
	Track alternative transportation commuters with Commute Calendar™!

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How Does Commute Calendar™ Work?

Commute Calendar was designed to do one thing and one thing very well: run a successful Bike To Work Month (some organizations call it Alternative Transportation Month) easily and flawlessly, where participants enter their daily commutes and event organizers can gather the statistics and hand out prizes at the end of the month. The following are the steps that the software leads participants and organizers through to accomplish this.

Step 1: Set Up And Customization

A fresh copy of Commute Calendar is created for your organization, and your web site's logo and colors are applied. Text, instructions, and your organization's contact information are also customized throughout the application to your preferences. Links to Commute Calendars login page, sign-up page, password reset page, and other user functions are linked to a page of your choice in your organization's web site.

Step 2: Participant Sign-Up And Login

Next, participants follows links from your site's web page to sign-up at your customized Commute Calendar. After logging in, participants specify their commute mileage, select a t-shirt size (if your event plans on passing out t-shirts), and select the company or school they are participating with.

Step 3: Entering Commutes And Group Communication

Participants are encouraged to login to their Commute Calendar frequently and enter how they commuted to and from work or school that day (Bike, Bus, Carpool, Drove Alone, Didn't Work, Telecommute, or Walk). Optional Weekly email reminders are sent out to help participants remember to update their Commute Calendars. On a separate Statistics page, participants can view how they have commuted so far during the month in a summarized format.

The Bike To Work Month event works best when things are done by group, which is usually by company, school, college department, etc. This way, people who know each other can encourage each other, ask each other questions, carpool together, share stories, and elect one person to go pick up the prize bag at the end of the event! Usually, the person who becomes the "leader" or "pick-up person" (these designations are usually used interchangeably) is usually the same person in the school or company who first learned about Bike To Work Month and naturally became the "cheerleader" for it. A new feature for the 2013 version of Commute Calendar is Group Talk where group members can post discussions to the group online, which comes in very handy for coordinating and promoting Bike To Work Month at a company or school. As you can see to the right, participants can see who is in their group, who the pick-up person is (changeable by any member of the group), and who's in the lead for alternative transportation usage so far! Additionally, there are event-wide Top Participant and Top Companies lists that are publicly viewable and post-able to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter (NOTE: anyone may opt-out of appearing in the public listings).

Step 4: Administration System

At this point you might be wondering how the event organizers can stay informed of what is going on in the system, how to run reports on the data, how to manage and give assistance to users and groups, and how to put together all the prize bags to hand out to the group leaders. Commute Calendar makes it very easy to do all of this with the following administration system features:

Event organizers are given a special username and password that allows them to login and get an overview of all participants and groups.
Administration system reports include:

This year's participants and previous years' participants.
Pick-up bag report, with t-shirt tallies per group.
Monitoring reports to view newly added users, newly added companies, and company information changes.

Some very useful tools in the administration system include:

Mass email all current users, past users, group leaders only, or everyone.
Add / edit / delete users, groups, or move users from one group to another.
More tools to come!

Simple And Effective!

So that's all there is to it! Commute Calendar is simple, effective, and reasonably priced online software that can take care of most of the administrative tasks in your organization's alternative transportation event. If you think this kind of event is exactly what your city or company needs, feel free to send me questions at pelton@peltonweb.com. I always love to hear what people are doing to help people be healthier, happier, and more independant with alternative transportation, especially if I can make it easier with software. Drop me a line and tell me about your plans and ideas!