Events just for some members

Is there a way to create an event in which you just invite some members to the event, for instance, we have a Building clean up calendar, every week we have different groups scheduled to come and help clean the building,, so we would like to create events that will have reminders to the specific group according to the week they need to come to clean.

samavimaant wrote:Is there a way to create an event in which you just invite some members to the event, for instance, we have a Building clean up calendar, every week we have different groups scheduled to come and help clean the building,, so we would like to create events that will have reminders to the specific group according to the week they need to come to clean.

The only way to do this currently is to create a private calendar with just those members on it. But that sounds like too much hassle, because you'd essentially be creating a calendar for each event. So I'd say it's a nice suggestion, but can't really be done with the current calendar.

samavimaant wrote:Is there a way to create an event in which you just invite some members to the event, for instance, we have a Building clean up calendar, every week we have different groups scheduled to come and help clean the building,, so we would like to create events that will have reminders to the specific group according to the week they need to come to clean.

Welcome samavimaant- It's your first post! You are trying to automate the invites, or reminders, which is a great time-saving idea, and to limit the amount of wasted emails sent to those who don't need them (spam,) another great idea. I think these tools are moving in that direction, but as aebrown mentioned, not quite there yet-

Some ideas: Do you have separate calendars for each organization? That may be a partial solution. You would then enter the building cleaning event on each organizations calendar, and thus a reminder could go only to those subscribed to the specific organization's calendar. Another solution may be to set your present building cleaning calendar to "private," and make each organization leader a viewer, and then the reminders would just go to the ward leaders, but that wouldn't notify the organization members. Do you have a "leaders only" calendar already that could contain these events? A third idea, use the "broadcast email" feature in "classic" LUWS to send an email manually each week to all members of that organization.

(insert sounds of soap-box being pulled out....)
While email sounds like a real time-saver for contacting individuals, these are reminders at best, and may be only marginally effective. Look over your ward directory (lds.org) and count how many members have an email listed. If you've got over 40% of your members even listing an email, you're doing better than our ward, and of that how many spam filters are capturing your email because you are not "white-listed?" These reminders are sent from the lds.org system, but with your email as the sender.

Finally, and perhaps most important, email has no "commitment" factor. There is no shortcut for leaders here. An email "invitation" will never be binding like a verbal "I will be there" declaration from an organization member to his/her file leader. At best, I would use email as a simple reminder of a commitment to an assignment already made.

In-spite of this, I hope we will see more "tweaking" in the area of notifications in the future development of LDS.org "tools," including a "broadcast email" option. By the way, I don't know that the "send a reminder later" feature of the calendar is working yet....

samavimaant wrote:Is there a way to create an event in which you just invite some members to the event, for instance, we have a Building clean up calendar, every week we have different groups scheduled to come and help clean the building,, so we would like to create events that will have reminders to the specific group according to the week they need to come to clean.

Along these same lines, it would be very helpful if events on private calendars could be marked private from other calendar editors/viewers. I am an ward executive secretary, and sometimes the Bishop needs to meet with people that I don't need to know about. It has happened that I have double-booked him because I wasn't aware of the conflict. It would be nice if he could add an event and mark it private so that I could see the time was occupied without seeing the details. This could probably be accomplished be creating an event that simply says "Private Meeting", but it wouldn't help him go back 6 months later and see who he was meeting with then.

Seriously consider using a mass email list. I broke my larger mailing list into 5 smaller ones so that I could just email the Bishops in our Stake for example, or all the Ward Bulletin Specialists.