ScheduleMonkey is an easy way to keep track of your busy life. It allows you to plan, manage and communicate with any number of groups – all in one place. Consider it a virtual meeting spot for your real world groups. It lets you manage calendars, arrange activities and post messages in a private, password protected website.
Schedule Monkey was created when parents were looking for a way to manage their young daughter's activities (who knew a one-year-old could have such a complex life?) but you don't have to have kids to get value from it.
It is a website for groups, that was built to meet the needs of families. Simple and easy.
ScheduleMonkey works by putting all your groups in one place – you don't have to go to ten different websites if you belong to ten different groups.
You don't have to remember a login for each group, you don't have to look on your refrigerator for contact sheets, no more calling around to see if it's your turn to pick the kids up after swim practice.
And, you have the option of viewing everything either in combined calendar, or individually.
We purposefully kept the focus of ScheduleMonkey simple, in order to make it as easy to use as possible. You have so many things to do already; ScheduleMonkey can make leading and belonging to groups simple.
Do you ever get an inbox full of reply all emails when you ask a simple question of a group!? That's what makes this site better than email. All your conversations are centralized, with logical comment posting and searchable history. It's up to you whether you get notified any time there's a posting, whenever the leader posts something, or only when something that matters to you is being discussed. Of course, you can always log on to ScheduleMonkey whenever you like to see what's going on with your groups.
This is the heart of ScheduleMonkey. All your groups are combined in this section – think of it as your dashboard. Posts from all groups, plus access to a combined calendar. You can also filter the Overview by person to see the calendar and discussions for only one person at a time.
When you want more detail, you can go to the individual group tab.
Membership on ScheduleMonkey is free and most functions will always remain so. Soon, there will be reasonably priced upgrade plans for some additional features, such as leading more than three groups or to use the site free of advertisements.
Understand that in order to deliver the best product to our users at the lowest costs, we need to use ads to allow free membership for basic users.
That seems like quite a lot to type, in our opinion! Our site is built on making it easy for you to get to all your groups in one central location. Your login to one site gives you an overview and switch between groups easily. Plus, you don't have to remember the name the leader chose – would you rather call your group "Billy's Soccer" or would you rather call it "NY Youth Soccer Summer Team 12"?
ScheduleMonkey makes it easy for people to name groups – both as leaders and as members. Plus, this way, you can keep the names simple and not have to come up with some long, contrived combination in order to create a unique group name.
Group leaders send invitations through e-mail. Simply accept the invitation, and you're in!
We support the iCal standard – which works with Google calendar, iCal on the Mac and Outlook 2007. You can subscribe to a combined calendar in Overview or each group calendar individually. Learn more by going to our iCal detail page.
You can also use the web calendar and/or have event reminders sent to you via email or text messages on your cell phone.
You can choose to receive text messages or email messages ahead of meetings. The message will include time and the location of the event.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is an easy way to stay up to date on updates from a particular website - in this case your group activity on ScheduleMonkey. Please see our RSS detail page for more information.
We know that groups start and end all the time, and sometimes people leave. Members can leave a group by putting that group into an Archive. All your posts and events are still readable and searchable, but from a special tab, not from the main screen. Members can rejoin a group by un-Archiving it.
A Group Leader can Deactivate a group that has ended, which is similar to Archive, in that the posts and events are still readable and searchable. But since the group is Deactivated, it cannot be rejoined.
In both cases, you can always access your ScheduleMonkey contacts for the old groups. This is a great resource if you want to start a new group with some people from former activities!
Certainly. You can search all groups from the Group Overview page, or just within one group by going to that Group's specific page.
Right now you can print all your history. We are working on the ability to download it.
Absolutely. We take your privacy and security very seriously.
We will never sell your contact information to anyone for any reason.
Any information you place on ScheduleMonkey will remain yours. Only people within your group will be able to see your posts and upcoming events. And the Group Leader has complete control over who is in the group.
Only the group leader has access to your contact information, unless you choose to share it with other members. If not, you'll still be able to communicate with them through postings.
For more details, see our Privacy Policy.
Just click on the "Create Group" button in the top navigation bar. It will walk you through a simple form to collect meeting times/dates and allow you to invite people either via email or through your ScheduleMonkey network.
Running any group is always a challenge for the leader. Sending messages. Setting up meetings. Updating schedules and contact lists. Keeping track of who is coming to what. ScheduleMonkey takes over a lot of that burden.
How?
Everything is stored and communicated from a central place, which simplifies your job. If a member's address changes, you get word. If you change a meeting location, everyone in the group gets notification (and you don't get a dozen e-mail replies saying, "Sounds good!") You and members can easily exchange posts with one another.
Soon RSVP and survey tools will be added to the leader tool kit.
All these things lighten your load.
Yes. The leader has the ability to remove comments that are not deemed appropriate for the group.
Select the group in the "My Groups" dropdown. Leaders have an extra tab in the lower navigation bar that lets them change settings. Groups that you lead have a "Leader" badge to identify them.
The original Group Leader is the person who set up the group at first. He or she can add more leaders or migrate leadership to other group members from the "Group Settings" leadership tab. Of course, there has to be at least one leader. You'll get an error message if you don't select anyone.
Yes we do. The initial group setup walks you through setting up one group meeting or series of meetings. Set up your first event, then go to the "Lead Group" tab for your group to add additional dates or series of dates.
Unfortunately not. We understand that while there may occasionally be a question or comment that pertains to more than one group, however, to keep things as simple and relevant as possible for each group, you can only post a question to one at a time.
Not directly – but we encourage posting URL links in the comment boards. There are so many great photo sharing sites and everyone has their favorites, we didn't want to limit people.
To keep things simple, there is only one adult/owner of an account.
We suggest joining as "Bill and Mary" if you both want to participate in the management of your account.
Your spouse can also join ScheduleMonkey, and they can be invited to be a member of the group on their own account. The ownership of the kids will remain with the primary account.
No. As mentioned above, there is and always will be a free plan that has the majority of features. When you sign up, you will stay in this free plan unless you decide to upgrade.
That's right – during our initial rollout, there are no charges for anything; everyone will be on the basic plan, even group leaders. Eventually, we'll add features such as ad-free options, and other upgrade features (as well as anything else that makes sense after our test phase is done!)
We will accept major credit cards. Accounts will be billed on an annual basis.