Open Evening Booking System

[paulkerton]

Hi everyone.

So, we're looking at having an on-site open evening (with the caveat it might go online should infection rates increase in the area)

 

We are thinking of offering a number of available slots per time and a number of times across the evening (So say 20 minute slots from 5pm to 8pm with a maximum of 10 families per 20 minute slot)

 

Does anyone know of a free/cheap system that will let us do this? I've looked at things like Choice Eliminator 2 in Google Forms, but it's a little flakey at handling things like this.

The crucial thing being that this is for new people, so isn't something we want linked to MIS or require some kind of school based login to use.

What do you all use?

Edited September 8, 2021 by paulkerton

[Garacesh]

We use https://www.schoolcloud.co.uk/

It seems decent enough, even when parents evenings are physical, I'm pretty sure parents still book their slot on there. Only connection issues we've had has folks at home with terrible WiFi or dying laptops.

 

Only gripe from a technical standpoint I can say is it seems to consistently forget your password. And then you say OK, I'll reset it. And then you reset it to exactly the same thing, and login. Then next time you log in it says lolno that's wrong, and you do the same song and dance.

 

Couldn't tell you about the pricing, though. Nowt to do with me.

[paulkerton]

Can it be used publicly facing though? It's more for an Open Evening than a Parents Evening, where we already have the parents in the MIS. It's more we want to open 10 slots at 5pm, 10 slots at 5:20pm etc and people can book 2/3 people to come along and take the tour.

 

I suppose an every day ticketing system would work?

[lmrogers]

Microsoft Bookings could work with the correct 365 licensing

[Garacesh]

Can it be used publicly facing though? It's more for an Open Evening than a Parents Evening, where we already have the parents in the MIS. It's more we want to open 10 slots at 5pm, 10 slots at 5:20pm etc and people can book 2/3 people to come along and take the tour.

 

I suppose an every day ticketing system would work?

 

Ahh I misunderstood. My bad!

I have no idea if you can double-book slots, let alone deca-book them.

[IRL]

We're using Eventbrite for this. Easy and straightforward to set up.

[TechMonkey]

I don't know if it will specifically for your use case but the School Cloud system does do event booking as well as Parent Evening booking. It syncs with various MIS as well so you would just need to ask the question if Applicants can be included. May be overly costly just for Open days though. Something like Eventbrite suggested higher up may be better.

[Hedgehog13]

When I was at Groupcall we partnered with Parents Booking, which also has an Events Booking module too, and it was extremely well-liked by the hundreds of schools that purchased it through us. Great piece of software, very easy to use for both the school staff and also the parents too. They introduced video last year and that has been taken up massively too - and they also allow multiple parents/carers to join the video calls from different locations etc. which makes life easier for working parents or split families...

 

Whilst it links with your MIS, you can also simply upload a CSV instead if you prefer.

 

I heartily recommend it and they give full access and training so that you can try it for free with your next event without any commitment to purchase too!

 

https://schools.tecl.co.uk/education...3d%3d-&CC=&p=0

[fiza]

I have just done a parent open evening similar to your requirement. I did it using ticketsource.co.uk and created an event for every slot. Sounds long winded but once you create one event you can then copy and edit more quite easily. As you won’t be charging entry for the event it is free to create.

[ridleyrumpus]

Choice eliminator on a Google Form or one of the similar one works great for me, I've been using it for years (in an O365 school).

 

Afaia there is no similar functionality available in ms forms