Digital Calendar Sharing

[Alex2614]

Fellow FIRSTers,

A lot of teams out there utilize digital calendars such as Google Calendar. The beauty of these is that you can share these calendars with the people in your organization so everyone can see it, and it can even sync with your website.

What I want to know is if anybody out there has experience setting this kind of thing up with your team. I know there are a bunch of different ways to do it, and we are currently looking into streamlining our calendar organization. If you know of what works and what doesn't work, please comment below.

What we have right now. We have a Google Group for our "PR" team, including Chairman's deadlines, outreach events, etc. This also allows for a separate email list for this sub-team.

But we would like to streamline the process of sharing these calendars with everyone, but keep from cluttering everyone's Google accounts.

Thanks in advance for all the help!

[Rainydaymaker]

Skunk Works shares the calendar visibly by embedding it in our website. We share the ICAL address so people who choose to can view it in their calendar manager of choice. We put all the major items on that calendar. (Meetings, Provided Meals, Events, Major Deadlines, School Vacations)

For communication we use http://groupspaces.com/. It is much nicer than Google groups, but it appears to not be a thriving company. http://www.wildapricot.com/ is about to add ListServe functionality. Their platform has many advanced features. I hope to switch for next year. We extensively use ListServe functionality. Groupsapces handles that well. We have separate email addresses to communicate with Mentors, Design, Marketing teams, and many many more). Groupspaces also has event registration and follow-up communication features.

[221Sarahborg]

We have a team Gmail and I use the Google Calendar for the account with all of the things that we're doing. I have it on our team website, and it's through Wix so it has the Google Calendar app so it syncs from the calendar app to the website, and it's even accessible on mobile and people check it. We also have a mentor who has us on a group email for both students and other mentors for meetings or information we need.

You could even for a GroupMe. Not everyone has to have a smartphone to be in a group message, but it wouldn't hurt to install it. You could make sure that there's someone who would be responsible for sending reminders to everyone about a meeting or an activity you guys are doing.