3 Ways to Mastering the Calendar Invite for Virtual Orgs

One of the things that the past year has taught us is how essential our calendars are to virtual living. 

Our calendars tell us where to be at any given time. 

The problem is... if you're someone who has to manage various groups/subgroups for a virtual organization, managing the calendar is a nightmare. 

Either you're manually typing out invitee emails into google calendar, or you're copying and pasting email addresses from a spreadsheet.  

Fortunately, there's a better way. 

This post covers 3-possible solutions to making it easier to manage your calendar:

Option 1: Leverage the Zoom Extention

It can be a huge pain to create events on Zoom and then switch back and forth between Google Calendar to paste the conferencing information into a calendar invite. 

The Zoom Chrome extension makes this slightly more manageable with the ability to generate meeting information automatically. 

Cons:

• Still need to input email invites manually
• Can't modify zoom host or fine-tune zoom event settings
• Limited capabilities in terms of notifications and reminders

Option 2: Internal Mailing Lists

The next step you can take to leverage internal mailing lists with a tool like Google calendar. 

You can essentially bucket users into various mailing lists and send out calendar invites accordingly. 

Cons

• Lists can go stale
• Difficult to update individual memberships
• Calendar invites aren't always updated with membership changes

Option 3: Using a tool like Virtually

If you're an organization with 100+ members and hosting a large volume of Zoom events, investing in a tool like Virtually may make sense. 

Virtually allows you to upload your student roster and dynamically send calendar invites to any group or subgroup. 

It integrates with Google Calendar, Zoom, and Slack. Not only can you manage calendar invites, but you can send notifications through email and Slack. 

Lastly, you even get access to analytics for your Zoom events, including attendance and engagement trends. 

The best part is that any changes in your membership/roster automatically reflect within the calendar, and there's never a need to copy/paste. 

Cons

• Still no support for calendars other than google at this time
• Updating memberships can be tedious depending on your organization



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