Share the gift of Doodle this holiday season – for FREE!

Finding a common meeting day and time which can work with the busy calendars of diverse people from different organizations can be VERY challenging. When you add the complication of people in different time zones, this coordination process can become even more difficult.

photo credit: zpeckler

As much as the vendors of Microsoft Outlook and other calendaring / organizational software platforms would like everyone in the world to standardize on THEIR platform, the fact is people haven’t and are NOT going to do this. We need simple tools that can serve as “common denominators” for scheduling challenges.

Enter Doodle.com.

Doodle permits anyone to quickly and easily create a simple text poll to find out common dates and times when different people can meet, or answer a basic text poll question. I LOVE Doodle. Regardless of the computer platform or computing literacy level of someone, chances are they will immediately understand and appreciate the utility as well as power of Doodle when they’ve seen it demonstrated once. This is a scheduling poll for an upcoming meeting I’ll be attending next week. Date/time blocks which are good for people are shown in green, blocks which will not work are shown in red. This poll format is easy to setup, use and interpret.

Out of thousands of nominations and votes, Doodle won the “Blogger’s Choice Open Web Award” in the “Places & Events” category. Congrats to Doodle!

Got an upcoming meeting to schedule? Have a question you need to pose to a group of people? Don’t just email them the question and condemn everyone on the distribution list to a CCed copy of their replies! Instead, send a text link via a free Doodle poll. Then anyone who wants to check the status of the poll can simply view it themselves, without having more clutter in their inbox.

Become an activist for reducing email inbox clutter by using and sharing Doodle this holiday season and in the new year to come! 🙂

Thanks to Darren Kuropatwa for introducing me to Doodle many months ago as we begin gearing up for the 2008 K-12 Online Conference!

Technorati Tags:
doodle, calendar, poll, schedule, web2, technology