Connect Chicago Toolkit: YouCanBookMe

“Establish a smart community benchmark and toolkit for broadband access and use” is initiative four of the City of Chicago Tech Plan. the Connect Chicago program is an essential component of that initiative. 

At our last Connect Chicago meetup, Rene Paccha demonstrated some of the tools that he works with teaching digital skills to residents at their Pilsen and Southeast Chicago locations. One of these tools is YouCanBookMe, which Rene uses to let residents schedule training sessions. 

About YouCanBook.Me

Rene uses a scheduling tool called YouCanBook.me to allow anyone to make an appointment with him to learn keyboarding. Here’s Rene explaining the booking tool.

YouCanBook.Me integrates with Google Calendar and allows people to book appointments with you based on preferences that you set.

How to Get YouCanBook.Me

If you already have a Google account, then registration is a fairly simple process.  Simply sign in with your Google account and then set up your preferences including a custom url for people to use when booking appointments with you.

The service is free, but additional features are available on a monthly subscription basis. These features include setting up appointment reminders, follow-up emails, and the ability to sync to multiple google calendars. These features start at $13/month and go up to $113/month for enterprise clients.

Embedding YouCanBook.Me into We Connect Chicago

One interesting use case for YouCanBook.Me was Rene’s use of the booking tool. He’s also embedded the tool into his We Connect Chicago location page .  The YouCanBook.Me tool allows you to copy-paste the code into your website. Rene has copied this code into the “Additional Media” box on his location page. He explains the process below.

You can find out more about YouCanBook.Me from their website or by following them on Twitter.