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With the holiday season upon us, we wanted to take this opportunity to remind you about one of the most powerful Fantastical features: Proposals.
Proposals is the perfect tool for the holidays, when everyone’s got tons of family, friend, and work obligations competing for time on their schedule. Rather than just list all the cool features of Proposals for you, we thought we’d spice it up — why not try a little holiday-themed Choose Your Own Adventure post?
The adventure: It’s your turn to plan the Annual Soup Lovers Potluck.
You and a group of like-minded soup fanatics get together every December to share new soup recipes, talk about innovations in the soup industry, and sample soups to your heart’s content.
Of course, with it being the holidays, the task of finding a 2-hour block of time that will work for everyone in the Soup Lovers Club is a daunting one.
First off, you need to find a time that works for the most important person in this scenario: you, the organizer of this year’s potluck!
You start by clicking and dragging on the open parts of your calendar to automatically create a proposal.
All of the time slots in your proposal will stay on your calendar with a PROPOSED signifier at the top until a time is chosen.
Now that you’ve got a smorgasbord of times that work for you, it’s time to…
Choose your own adventure!
If you want the organizing of this potluck to involve as few steps as possible, skip to Scenario A.
If you want this to be the biggest, most raucous Annual Soup Lovers Potluck of all time, skip to Scenario B.
If you’re primarily concerned with making sure no soup-lovers get left behind in the scheduling frenzy, skip to Scenario C.
Scenario A: You send invites to everyone in the Soup Lovers Club and set the event to schedule itself automatically.
To get this potluck scheduled as quickly and painlessly as possible, you add all of the soup lovers to the proposal as invitees, then set add event to “When replies are unanimous”:
Once you’ve added your invitees and created the Proposal, your invitees receive an email where they can pick the times that work for them:
Once everyone has picked a time, the event automatically gets scheduled in a time slot where everyone is available. Easy as pie! Err — soup!
Scenario B: You create a Fantastical link so that everyone in the Soup Lovers club can invite as many soup enthusiasts they want.
The Soup Lovers club are the some of the wildest, most well-connected people you know, so you decide you want them to be able to invite whoever they want to this year’s potluck.
You add all of the core club members to the invite directly, then click “Create Fantastical link” in the event settings:
Your event will automatically be set to manual approval. Why? Because you have no idea how many people the soup lovers are going to invite, so the event would never know when the responses were unanimous!
The Soup Lovers Club then sends the Fantastical link to anyone they want. The link looks similar to the direct invite, but with Name and Email fields so that you, the organizer, have a sense of who will be joining.
You monitor the responses as they come in by clicking on any of the proposed times in Fantastical:
Once you’ve amassed a quorum a soup lovers, you schedule the potluck on the most popular time and buckle up for a soup extravaganza!
Scenario C: You copy the Proposal times as text and send them to the less tech-savvy soup lovers directly.
As you set out to schedule the potluck, you can’t help but think of Linda the ladle-collector and Boris the borscht-connoisseur, who still use physical cookbooks and handwritten recipes. They’ve probably checked their joint email account once in the last year, but they do like to text you pictures of their adorable grandchildren.
To make sure Linda and Boris aren’t left out, you control-click your Proposal as you’re creating it so you can Copy Proposed Times as Text:
With a quick paste, you send them a text with the times:
Very few clicks to include a very important pair of soup-lovers! You have to factor in Linda and Boris’s reply separately from the rest of the group, but that’s okay — they’re worth it.
Outcome A…
Since the scheduling of the potluck was such a breeze, you had extra time to make not only your world-famous mulligatawny soup, but also hand-embroidered Soup Lovers Club napkins for everyone as holiday gifts! Everyone agrees that you deserve the All-Time Best Potluck Organizer award.
Outcome B…
The word gets out about your soup-stravaganza, and soon the whole town is lining up to be a part of it. People share the invite link around like candy, and you end up needing to upgrade the venue from a room in the rec hall to taking over the entire community center. Legend has it that the crazier soup lovers even had an after-hours soup-keg-stand competition…
Outcome C…
Linda and Boris are so touched that you went out of their way to include them that they gift you an old ladle that has been passed down in Linda’s family for many generations. Years later, you bring it to an antiques shop for an appraisal and discover it’s worth a small fortune! You use the money to help send Linda and Boris’s adorable grandchildren to college. A little extra effort can truly go a long way, no?
No matter what your holiday plans or potluck preferences, we hope these Proposals pointers have proved both pleasant and pragmatic.
If you want to look closer at any of the features in our adventures above, check out our Help Book entry on Proposals, and don’t hesitate to contact our Support team if any issues arise.
Here’s to a holiday full of adventures!
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