I’ve come across a frequently asked question in my support conversations recently that inspired me to make a little how-to on a workaround I recommend on the regular that answers the question–
How can I add additional meeting attendees to existing booked one-on-one meetings?
While yes, adding your guests directly to the calendar event in your external calendar is a perfectly good solution to loop additional guests to your meetings, there are a couple of drawbacks to this method:
Guests added in this way will not be included in any Calendly reminders or Workflows.
They are kicked from the meeting if it happens to be rescheduled.
This isn’t ideal, so I wanted to drop a super helpful workaround I’ve found for this that allows you to add guests to one-on-one meetings within the Calendly loop.
Problem: At this time, Calendly does not offer a function to “Add Guests” to an existing booked meeting directly from the Meetings page.
Solution: Using the “Reschedule” function, you can access the “Add Guests” feature for a booked one-on-one or collective event.
By “rescheduling” the event for the same date/time as the original booking, you can add your additional guests when going through the reschedule flow. You can also include a reschedulenote to your invitees clarifying the reason for the “reschedule”.
Who Can Use This?
Calendly’s “Add Guests” feature is available to users on all plans, from Free to Enterprise.
To learn about the features in each plan, feel free to check out our pricing page!
Step-By-Step Instructions
From your Meetings page in Calendly, click the booked event you wish to add guests to and select “Reschedule”.
If you are not moving the date/time of the meeting, select the booked invitee’s “former time” as indicated on the left hand side of the reschedule page.
Select “Add Guests” beneath where your existing invitee’s email will pre-populate. Note: I have removed the original invitee’s email from the “Email” field for this screenshot.
Add the email addresses of up to 10 guests you wish to add to the meeting under “Guest Email(s)”.
You can then add a reschedule note to provide clarification to your invitees that the meeting time is not rescheduled, but that you are simply adding more people to the meeting, and then click “Update Event”.
You will then be able to see your new additional guests from the event details in your Meetings page, as shown here.
I hope this workaround is helpful! As always, please please always feel welcome to let us know any questions you have, or any cool ways you’ve found to use Calendly!
Cheers!
Sam
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Hello Sam,
Thanks for your tips on this challenge.
I am attempting to schedule two people. (parents doing divorce mediator) into the same appointment slot. I am thinking that a group with two slots is the best way.
Perhaps on parent picks a meeting - can they send that link to other parent.
I want both parents to have signed up before the meeting is confirmed.
Can they both get reminders or prompts. ec. “your co-parent has selected this time... sign up or decline. If they chose one, they get a confirmation and reminders. If they decline how would they proceed?
Thanks for any help you can offer.
Cliff Leonardi
Mediator
Hey there @Cliff40786 - great questions, here! Firstly, check out our New User Guide - it’ll def prove helpful as you get used to the platform!
At this time there is not going to be a perfect way to make this happen. While, yes, you can absolutely use a Group Event Type to allow for two invitees per time slot (I suggest this, for your use case), you would not be able to set up the message to a single co-parent once the first co-parent has signed up. This is because, while you could figuratively use Workflows to send out a followup email to the first parent as soon as they book prompting them to send the link to the second parent, workflows applied to an event apply to all invitees that book that event, meaning the second parent would get the same “please send this link to your co-parent” message. Likewise, a message cannot be fired off before booking, so a prompt to sign up because the first parent signed up would not be possible (via Calendly) either.
What might work for you is the consideration of integrating with a third party CRM like Zapier, HubSpot or something else. If you integrate with Zapier, for example, you can be notified of each new booking and have that info pulled into a spreadsheet. You can then set yourself up to send out emails (outside of Calendly) with these prompts via HubSpot or another service.
Read more about our integrations, here:
I also want to point out that the moment an invitee books with you, that meeting is confirmed. There is no way to make it so that the meeting is not confirmed until both parties book. Likewise - once a parent books one time slot and the other remains open, that second time slot could be booked by anyone else - it will remain open on your booking page. For this reason, I’d consider making your group event secret and sending the link out to parents directly with specific dates available to them. You can do this by using our Customize Once and Share feature and sending to both parents with one date open for them, for example.
It might be easier, for all of these reasons, to use a one-on-one event type with “add additional guests” enabled. This way one parent can sign up for their time slot, include the email address for the second parent, and both are confirmed at one time - and nobody else can accidentally book into the time slot before the second parent.
I hope this helps!
Thanks for your thoughtful response!
Cliff
When I try to reschedule a meeting, it doesn’t show the Former time when I select the same day the meeting is arranged for. How do I select the same time as the meeting is scheduled for?
Here is a screen shot, you can see the Former time is not an option available when I try to reschedule.
Here is a screen shot, you can see the Former time is not an option available when I try to reschedule.
Hey there @Neal71508! Great question.
If you are rescheduling the meeting and not first canceling it, that time is not going to appear as available because it is still currently booked!
You would first need to cancel the meeting and then reschedule it if you want to use the same time slot.
I hope this helps!
hi @Kelsi at Calendly . I am looking for a similar solution, but for group events where participants are paying to attend.
So for example, I provide a service where my customers meet with me for 4 hours per month. If they need to reschedule to the same type of meeting (like a 2 hour group meeting to another 2 hour group meeting) then I don’t typically have an issue. However if they are needing to switch to a different type of meeting (2, 1-hour meetings instead of the 2 hour group meeting they originally paid for and scheduled) then I typically end up just adding them to the calendar invite - which like you said above, isn’t ideal.
I would love to have the option to administratively add attendees to a scheduled event. Is this something Calendly is working on? Or do you have other suggestions of a better way to do this?
TIA.
Hi bfelderhoff. Unfortunately there is no way to for an invitee to reschedule themselves for a different scheduled meeting or event type other than what they originally booked. This extends to every version of switching between individual events as well as event types.
Calendly is a scheduling platform that essentially sits on top of your connected personal calendar. When an invitee schedules with you, the event is automatically published to your personal calendar and appears on your Calendly Home page under Meetings. Once an event is on your calendar, Calendly cannot access or change it, so once an invitee books with you those settings are locked into place. Any changes that are needed to individual meetings will need to be made on your calendar itself. We do get feedback about this a lot and it doesn’t go unheard!
@Sean Marlin Thanks for your reply! I get that there is probably a lot that goes into something like this, but if it helps, I’d love to be a part of helping to build this out. I can envision on the scheduled events page, a space to add people, where we can reschedule/cancel/mark attendees as no-show, etc.
Also, I really love Calendly. It has revolutionized my life and I tell everyone about it.
@bfelderhoff There’s definitely a lot that goes into things like this, but innovative and creative customers like yourself definitely help!
I’m tagging in @SchedulingSteve here to see if he has any additional thoughts or wants any more context/feedback.
Thank you!
Thanks for the guideance and workaround suggestions. I do hope Calendly adds the capability to add guests to an existing meeting as I imagine this is a frequent need. The workarounds aren’t an option as we wouldn’t want to confuse the guests by canceling and/or rescheduling the event. Getting the original timeslots booked is hard enough. Further, the fact that the original timeslot is unavailable unless cancelled is a non-starter. Fair to say, the only viable option at this point is to exit the Calendly UI and add the guest directly on the external calendar event. Again, add a vote to remedy this issue ASAP. Thanks!
