrate a new system. If you have members who are not online at all, reach out to them to make arrangements to add their availability to the calendar for them and consider printing and mailing a hard copy of the availability for the group.

I learned of this resource from a fellow lay administrator and have always relied on my colleagues for great advice. What tools or resources have you used in your parish to be more adaptable to 21st century realities and run more smoothly? Share yours in the comments or click on Your Turn to post your tool or resource.