how to stay organized while booking bands from a shared Gmail account?

September 22, 2014 6:41 PM

I've recently started booking for a small nonprofit that runs two events a month. I'm looking for a workflow, software, or any other magic to impose some organizations on a largely email-based workflow so that I don't forget to follow up or offer the same date to multiple people.

For each event, we need
- the board to pick a date
- a deposit on the venue
- a band
- a "caller" (if you're not familiar with contra, think of him as a different kind of performer)

All of the communication is done by writing email from a company Gmail account.

Some cases I need to handle:
- sometimes we'll approach someone about one date and book them for another instead
- sometimes the board will move the event to a different date, or cancel it entirely
- sometimes the next step is to wait for some event, but I need to follow up with someone if it doesn't happen by some deadline

So far I've been getting along with a combination of meticulous manual tagging in Gmail and writing things down on a calendar, but this is rapidly becoming untenable. I've had a few close calls already with offering the same date to multiple people and forgetting to follow up for far too long.

Additional constraints:
- I have no budget for this sort of workflow improvement
- If there's software involved, the data should be remotely hosted and accessible to coworkers on the Internet (the company is willing to expose this data to foreign servers)

Hope me...?

posted by d. z. wang to Work & Money (4 answers total)

Google Tasks is tied to the Gmail account; you can keep things there. You can use a Gmail-integrated snooze like RightBox or Streak so things pop back into the inbox when you need to see them. Streak (I think) lets you keep very visible notes about a contact as well.

In Google Calendar, you can create a calendar for actual bookings and another for prospective bookings (or whatever; you can create a lot of sub-calendars) so that you'll see different colors in timeslots to avoid mistakes.

I'd also think about getting everyone using the account to review the usage history they missed to double-check that things are noted and processed correctly.
posted by michaelh at 6:51 PM on September 22, 2014

This might be the type of thing that Google Forms works well for-- I have a setup at my job through Google Forms where one person can fill in a variety of categories (title of request, details of request, date needed) and it posts automatically to a spreadsheet. Every time a change is made to the spreadsheet (so every time the form gets filled out) the change is emailed to whoever you specify when you set it up.

You can set up tabs on your spreadsheet (ie, one for each week/month) so that you can copy-paste from the tab where it automatically gets posted to, say, a tab for 'October', and then everyone can see at a glance what dates are taken.

I had zero Google Forms experience, but set it up in roughly an afternoon (it took me a few hours of fine-tuning after that just to make it perfect) and my team went from having way too much stuff fall through the cracks to it being a once-in-a-blue-moon event.

You should be able to find Google Forms tutorials pretty easily through search, but let me know if you're not able to, and I might be able to walk you through it.
posted by matcha action at 6:53 PM on September 22, 2014

Look into Streak for Gmail. Free and has some amazing organizational features. I barely use a quarter of the features but still find it very useful.
posted by Bella Sebastian at 12:28 AM on September 23, 2014 [1 favorite]

We use teamwork: https://www.teamwork.com/refer/greenfrogmusic

I love, love, love it! We can make a list of everything that needs to be done with the time that it needs to be done by. We can get email reminders. It supports multiple users. I can log on and see everything that my boss is doing and has done- it draws a line through the things that you check off. And, it has a timer so I use that as my time clock for reimbursement.
posted by myselfasme at 4:06 AM on September 23, 2014