Smart (courtless) invitations

Introduction

The smart way to arrange your matches is to invite people to play without booking a court. With no court booked, you can invite as many times as you like. And if no one takes you up on your invitation, you don't need to be concerned about cancelling a court either.

Setting up smart invitations

To smart invite, click the blue invite button to the left of the booking schedule:

You can set your smart invitations to expire automatically to prevent short-notice bookings - here's an example of the choices you could get (depending on when your invitation is for):

You can invite for multiple times - say from 7pm to 9pm on a Friday evening - so what's to prevent you getting booked twice in the same evening? If one of your invitations gets taken up, MMM cancels all others on that day, the day before and the day after. What if you didn't want that? What if you are happy to play on consecutive days? No problem: You can set your invitation preferences for this and more...

Invitation preferences

Setting your preferences allows MMM to organise your match play just how you want. Select My account and choose the My preferences tab. It only takes a few minutes to review the 4 sections:

1. Stamina - indicate how often you like to play
2. Schedule - set a weekly schedule that prioritises when you generally like to play and when you don't
3. Courts - prioritise the courts you like to play on
4. Other - a few defaults to be used when you review courts and set invitations

Responding to invitations

In the booking centre, any invitations for you will show up as amber slots - just click the booking slot to get the option to accept.

On the Home Screen, look for the My invitations panel. Invitations are summarised here as per this example:

Just click the Review button and you'll get a list of all invitations you can accept. You'll also see the invitations you have issued - which you can easily remove. It's a one-stop-shop to act on all your invitations (incoming and outgoing) quickly and easily.

The court gets automatically booked when an invitation is accepted.

Invitations on steroids

From the above, you've learned all you need to take advantage of smart invitations. But there's one more screen that brings it all together - choose the main Invite menu option and you get something like this (Note: You will need to set up your preferences for this screen to work best):

One simple screen that gives you a week-by-week overview of when you are playing and when you are inviting. The three columns tell you:

1. Envelope - how many invitations you have for that day
2. Handshake - times of any matches you have on that day
3. Grid - court availability on that day

Drill down into each day to break it down by time segments, to get more timing detail - at which point you can remove existing invitations or issue more invitations a block at a time or for just one particular time slot.

The time blocks are set as per your preferences - you can even customise those if you want!

Fun facts

1. If your invitation overlaps another's invitation to you ... guess what - MMM will immediately book a court for you both!
2. You can invite at a time even if no courts are currently available. And Fun fact #1 would kick in as soon a court does becomes available due to a cancellation!
3. You can invite beyond the booking horizon - you're not booking a court!
4. You can invite for next month's leagues - as soon as they are published by the organiser, MMM will hunt around for matching invitations and book you in!

Wrapping up

With enough people issuing smart invitations, the days of struggling to arrange your matches are over.  The matches will come to you. Just participate in issuing smart invitations and you'll be spoilt for choice. Get smart - smart invite!