Visigoth takes in your visit day events and data from participating visitors and faculty, helps you arrange and schedule everything, and produces individual agendas for each participant to follow. You retain complete control over everything. You can tweak schedules, add and remove people from events, customize the produced agendas, and much more.
Here’s a quick rundown of the steps you can use Visigoth for your visit days. Its meant to be a summary, not a full guide. If you purchase a license for Visigoth, that comes with white-glove customer service and personalized training.
0. Plan the visit day
Before you get started, have the following information:
- Clarify if your visit day is to be in-person, online, or a hybrid mix of both.
- A list of faculty who will be participating in the visit day.
- An approximate list of admitted students.
- A rough schedule of events during the visit days, including knowing when one-on-one meetings will be held.
Oh, and send an email to g@visigoth.ai to purchase a license. While most people get a license in January, we have onboarded people as late as two days before students arrived.
1. Collecting data from participants
Visigoth comes with a set of sample Google forms, including sample data. Feel free to customize the forms to suit your department’s needs. There’s no requirement to use Google forms — any spreadsheet software will do. Past visit days have used Microsoft Office forms, Slate, or just plain Excel and emails.
Once the forms are ready, send them out to prospective students and faculty. In their responses, they will tell you which who they’d like to meet, when they’re available, their dietary restrictions, and a bunch of other important information. (None of this data needs to be final — Visigoth will gracefully handle updates to user submitted data.)
We’ll handle any necessary configuration and get Visigoth to understand your guests’ and hosts’ data. Once that’s done, you can directly preview all the data loaded into Visigoth:
TODO: Screenshot
We’ll automatically highlight any cells that need your attention. Once that’s sorted, you can immediately being using that data to generate schedules.
2. Setting up events
Your visit day will be full of events, and Visigoth’s flexible and powerful event management interface will let you easily organize schedules full of them. We can handle in-person, remote, and hybrid events (and show people venues or links depending on how they’re attending). Events can be marked as optional or mandatory, and one-on-one meetings are scheduled accordingly.
At the heart of the event interface is the invitation system. You can use this to set filters on each event to automatically select which students and faculty are attending, or make manual changes to the guest list. Once you’re ready to order food, we can even generate a list of food restrictions for each event.
3. Scheduling one-on-ones
This is the core part of a visit day that inspired Visigoth. Once the people and events are set up, you can automatically find common times and create meetings between people. Meetings are selected based on faculty requests, student requests, or your department’s policies (such as limiting the number of meetings). We’ll help you set it up to suit your department’s needs, so you can run it as many times as necessary.
Once you find a schedule that’s almost perfect, you can continue to make manual tweaks using our drag-and-drop interface. The manual tweaks are also very powerful, letting you deal with last-minute requests flexibly. You can schedule meetings during the standard slots, or at any other time in the day; you can hold combined meetings (one faculty and multiple students); and you can pull students out of mandatory events. All this gives you the power to get the exact schedule you want.
4. Sending individualized schedules
Once you have your perfect schedule you need to have some way to give the details out to everyone. To do this, Visigoth generates a separate link for each person that always hosts the latest version of each schedule. You can update the content at any time, and attendees can always view the latest version of their schedule. You have full control over the templates and branding for the generated schedules, and we’ll even help customize them to fit your department better.
Once you’ve sent the schedules out, Visigoth tracks when people read their published schedules, so you can see at a glance who has or hasn’t been checking their schedules. Attendees can also opt in to push notifications when their schedules are updated.