How to track meetings for a small team?
March 8, 2022 2:44 PM Subscribe
Our team of five would like to be able to track which external players members of the team are meeting with in a way that gives everyone else visibility of those meetings (but we don't want a calendar app).
We'd love to have a dashboard that shows the details for meetings (Team member U met with person V of organization W about subject X for campaign Y, click to see notes). It would be nice to be able to sort and search, but the key here is a dashboard that allows others to get an overview of the meetings in the last week or coming up in the next week. We don't want a calendar app because we don't really care exactly when those meetings took place and we'd like to be able to see a little more data than calendars generally allow
It seems like there should be an app that handles this, but I'm only finding calendar and scheduling apps. A full fledged CRM would probably do this, but that's more complex than we need. We operate mostly in Google Workspace, but something standalone would be fine. In an ideal world, we somehow integrate this with Google Calendar so people aren't entering their meetings in Calendar and then also in this meeting tracker. If there is no solution, I'll probably build something with Google tools (Forms, Sheets, Data Studio).
We'd love to have a dashboard that shows the details for meetings (Team member U met with person V of organization W about subject X for campaign Y, click to see notes). It would be nice to be able to sort and search, but the key here is a dashboard that allows others to get an overview of the meetings in the last week or coming up in the next week. We don't want a calendar app because we don't really care exactly when those meetings took place and we'd like to be able to see a little more data than calendars generally allow
It seems like there should be an app that handles this, but I'm only finding calendar and scheduling apps. A full fledged CRM would probably do this, but that's more complex than we need. We operate mostly in Google Workspace, but something standalone would be fine. In an ideal world, we somehow integrate this with Google Calendar so people aren't entering their meetings in Calendar and then also in this meeting tracker. If there is no solution, I'll probably build something with Google tools (Forms, Sheets, Data Studio).
Are you saying you don't care which days the meetings were on / will be on? If you do care, then just create a different calendar in the Google Calendar for these things, and tell people to put their meetings on that calendar. Everyone can view them in overlay mode, or turn off that calendar if they don't want to see it
posted by TimHare at 6:27 PM on March 8, 2022
posted by TimHare at 6:27 PM on March 8, 2022
You’re asking them to do additional data entry on a separate dash. Using a calendar app you already all use like outlook or gmail with a group overlay is way more sustainable.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:38 PM on March 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:38 PM on March 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
Sorry if I’m missing something, but why not use Google Calendar? You can enter any info you want into the meeting description — including links — and anyone can view it.
posted by mekily at 9:24 PM on March 8, 2022
posted by mekily at 9:24 PM on March 8, 2022
Response by poster: There are a couple reasons Google Calendar or another calendar wouldn't quite work as well as we'd like for this:
1) Data isn't structured or filterable. So we can't easily see all the meetings for a specific campaign, or meetings with a specific org, or even easily see all the meetings that a specific team member had.
2) People often use their calendar to invite the person they are meeting with or are invited by someone else. This would preclude attaching notes that we may not want the person we met with to see or using a specific format for the name of the event that includes the details we need. In this case, we'd have to create one internal event and one external event and that would just be confusing for everyone and potentially lead to accidental sharing of notes that weren't intended to be shared.
posted by ssg at 9:34 PM on March 8, 2022
1) Data isn't structured or filterable. So we can't easily see all the meetings for a specific campaign, or meetings with a specific org, or even easily see all the meetings that a specific team member had.
2) People often use their calendar to invite the person they are meeting with or are invited by someone else. This would preclude attaching notes that we may not want the person we met with to see or using a specific format for the name of the event that includes the details we need. In this case, we'd have to create one internal event and one external event and that would just be confusing for everyone and potentially lead to accidental sharing of notes that weren't intended to be shared.
posted by ssg at 9:34 PM on March 8, 2022
(Team member U met with person V of organization W about subject X for campaign Y, click to see notes)
If you don't care about the calendar view, then it sounds almost too (suspiciously) simple to me. Excel table with a column for each of those things, rows for each meeting. Then you can filter and sort on any column. Who's U meeting? Who met with V? etc. Just change the "notes" column to a link to a word file on a shared file system or something.
posted by ctmf at 10:20 PM on March 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
If you don't care about the calendar view, then it sounds almost too (suspiciously) simple to me. Excel table with a column for each of those things, rows for each meeting. Then you can filter and sort on any column. Who's U meeting? Who met with V? etc. Just change the "notes" column to a link to a word file on a shared file system or something.
posted by ctmf at 10:20 PM on March 8, 2022 [1 favorite]
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posted by kschang at 5:59 PM on March 8, 2022 [1 favorite]