Scheduling is at the heart of any meeting, and schedules are at the heart of any meeting app. The more complicated your meeting schedule, the more likely it is that you’re going to be relying on an app to increase your attendees’ experience. Based on Guidebook usage, we found that event scheduling is one of the first actions a user takes after downloading a meeting app. In fact, most personal scheduling is done within the first 15 minutes of downloading an event’s app, regardless of how far in advance an attendee accesses it. Fun Fact: Out of all the features we offer at Guidebook, the schedule feature is also used 3x more than any other feature (which is why we’ve done an awesome revamp - check out more in our recent blog post). Knowing that the primary reason people are downloading your app is for the personalized schedule, what does that mean for for your meeting app? And how should that impact its content?

Schedules should be relevant

At large conferences, it’s expected of the event organizers to provide a large, diverse schedule of events to cover a variety of sub-interests. At an event of this nature, however, no one person is going to be able to attend every session. And many of your attendees are going to be broken up into groups with very specific categories of information they’ll be interested in consuming. Before meeting schedules went mobile, this meant a giant book of charts explaining each session, its meeting time, and location. Then attendees were left to either comb through and circle the sessions they wanted to attend or go off and make a chart of their own. Meeting apps have made it easier than ever to create event scheduling tracks for specific subject matters or types of content. It’s like having several mini-schedules that, as a whole, make up the master meeting schedule. Say that as an app user at my company’s annual meeting, I’m most interested in panels about marketing and event planning sessions. A schedule track for “Marketing” and one for “Event Planning” will make my personal event scheduling a breeze.

Meeting schedules should be personal

A large part of the joy of using a meeting app is that your personal  schedule can be hand-crafted with a few taps. It’s easy for a user to casually scroll through the master schedule or the schedule tracks, check descriptions and speaker bios, and add it to a custom schedule of their own. The process has become so simple that it eliminates the need for any sort of hunting through a paper program and doing silly things like creating a spreadsheet of your must-attend sessions. It also has the added advantage of linking to other related sections within your app – no flipping pages to find the speaker bio.

Choosing a meeting schedule app

Your event schedule will, no doubt, consistently change leading up to and during the event itself. You’re going to want something flexible and easy to use when it comes to updating your attendees. A content management system like Guidebook’s Builder allows organizers to easily update and view all their schedule data. Even extremely complicated schedules begin to unravel themselves once they’ve been uploaded into the CMS using a template and divided into tracks. You might even find more clarity about your schedule after viewing it in your meeting app’s CMS! Ready to create your own meeting schedule app? Try building a guide with Guidebook today.