At the beginning of the season, it can seem like there’s a never-ending pile of things to organize and schedule in order to get our groups off the ground. Thankfully, we can take audition scheduling off the list using a free online scheduling tool called Doodle. Designed to allow groups of people to remotely agree on a meeting time, with one small step it becomes ideal for things like audition schedules when you want to offer available times to multiple people. Best of all, it requires no registration or accounts and sets up in seconds. If you have the e-mail address of everyone
When you go to Doodle (No, I can’t say it with a straight face, either), you can schedule an event and enter title, location, description and your info. It will then ask you to enter the days and times which you would like to propose. If we were scheduling a meeting, we’d enter all the times in which we were available and ask participants to choose. For auditions, we do the same thing– enter all the available slots. Hint: If you have the same times available on multiple days, enter the times in the first day, then hit “Copy and paste first row” to have all of the days filled with the same times.
We do our magic in the next screen, the settings page. Instead of choosing “Basic Poll,” open up the settings box. This gives you a couple of options useful to us. First, the key: “Limit the number of participants per option.” If you limit each time slot for one participant, it will disappear from the list as soon as someone chooses it. I would also choose two other options: “Participants can only choose one option,” which will only let someone choose one slot, and “Hidden poll,” which prevents the respondant’s name from showing up for other users. You will still see all the respondants, of course.
You now have a poll ready to distribute. Whenever somebody enters a time, Doodle will send you an update via e-mail to let you know. You’ll also get a link via mail that you can use to view the poll at any particular time. You can have Doodle send the e-mails to your candidates, you can send it directly, or if you have a choir page, blog, wiki (or Twitter!), you can post the link for all of your candidates to enter, taking it out of your hands directly.
All told, it’s a quick and easy way to automate the audition process. Hopefully it helps you tame the organizational demands of a new season so you can get straight to the most important part– the art.
Are there other tools that you use to schedule auditions or similar events? What do you use to keep your auditions organized?
David Topping says