Introducing Meeting Polls: Now it’s even easier for everyone to find time together

If you’ve ever needed to schedule a meeting among several people across organizations and even time zones, you know finding a common time to meet is manual, time consuming, and often inequitable. And the polling tools currently on the market are either costly or cluttered with ads, creating a distracting experience for invitees. 

None of that’s an issue anymore.

Today, we’re introducing one of the most-requested features for scheduling one-time meetings with multiple people: Meeting Polls. 

Whether you’re scheduling a university faculty meeting, a corporate board meeting, a customer kickoff, or even a personal book club, you can now easily find the time that works best for everyone — for free.

With Polls, your invitees vote on preferred times so you can easily accommodate personal preferences and time zones when scheduling with multiple people. The public beta of Polls has:

Available for free to everyone who uses Calendly, Meeting Polls provide two-way insight into meeting preferences so you truly find the best time to meet — for everyone.

When and how to create a Meeting Poll 

While Calendly offers various multi-person meeting types (Round Robin, Group and Collective events), Meeting Polls are ideal for scheduling one-time meetings in which there is a single host finding a common time across several invitees.

Kick off a poll

By clicking “Create” and choosing “Meeting Polls,” the host can start a poll by picking times to vote on and sharing a Meeting Poll link with as many as 40 invitees (regardless of whether they use Calendly). 

Create a poll within the Calendly Create menu, or via Calendly’s Gmail, Chrome, and Firefox extensions.

Accessible within your Gmail, Chrome and Firefox extensions, you can create Meeting Polls on the fly from your browser. 

From here, select times from your calendar that you’d like your invitees to vote on, then send out the link to the poll.

Select times from your calendar for people to vote on.

Gather everyone’s availability

The invitee experience is simple and intuitive. With automated time zone detection, the available times are conveniently displayed in the time zone of the invitee. If they also use Calendly, the Meeting Poll will go an extra step and highlight times that work across both sets of calendars. 

Meeting invitees share their preferences by selecting the times that work for them.

Book the most popular meeting time

As the votes come in, Calendly will surface the most popular times and the host can book the meeting directly from the poll results (accessible from the Pending section of the “Scheduled Events” tab).

Hosts receive notifications as votes come in and can book the most popular time directly from the poll results.

Location details will be automatically populated into the calendar event for one-click joining. And, with our always free video conferencing integrations, Meeting Polls is also linked to popular tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex. 

Related reading: Calendly vs. Doodle

Available for free — for all Calendly users

Here at Calendly, 2021 was a big year for making Calendly easier to use with others. 

From our new Enterprise Plan (which offers SCIM, SSO, administrative controls, and more) to new Teams features (Workflows for Teams and Schedules for Teams), we’ve launched a ton of collaborative scheduling options to make remote and in-person scheduling easier — regardless of where your office is.

Meeting Polls are a continuation of that work, and, as of today, they’re available to everyone who uses Calendly — even on the Basic Plan, which is always free.

We’re always listening to our customers, and we’re full steam ahead on improving our product based on what you want to see, and what the evolving hybrid-remote workplace calls for. We hope Meeting Polls help make it easier for you to connect with others, and we can’t wait to show you what else we’ve been working on. Stay tuned!

Ready to explore more Calendly features? Sign up for free today.