Bulk Acceptance Question when transitioning from existing bookings

[LesStrangers]

So I'm trying to schedule around 30 or more gigs for my band to get all synced up - complete with acceptances. We have a lot of players, which vary for certain gigs, so one can imagine how complicated this becomes.

What is the most efficient way to get them all synced up. So far I've subjected them to SCADS of texts/email notificiations. They get a text or email for every confirmation, one for every 'Accept' or 'Decline' request. And I'm getting pushback.

If there was a way to do a bulk acceptance request for each member, it would simplify things tremendously. Short of that, I am realizing all too late, that I should have considered the following approach below.

1. Entered all my USERS, turning OFF all notifications.
2. Enter all EVENTS, requesting 'ACCEPTANCES' checked.
3. Send Passwords to all users.
4. Send group email to all users, asking them to 'ACCEPT' each event manually.
5. Review to see if they did it.
6. Turn ON their notifications, and send an 'ACCEPTANCE' reminder.

Can you amend this so I can understand the best way to handle this transition? I am honestly finding that a simple tutorial is needed for transitioning workflow over to Bandhelper. The workflow of getting synced up as painlessly as possible, through my initial trial and error, has been painful and slowed down acceptance of the platform.

[arlo]

Are you talking about initially populating your account with events that are already booked and confirmed? In that case, I wouldn't use the Require Acceptance function. I would just let your users know that they'll get a batch of confirmation messages that they can ignore because they're for gigs that have already been booked.

[LesStrangers]

It's a combination of gigs that we were previously booked for prior to Bandhelper, as well as a slew of gigs coming in during the transition, along with recurrent ones, as mentioned in a previous thread). The fact that there was confusion and some uncertainty with previously booked, was the reason to make the move to Bandhelper to clear up that confusion, once and for all.

Hence the need for a way to have a list (Digest) of outstanding acceptances that can be sent to each member.

I found out that my suggested workflow above doesn't work with the software because I was not allowed to turn off notifications to my users, since Bandhelper requires that one form of notification is selected per user. So that workaround didn't pan out. Furthermore, when Require 'Acceptance' isn't selected on the event page, then the user doesn't appear to have the option to 'Accept' or 'Decline' manually.

[arlo]

For events that have already been confirmed, I still recommend not using the Require Acceptance option. If you're adding so many new events and you want to use the Require Acceptance option but that it is generating too many notifications, I don't have a workaround for that, but I'll add an email digest option to my wish list.

[LesStrangers]

A digest option would be amazing, thank you. Most band members - and I think I can paint with a very broad brush about this - tend to be slack about the business details of music. If they see 20 emails and/or texts, depending on their settings, they shut down and just ignore responding.

And in our case, with 12-20 users, and floating/subbing band members, it gets downright confusing. I hear your recommendations on existing events but it's just not clear enough for them when also adding new gigs via Bandhelper, using your excellent 'Acceptance' system. And sometimes they have some dilemma pop up and I still have to sub them out, even though it was previously existing. The more clarity and simplicity, the better.

Ideally a digest summary of 'Accepted', 'Declined' and 'No Response' gigs would note whether the event was pending vs. confirmed gig. Email the digest directly to a particular musician out of Bandhelper and make them complete their darn list. (Short of that, a simple digest of links that can be sent to each player with every event showing their 'No Response' items.

Great job on Bandhelper, Arlo.

[arlo]

I'm looking at this again and thinking about ways to do it:

1) This could be an account setting that covers all the users in your account, and you can turn on if you commonly enter many events on one day.

2) This could be a user setting that users can change according to their preferences. But this is probably less useful because it's going to depend less on user preferences than on the type of band you have and how you enter events. Also, this would make the replies less predictable because some users would have it on and some off.

3) Or I could add an "auto-digest" function that would be enabled for all users and all accounts. With this approach, request notifications would never be sent immediately. Instead, BandHelper would check periodically for new events, and if more than an hour has passed since an event was added, it would send a digest of new events at that time. This could be the best of both worlds: if you enter a bunch of events at once, they will be bundled together, but if you only enter one event, you won't have to wait until the next daily digest for users to be notified.

BTW for users receiving SMS notifications, it wouldn't be able to show info for multiple events, so it will have to just link to the notifications page in the app.

Also, I'm thinking this would apply to event requests and confirmations, but not event reminders, event updates or set list updates because you'd probably want those to be sent without delay.

[arlo]

In the new BandHelper version 2024-07-12 released yesterday, all outstanding event requests will be bundled into a single "action items" message. This message will be triggered 10 minutes after you enter the last event, so if you can enter a batch of events with no more than 10 minutes in between, there will just be one notification at the end containing all of them.

If your bandmates don't respond to the requests, the reminder will be sent again every 12 hours until they respond. You or your bandmates can adjust that interval on the user edit page of the website or the Settings > General page of the app. It's called Send Action Item Reminders.

I didn't include event confirmations in this because I suspect a lot of people search their email to remember the date or details for an event, and in that case it will be helpful to keep each event listed separately there with the date in the subject line.