Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Reconnecting with Meeting Invitees who Declined

As mentioned before, I really love the FREE online program MeetingWizard. Use it to identify meeting dates that could work for a group, to confirm meetings, create attendance rosters, and more. One feature it has is sending a meeting reminder to attendees. What I didn't realize until this week is that it also sends an email to those who indicated they could not attend. Here's the text:

"This is an automated reminder for the following meeting event: [details listed]

You have indicated that you are unavailable for this meeting event. If you wish to change your response, please e-mail the organizer. You may view more details by clicking the following link: [link to original meeting notice.]"

As a result, three people who had initially indicated conflicts with meetings this week responded their plans changed and emailed they can now attend.

In the past I've assumed if someone says they can't attend that it made sense to stop sending meeting reminders. It may make sense to check in with those indicating they can't attend a meeting with their own special message 2-3 days before the meeting, like MeetingWizard. I don't think sending the same message to all attendees is as effective as this.

1 comment:

Adriana B. said...

What MeetingWizard does makes a lot of sense, and it also highlights something that software applications should be doing more frequently: taking advantage of how easy it is to automate different scenarios (in this case, depending on the initial answer, the system can easily schedule the appropriate reminder/notification, as opposed to sending the same reminder to everyone, which I agree is not as effective as using customized messages).