In the Club
Find the best time for a club event
Trying to settle on a date for a club event often results in endless emails about who can make which dates. Using Doodle, you can propose dates to your members, then ask them to mark which they can make.
To get started, go to www.snipca. com/32989, then click the red ‘Create a Doodle’ button (top-right). Next, enter a title for your event and, optionally, a location and note, then click Continue.
Select proposed dates
You can now add your proposed dates to the calendar. Our photography club meeting is going to last one hour and we want to suggest it’s held at 8pm on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday in the first two weeks of November. We scroll the calendar to November using the arrow buttons at the top, then enter the first potential slot by highlighting 8pm to 9pm on Monday 4th November. We then repeat this for all the other potential dates. Don’t worry if you make a mistake - you can edit time slots by dragging them or delete them by clicking the cross icon in the top-right corner (see screenshot below). When you’re done, click Continue.
You now need to set your members’ voting rights. We recommend ticking the ‘Yes, no, if need be’ option, which means your members can mark dates as tentative. You also need to choose whether to make the voting public (the default) or private. If it’s public, your members will be able to make their decision based on the votes of others (possibly prompting them to clear their diary to make a date everyone else can). However, in a public poll, anyone can also edit the votes of others – either by accident or, hopefully less likely, an act of sabotage. Selecting the ‘Hidden poll’ option means only you will be able to see and edit votes. Note that features in the yellow Premium box on this page require a Doodle subscription – see box for more. Click Continue when you’re done.
If you don’t want to create a Doodle account, just enter your name and email address in the next screen, then click Finish (you’ll be emailed a link to view the poll). However, if you’re going to send regular polls, it’s worth clicking ‘Sign up’ to create a free account, which lets you monitor your polls from a dashboard.
Set voting rights
Send the poll
With the poll created, the final page lets you send out voting invites. Doodle subscribers can email links directly by selecting Email at the top, but we’re using the free version so are limited to emailing the link ourselves. Click Link at the top, click the blue Copy button, then paste it into an email to your members (they won’t need a Doodle account to vote – the link takes them directly to the poll).
Tell your members to click once on the dates they can make, or click twice to mark them as tentative. Although there’s nothing to stop people from casting multiple votes, they’ll need to enter their name each time, so you should be able to spot discrepancies.
Get the result
At any point, you can close the poll and find the most popular date. Access your poll by clicking the link in the email sent after you created it, then select ‘Choose final option’ at the top and scroll down to see the results. November 8th is identified as the best date in our example (see screenshot above), so someone will have to tell David Bailey he’s sitting this one out.