💡 This is available with the purchase of Playground CRM & Marketing Automation
Meeting types are your pre-set meetings, tours, consultations, etc., which you can share with potential families to book. You can create as many meeting types as you need, and each meeting type is customizable in terms of its name, booking form, duration, availability, and location of the meeting.
Booking links enable families to directly book tours with you. You can post this link on your website, share with families on social media channels, or even create QR codes for flyers.
Managing availability
In order to create a meeting, you'll need to ensure you have your availability set up along with a form leads fill out to book their time.
Providers can a specific schedule for every meeting type. They may use a certain availability schedule for all meeting types, more than one meeting types, or have a separate availability schedule for each meeting type to better organize their meeting types.
Create availability
Under Meetings, navigate to the Availability tab.
Click + New Availability.
Name the availability.
This allows providers to easily find and apply the availability to specific meeting types.
Select the Timezone.
Set the available days & times. These are the days & times that will be available each week for families to book.
Toggle days on or off to make them available or not.
Add multiple time ranges within a specific day by clicking + to the right of the time input. You can break your regular schedule day into multiple slots, allowing you to easily take time out of the calendar for consistent events such as lunch breaks, coffee breaks, or even recreational breaks.
Add any Date overrides so that you can dictate when you wish to be unavailable within your typical schedule. Often times, you become unavailable for various reasons within your regular schedule and you don't have an event created in Playground, but you are busy to take any meetings. In such cases, you can simply make use of the Date overrides and block your otherwise bookable calendar out as per your requirements, whether it is for a few hours on a particular day, or for entire days at a stretch.
With availability date overrides, you can now pick any date that you're currently available and set specific hours for availability on that day or mark yourself entirely unavailable. Taking a half day next Thursday and Friday to do some last-minute shopping? Simply set an override on those specific days to block yourself off. You can add date overrides to block some of your slots on a particular day, or mark yourself unavailable for entire day.
Edit availability
Under Meetings, navigate to the Availability tab.
Click Edit.
After changes are made, click Save.
Or, click on All availabilities to navigate back without saving the changes.
Delete availability
Under Meetings, navigate to the Availability tab.
Click Edit.
Click Delete.
Confirm you'd like to delete the availability.
Meeting Types
Meeting types are the shareable links you can create and provide for families to book time with you.
Create meeting type
Under Meetings, navigate to the Meeting Types tab.
Click + New Meeting Type.
Add the meeting Name, Description, Duration, and Location. This can all be edited later.
Click on Scheduling, and select your availability. If you haven't created availability yet, follow the steps above.
Add Minimum notice. Playground allows you to set how much time is required before a family books your time. This minimum notice allows you to define the exact space of time that you might need as a notice period before any meeting can be booked.
For example, if the potential family wants to book the meeting with you tomorrow at 3:00 PM and you have set a minimum notice of 120 minutes (or 2 hours), they need to submit the booking by 1:00 PM at the latest on the same day.
Add Maximum notice to limit future bookings.
If there is a period in the future after which you think managing your Playground tours carries some level of uncertainty, with this feature, you can limit how far in the future your tour can be booked. You can select how many calendar days will be displayed on your booking page as available for booking.
Let's say you want to be available for bookings only two weeks ahead at any point in time. In your Meeting Type settings, select a number of days for how far into the future a family can book an event with you and set it to 14 calendar days. Now, families can only book you for two weeks ahead at any point in time.
Add Booking questions to collect more information about your families. Make sure a form is set up first.
Select which lead stage the lead will be placed into after booking the meeting. For example, this enables you to automatically place leads in the Tour Booked stage when someone books this meeting.
Add an email to receive notifications and reminders about upcoming bookings.
When ready, click Save.
Edit meeting type
Under Meetings, navigate to the Meeting Types tab.
Click Edit.
After changes are made, click Save.
Or, click on All event types to navigate back without saving the changes.
Delete meeting type
Under Meetings, navigate to the Meeting Types tab.
Click Edit.
Click Delete.
Confirm you'd like to delete the meeting type.
Sharing links with families
Once your meeting is created, there are two ways you can share the links with families to book time with you.
Share link
This method enables you to copy the public meeting booking link to your clipboard and share this anywhere. You can add this to buttons on your website, link it on your social media, or even turn it into a QR code to print out on fliers.
Under Meetings, navigate to the Meeting Types tab.
Click on the 🔗 icon to copy the link to your clipboard.
Embed code
User would directly see your booking link inside your own webpage like it's part of your website. Using the inline embed, the entire booking would happen on your website.
Under Meetings, navigate to the Meeting Types tab.
Click on the ( • • • ) icon and click Copy embed code to copy the code to your clipboard. This can be pasted into your own website.
Bookings
All your bookings are categorized by their date and time, their type, and the booker, so that you can have an organized and holistic view of your upcoming & past bookings.
Our booking flow helps you avoid all the back-and-forth you would typically have when trying to schedule a tour with someone. Instead of suggesting all the times you are available and the person on the other end doing the same, a link that leads to your event type and available times speeds up that process significantly.
With that URL that leads to your available times, you can focus on the tour, and not on making meetings happen.
Add events to calendar
Playground is soon offering the possibility of automatically adding events to the calendars connected to your account. This is not yet available, but will be soon.