How many emails did you send last week trying to coordinate meetings? Probably way more than you’d like to. Face-to-face and online, internal or external, we want to make meeting bookings and the coordination process as easy as possible for you.

And then, while in the meeting, we need to allow for interactive, creative and open flow of ideas and discussion.

The right software for meetings can help you save time by automating booking and adding interactivity to the meeting process. It takes the hassle away from scheduling meetings, allowing members to define their availability, remove the risk of double booking a time slot, and eliminate the back-and-forths.

We’ve prepared a list of our favorite meeting scheduling tools to get you up, running and managing meetings like a pro in no time.

 

Calendly

Back and forth emails trying to find a mutually convenient time to meet is time-consuming and frustrating. Calendly eliminates this by helping your team and members easily book their availabilities in your calendar.

You can easily integrate Calendly calendar to your website to make external meeting booking process easy and welcoming. Calendly can be synchronised with the calendar of your choice and you can also pre-plan time slots for different activities. For example, you can schedule Member Welcome and Onboarding calls in afternoons for your membership team.

Here’s what you can do with one of the world’s most popular digital calendar tools:

Integrations

Calendly securely integrates with Google, Outlook, iCloud, and Office 365 calendars. You can connect up to six calendars, and Calendly checks for availability to ensure that you’re never double-booked. You can also connect Zoom to your account for Calendly video meetings, with video conference details automatically saved to your Calendly event.

Ability to set meeting preferences

A variety of preference settings allows you to take ownership of your scheduling experience. You can cap the number of meetings per day and decide how much time you need between meetings.

Multiple meeting types

Calendly gives you the option to automatically distribute meetings to your team members based on factors like priority, availability, and equity. Allow people to schedule one-on-one time with you or schedule a time with multiple team members at once.

Time zone intelligence

Scheduling meetings with people in multiple time zones sometimes presents a challenge. Calendly seamlessly resolves this issue, detecting time zones for all meeting attendees without the back and forth. People who schedule meetings for you will see your availability in their own time zone.

Metrics

Easily track campaign scheduling activity, invitee engagement, and attendance with Calendly’s built-in metrics and reporting. The Calendly app is also available for mobile so that you can check on important metrics on the go.

Automated workflows

Calendly’s newest feature, “Workflows,” allows you to automate text messages when emails are booked, email reminders, thank-you emails, requests for follow-up meetings, feedback surveys, and more. If there’s another workflow you’d like to add, Calendly lets you create your own.

 

Doodle

If you need to coordinate a big group of people and choose the time that would be convenient for most of them, use Doodle. The main benefit of Doodle is that it helps simplify the processes of appointment setting and scheduling. As a bonus, it’s free.

 

Here are more of its benefits:

Dashboard 

With a free account you can track all the polls you create and participate in. Rather than trying to manage all of your polls with just the links in your inbox, you can access everything from one convenient dashboard. No need to worry about losing an admin link and trying to recover it.   

Interface

Doodle has a friendly interface and the right options to make planning simple for everyone. It’s also one of the few meeting schedulers with mobile apps for both Android and iOS. The mobile app is straightforward and intuitive, making this an ideal candidate for on-the-go meeting scheduling.

Polling

At its core, Doodle is a polling app, but it’s specifically for choosing times and dates. When you set up a poll, you don’t have to limit people to replying to each suggestion with only a yes or no. You can invite people to your poll by email or generate a link to a public URL and share it however you like.

Calendar integration 

When you connect your calendar to your Doodle account you’ll be able to see your appointments when you create or participate in polls. Never worry about a conflict or a double booking again. With a calendar connection, you can also add your events to your calendar automatically. Google Calendar, Microsoft Office 365, and Outlook are supported, and Slack and Zoom integrations are also included.

 

MURAL

MURAL is a virtual tool that enables innovative teams to collaborate visually and brainstorm solutions to their problems or challenges. Being able to create simple but comprehensive diagrams and throw ideas down in a virtual, collaborative space are some of the top reasons innovative teams cite loving this tool.

 

Here are some of the other reasons why:

Facilitator Superpowers

One of the elements we love is named “Facilitator Superpowers”, which offers tools well suited to professional facilitators and team leaders. These include the ability to “summon” everyone to a particular area of the Mural, set a timer and conduct a “dot voting” style session where participants vote on their favourite ideas.

Whiteboard areas

The MURAL canvas can house multiple whiteboard areas, similar to Photoshop artboards, that you can rearrange and resize as needed. On each whiteboard, you can go with the standard blank white background, or choose from a variety of templates to add pre-built grids and content boxes for some additional structure.

Multiple rooms

MURAL is particularly strong as a team tool, letting you create multiple “rooms” for your whiteboards, each with different permissions to limit access. You might have one room for your design team, one for your marketing team, and so on. You could also create rooms that correspond to various projects.

Feedback

It can be tough to share candid feedback in remote team meetings. That’s why we love MURAL’s timed voting session, where you can allot a number of votes to each collaborator. To vote, click on an object on your whiteboard. Every vote is anonymous and tallied automatically.

Google Meets

We don’t think Zoom needs an introduction, however, there are a few very attractive alternatives.

While Zoom has lots of great features, it has several flaws. For example, Zoom’s free platform only allows meetings for 40 minutes, which may hinder conversations on important topics.

 

Google Meet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While we don’t think Zoom needs an introduction, we believe Google Meet software is unfairly underused.

Google Meet, part of Google Workplace, is a video conferencing software aimed at business users who can tap straight into Meet. Guests can join directly from a Calendar event, email invite, or Gmail.

 

What is it useful for?

• The basic version is free for up to 100 users to meet for a maximum of one hour, while the top Enterprise tier allows 250 attendees and 300 hours (plus 100,000 viewers for live streaming).
• Attractive features include the familiar Google interface and top-notch security features similar to those offered by Glip by RingCentral, which integrates seamlessly with Google Workspace.
• Screen sharing, adjustable layouts, and live captions are available even in the free tier, along with custom backgrounds and a grid view. Paid plans allow video meetings to be recorded to Google Drive, while premium customers can enjoy low-light mode and noise cancellation.