How to use Calendly Meeting Polls (Tutorial)

Want to schedule a meeting in Calendly with multiple people? Why not give them a few options and let them vote for the best time. In this video, Scott Friesen shows you how to set up and share meeting polls in Calendly so can save the back and forth and schedule your next meeting with ease.

Transcript:
Calendly is a great tool when you're trying to set up a meeting with one other individual. But what if you're trying to set up something with a group of people, with a variety of different schedules? Well in this video, I'm going to show you how to use a new feature called Meeting Polls. And the great thing is, it's free for everyone. So whether you use a paid version or the free version of Calendly, you can use Meeting Polls as well. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more done and enjoy less stress. And if you're already a Calendly user, you're very used to sharing your Calendly scheduling link. Or maybe the specific link for a particular meeting. But recently, Calendly has introduced something called a Meeting Poll. And this allows others to vote on times which you have provided. And then you get to select which is going to be the best for everyone. So all you need to do when you're in your Calendly dashboard is select this Create button in the top right hand corner. And then select Meeting Poll. And what's going to happen, it's going to open up a preview of your existing calendar, or the calendars that you've chosen to overlay within your Calendly account. Now in this example I just have a few different commitments, mainly lunch. But what the idea is here is that I get to specify on what others can vote on. So the first thing that you're going to want to do, is come over here to the left hand side and identify the duration of that meeting. So in this case, I'm going to select one hour. And then if I have other types of options, in terms of my working hours. In this particular account, I only have one set of default hours. But maybe you have some other setup, you can make that selection here as well. Now moving over to the calendar. Now I'm going to select what's going to be available. Now I can either click these one hour blocks. So I can say, well maybe Wednesday in the morning at that time. Or maybe Wednesday later in the afternoon. But if I want to, I can also click and drag. So if I want to make all of Thursday morning available, I can do so just hold down my cursor. And then drag it to the desired time. And let's maybe give them one more option. Let's say a Friday, maybe just before lunchtime. You'll notice here, in the bottom right hand corner, you have a maximum of 20 different times selected. So I think you'll probably never need that many. That might be almost too many for people to vote on. But at least it gives you that option, it lets you know what that limit is here. And if you click on it, it'll also give you a bit of a summary. Because remember, we could go out further if we wanted to. We don't have to limit ourselves to just this particular week. This can also be a very helpful menu if we need to quickly remove something. Maybe I want to remove this 10 o'clock time, for example, I can do so from this menu. Once everything is set and you've got the selections that you want to allow others to vote on, we just need to select this Next button. Now on the second screen we have the opportunity to give this meeting a few more details, including a meeting name. At the top, you can see your username, the length of the meeting. And we can see that we've selected six times on three days. If we need to review we can simply select this View Details, which will expand those selected times. And then we can hide them again. So in this case, I'm going to call this a team meeting. And then I can specify the location. So I can either choose one of the options down here below. In this case, I'm going to call it an in-person meeting. Just to keep things nice and simple. And we're going to meet at 123 Fake Street, which happens to be one of my favorite Simpson's references. Now down below, there's one other option here available to us. And that is if we want to reserve these times, such as putting placeholders on our calendar. Now this is an important decision to make. Because if we leave this unchecked, which is the default option, what that means is that other people may be able to book you with your Calendly link. So for example, if we consider the six times that we've listed here. Maybe others might book some of those times, if not most of those times, with our other Calendly links. So you may want to turn this on, which is going to block out or reserve those six times until you decide to select on which one is going to be that time. So for this example, I'm actually going to turn it on, just so you can see how that looks and feels. So I'm going to say, publish meeting poll. And that's going to bring us to the last part of this three step process. And here, we're going to receive our unique link. If we want to, we can always change the backend of this meeting. But you know what? Team meeting, that's pretty simple. That's pretty straightforward. It also gives us the opportunity to preview this poll, which I actually like as well. So they're going to receive a menu very similar to, well, what they've experienced before in the past like any other Calendly menu. And they can choose the time that they want. I'm going to hide that preview. And what I'm going to do is select Copy link. Now I can include this link in an email, in Slack, in text messaging. However I want to communicate this out to the team, I can send it to them directly. Now because we selected the option to put placeholders on our calendar, I just wanted to show you what that's going to look like. Here I am within my personal Google Calendar. And you can see I've got these reserved for team meetings listed for all of the times that I made available. Now remember, we're only seeing this, this is only being placed on our calendar because we chose that option. If we decided to not toggle that option, none of these placeholders would be visible. Remember, these aren't meetings that are actually happening. But these are just temporary placeholders, until we actually confirm. Now that we're finished creating our Meeting Poll, let's take a look at what recipients are going to experience. I've just pasted this in a new Incognito window. So this is what I would see if I was to receive that link. And it looks very similar to a regular Calendly schedule display. Now on the top left, you'll see that it says it's a Meeting Poll. And it's telling me, select all the times you are available to meet. So for this user, I'm going to say, well I can do 10:00 a.m. I can do 10:00 a.m. and I can do 11:00 a.m. So I can select as many or as little as I want. And then I'm going to select Next. What I need to do now is enter in my name. So I'm going to say I'm John Doe. And in this case, I'm going to add one of my sample email addresses and select Share Times. You will notice that we're not inviting people directly. As in, we couldn't prevent someone else from voting if they happened to get a hold of this particular link. But remember, they have to input their email address. So you're going to know exactly who they are, and who has voted. Now in order for you to keep track of who has voted and when they voted, Calendly will send you email notifications. So for example here, here it tells me that John Doe has voted in this poll. And it tells me the times that he has selected. In fact, I could go ahead and book the meeting time directly from here. But I also sent this out to another sample test account. Here, it's giving me an update saying that two invitees have shared their preferences from the meeting times you offered. And what is helpful is that right within the email, it's telling me the top times. There have been two votes for this time, this is the 10:00 a.m. on February 9th. But I've only received one vote for some of these other available times. So if I'm comfortable with the results, I could simply select Book Meeting Time directly here from my email. But let's jump back into our Calendly dashboard and see how we access that information here. You're going to want to select Scheduled Events from your tab up top. And then come over and select Pending. And this is where you're going to find the event name of your Meeting Poll. So here it tells us when it was created. And if I go all the way over to the right, I want to select Details. So once again, we're going to see very similar, the same type of information that we saw in our email. And yes, we've got two votes for this time. But only one vote for these other times. So now that I've received all the votes that I've expected, I'm going to go ahead and select Book Meeting Time for the overall winner. I'm presented with this dialogue, which is going to include the names and the email addresses of those who voted. Now if there happens to be someone on here that I don't recognize, or who should not have been invited to this particular meeting, I can remove them directly from this window. I'm going to proceed and select Book Meeting. And now those invitations will automatically be sent out to those individuals. And if we jump back to my calendar, you will now see that all of those placeholders have been removed. And now I have that team meeting that we've agreed upon. So if you're looking for a quick, easy and free way to poll your participants, be sure to check out Meeting Polls right here within Calendly. Now I'd love to hear from you next. What are some of your favorite features, or features that you wish Calendly would add? Be sure to let me know in the description down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.