More options for specific rooms within a location

Suggest that options for the kitchen, classrooms, YW room, and both halves of the cultural hall. In order to accommodate the many requests the specific space that is being requested within the building would help.

We recently had the cultural hall separated and the two spaces should be listed and scheduled separately. Cultural Hall 1 and 2 or Cultural Hall and GYM which ever fits the church's worldwide.

Please reply

connellyjohnrichard1 wrote:Suggest that options for the kitchen, classrooms, YW room, and both halves of the cultural hall. In order to accommodate the many requests the specific space that is being requested within the building would help.

We recently had the cultural hall separated and the two spaces should be listed and scheduled separately. Cultural Hall 1 and 2 or Cultural Hall and GYM which ever fits the church's worldwide.

There is already great flexibility built in to the Calendar system for specifying whatever rooms fit your building. There are some default rooms, which can be selected or not, and custom rooms can be added with names appropriate to your building. Such changes need to be made by a stake calendar administrator. I'd recommend that you discuss this with your stake clerk.

Note that it's simple and relatively risk-free to add new rooms. But great care should be exercised in removing rooms, even if it is part of a process of consolidating existing rooms -- this can lead to a situation where an existing event scheduled that room, but once the room is removed, that booking disappears.

(BTW, what you call "Kitchen" is now called "Serving Area" -- and has the curious behavior that it is alphabetized in English where it once was in the list of rooms as if it it still started with the letter K.)

connellyjohnrichard1 wrote:Suggest that options for the kitchen, classrooms, YW room, and both halves of the cultural hall. In order to accommodate the many requests the specific space that is being requested within the building would help.

We recently had the cultural hall separated and the two spaces should be listed and scheduled separately. Cultural Hall 1 and 2 or Cultural Hall and GYM which ever fits the church's worldwide.

Please reply

You need to contact whoever is in charge of the calendar in your stake. If you don't know who that is, you can probably start with the stake clerk.

The list of rooms in a building is something that any stake calendar administrator can change.

There is already great flexibility built in to the Calendar system for specifying whatever rooms fit your building.

We have struggled with this, not having the rooms identified so that there is no guess work as to which room is the YM or YW rooom, or which end of the cultural hall is called what? Also we had three options which you could schedule the Cultural hall(whole thing) North end or South end. which was a big mistake. you could schedule the whole cultural hall and then someone else could come in and shedule both ends. wow! As for the cultural hall we landed with "cultural hall front overflow" and "Cultural Hall Back overflow. We settled on the multipurpose rooms as Multipurpose room # 5,6,7 etc.

What we are struggling with now is do we list every room or do we keep it to the main big major rooms? Do we list every class room so that the beehives and Varsity can schedule ther week night activities? Or do we just keep the list simple?

1968leocomeeatabite wrote:What we are struggling with now is do we list every room or do we keep it to the main big major rooms? Do we list every class room so that the beehives and Varsity can schedule ther week night activities? Or do we just keep the list simple?

I'd be inclined to list every room where an event takes place that might be on the calendar. Otherwise, the event would have to use "no location" or "other location" and won't show up when people check "week view". I'm sure sooner or later, not having events properly tied to a room will cause a problem.

I'm not sure as there's a downside to having too many rooms other than having a longer list to have to pick from. So long as the list is concise and everyone is clear what each item is.

But by the same token, if no one ever uses a particular room for scheduled events (outside of the block meetings), then I'd be inclined to not list it.

1968leocomeeatabite wrote:We settled on the multipurpose rooms as Multipurpose room # 5,6,7 etc.

What we are struggling with now is do we list every room or do we keep it to the main big major rooms? Do we list every class room so that the beehives and Varsity can schedule ther week night activities? Or do we just keep the list simple?

As you learned with the cultural hall, one essential rule is that you should never have overlapping rooms. Beyond that, I'd say that you keep it as simple as possible, while allowing rooms to be booked that are actually used. We have a lot of rooms where events could be held that we didn't bother to put in the Calendar system, because they are seldom if ever used for events. There are sufficient rooms that can be booked for the events that actually occur on any given night.

In our stake center, we chose not to divide up the multipurpose room. It can be divided into three sections, but no one would ever want to schedule the individual rooms that make up the multipurpose room. If they want a room that small, there are plenty of other individual rooms with more solid walls where the activity in the adjoining room won't distract them. That has worked well for us, but other stakes may certainly choose differently.

aebrown wrote:In our stake center, we chose not to divide up the multipurpose room. It can be divided into three sections, but no one would ever want to schedule the individual rooms that make up the multipurpose room.

The only times I've seen our rooms sub-divided is if an activity breaks out into "groups". In other words, it's always the same event (from the calendar perspective).

I'd say that you keep it as simple as possible, while allowing rooms to be booked that are actually used. We have a lot of rooms where events could be held that we didn't bother to put in the Calendar system, because they are seldom if ever used for events.

I'd be inclined to list every room where an event takes place that might be on the calendar. Otherwise, the event would have to use "no location" or "other location" and won't show up when people check "week view". I'm sure sooner or later, not having events properly tied to a room will cause a problem.

Here is an example that makes this question or issue come alive I think. Here on our week night activity (Wednesday evening) we have 3 wards meet in the same building. All three wards hold mutual on the same might. They do very well, at least I do not here of much conflict, they all work out any discrepancies. So the 3 wards meet in the same building, the cultural hall & serving area are restriction for each ward one wed. a month for their combined activity. then the one wed that is available each ward is given the opportunity to schedule this week on a rotating basis (4 times a year). But logically if none of them use the cultural hall on a given night with 3 wards and each ward has 6 groups to have a room to hold an activity in, you need 18 rooms so each group has an assigned room or a restriction. We have enough rooms, I think we have more than 21. So do we list all these rooms so that each group can learn and know how to use the calendar and book their room, or do we go as status quo and let them use the rooms that they are accustom to and do not require them to schedule the room?

If we decide to have them schedule the rooms we would have to do a big correlation find out which group is large and needs the bigger rooms and hopefully the groups will agree to the new adjustments. It probably would not be to bad, our youth groups a dwindling in size and our stake is fast approaching the empty nest stages.

1968leocomeeatabite wrote:But logically if none of them use the cultural hall on a given night with 3 wards and each ward has 6 groups to have a room to hold an activity in, you need 18 rooms so each group has an assigned room or a restriction. We have enough rooms, I think we have more than 21. So do we list all these rooms so that each group can learn and know how to use the calendar and book their room, or do we go as status quo and let them use the rooms that they are accustom to and do not require them to schedule the room?

If the rules are set and don't generally change, I don't think you'd need to set up the rooms in the Calendar. If, for example, Ward A always uses rooms 1-6, and Ward B uses 7-12, and Ward C uses 13-18, and each of those wards is content with their assigned rooms, you wouldn't need to make individual rooms schedulable for Mutual night. We have all sorts of rooms we don't add to the Calendar system because their only use is like this, and they aren't used for other purposes. It's similar to the chapel, where the rules for use during the blocks are well established, so we don't need to schedule it in the Calendar system.

1968leocomeeatabite wrote:So do we list all these rooms so that each group can learn and know how to use the calendar and book their room, or do we go as status quo and let them use the rooms that they are accustom to and do not require them to schedule the room?

Lets not forget that the calendar is there to schedule activities not just to secure a place in the building.

With that in mind my stake opted to list all the rooms in the building with the idea of getting each YM/YW quorum/class to schedule their weekly activities on the calendar. That way when one looks at the calendar they see that such and such class is doing such and such activity in such and such room.

We also not only put the room number for the rooms but tried to include a description of the room as well so that it is easier to know what your scheduling without having a map of the building in front of you.

For example the YW room is can be divided into three separate rooms so they are list like this.
Room #, YW Front Room
Room #, YW Middle Room
Room #, YW Back Room

We also did this for the muilti purpose room area and the primary room.