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How do I use Calendly for community office hours sign up?

  • 24 July 2024
  • 4 replies
  • 31 views

I’m admin of a software community and we have a regular office-hours meeting. I’d like to use my Calendly (professional plan) to help set up the meeting.

 

The workflow I’d like is:

  • I create a meeting time (eg, last Wednesday of the month at 4pm) and with the meeting name and the call details (in this case, Google Meet)
  • I share a Calendly link with my community that people can then subscribe to, creating an event in their local calendar

So far, I’ve been using the Meeting Poll workflow with a single proposed time. This works broadly fine, but it has a couple of drawbacks:

  • I have to remember to convert the proposal into an actual meeting in the days before the event. I’d like for this time to be a firm time (ie, not a proposal) as soon as I create the time
  • it means that I have to balance doing it early enough (so that people know it’s actually happening) with doing it late enough to capture straggler who want to join (there’s always people who want to join, but don’t want to commit early for <reasons>). I’d like for people to be able to use the Calendly link to sign up until the meeting time.

I’ve needed this workflow quite a few times over the years that makes it feel like I’m missing something. Is there a way of achieving my desired workflow?

 

Thanks

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4 replies

Userlevel 3

Hey MrSimonEmms. I think I can save you some of the headache around stragglers. 

 

I would suggest using a Group event type for this kind of meeting. This should allow you to skip the whole using a poll with a single time to schedule people. If I’m understanding your needs correctly a group event should function the way you describe your desired workflow to be. You can book a meeting time and share that meeting link with your team. Here is a page all about group meetings →  Group Event Types - Help Center

 

And here is about scheduling multiple people to the same meeting → Multi-person scheduling options for teams

It does looks like I can do what I want with that, although it’s not very intuitive. It appears that I need to set a custom schedule to the specific date and time of the meeting.

What would be better is if we had the ability to create a group meeting and then have a booking page for that specific event. However, I can achieve what I want to here so thanks.

 

Hey @Sean Marlin, I’ve had course to set up my first event and it’s worked perfectly. Thanks.

Might I be so bold as to suggest that this workflow is actually publicised a bit better in the main docs as a usecase? I know of other community managers who’ve avoided using their Calendly because they’ve not been able to do this, but you’ve demonstrated that it is actually possible.

Userlevel 3

Glad I was able to help @MrSimonEmms! I’ll look into creating a blog post about this. Thank you for the suggestion!