Tl;dr: You should use Google Calendar in addition to Swapcard to avoid missing, double booking meetings.
Why am I writing about this? Because I spoke to many people who were confused about Swapcard, missed meetings, and didn't know about a more organised solution. You can read more on why I think Swapcard doesn't work as well for a calendar view below my proposed solution.
My solution for being extra organised for EAG:
While you're booking 1:1s, talks and activities, get all the meetings into the Google calendar (or any other digital calendar of your choice), including after-parties, breakfasts, and other external events
Colour-code the meetings: blue for confirmed, green for requested, purple for rest times, yellow for dinners and parties. As the meeting got confirmed, I’d change the colour. You can also add your own colours for talks, for example.
In each entry in Google Calendar, I would put the name, a very short summary of org/profession and the purpose of the meeting, and the location of the meeting.
If you have a meeting agenda, such as a list of questions you’d like to ask, you can put a link to the Google doc right in the meeting invite so that it’s all in one place. When you arrive at your meetings, the agenda will be easily accessible to you.
I’ve attached a picture from one of my EAG London 2022 days for your reference (real schedule with names hidden).
This does involve some manual work but it makes it so much more organised, especially during the stage of filling your schedule when you need to see everything in one view. I don’t think that this took me more time than trying to figure Swapcard out.
You can also export meetings from Swapcard to your calendar automatically, but was told that the calendar won't delete old meetings and as you get new invites, the calendar will show two meetings (old and new) next to each other, which is a bit confusing. In addition, I think I’d still like to add a note about what we are talking about, and have a link to all my notes right there. It's worth trying to see how the automatic transfer works and whether unconfirmed meetings go in your calendar too.
During the conference, I still used the app to communicate with others, and the in-app reminders were great too. I found that I didn’t have any discrepancies between my calendar and Swapcard, so I could rely on either.
I also know that some people abandoned Swapcard's own scheduling system and just used Calendly. It didn't work for me because people still send you meeting invites on Swapcard and you can see other people's slots there.
Why use Google Calendar?
Some issues with using Swapcard's own calendar:
I’ve noticed that a lot of EAG attendees I spoke to report missing at least one meeting (my own observation, not official data) due to being confused about Swapcard scheduling, for example, due to double booking meetings.
Some new attendees said that they didn’t schedule enough meetings because they didn’t know about how Swapcard worked and/or didn’t see how many free slots they had, as they requested meetings that never got confirmed.
I found it fairly challenging to schedule with Swapcard at my first EAG. I got a pdf of my schedule and viewed it on my iPad, but it still looked like a mess - I wanted to see all my activities at a glance. With about 10 meetings a day, three days in a row, my schedule was massive. I saw an attendee using a Google Calendar for their meetings, borrowed it for the next EAG, and felt super organised on all the days next time.
I had no way of viewing activities external to EAG in one place, such as afterparties, to see if any of my meetings clashed with them.
As EAGs get bigger and are hosted in multiple locations, some people found that they needed to move locations at very short notice and thus missed the first 5-10 minutes of the meeting. This means that there is a need to plan your location and movement for the day in advance, or at least have a quick way of seeing where you need to be and when.
I’d also love to hear your solutions and how you keep organised at EAGs.
This is a crosspost from the new Animal Welfare Alignment Newsletter by Anima International. You can subscribe on Substack if you are interested in following these efforts. Audio reading also available on Substack.
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