Keep Your Family Organised with Droppa

For better or worse, we all spend vast amounts of time on our phones in the modern world – whether that be working, playing, editing photos of our little ones or catching up on Facebook gossip.  Our phones have become a palm-sized electronic extension of us and I know I’d feel a little lost without mine.  It helps to keep me organised in day to day life, especially with the calendar and to do list functions.

I work, I parent & I blog so keeping track of family appointments and nights out alongside all of that can be really challenging, particularly at the moment during school holidays when there are so many children’s events to keep track of.  So when I found out about Droppa I was very interested to try it out.

In basic terms Droppa is a calendar app however it is actually so much more and I’ve really enjoyed trying out all the different features.  My phone calendar is great for creating reminders just for me but Droppa enables you to share your diary with your husband and children, and even friends and extended family too!  Any one of your phone contacts can download the Droppa app and instantly be able to “drop” events and information into your calendar, and vice versa.  And just like other calendar requests you can decide whether to accept or decline the invitations.  

In contrast to complicated email scheduler software I’ve used in the past, Droppa operates using push notifications on your phones, so you don’t even need the email addresses of the people you’re scheduling with, just their phone numbers.

Droppa was invented by two dads who realised that, whilst using a traditional calendar, they were occasionally forgetting appointments and it would be a great idea to have a family calendar that you could have with you at all times, and was interactive with the whole family.  They soon realised that most people don’t interact via email outside of work hours and in fact correspond most often using text or instant messenger.  Droppa is a way of combining the simplicity of instant message with the traditional family calendar.

Droppa can be used just as your own personal scheduler too of course, but I think the real beauty of it lies in the fact that it interacts with other people and allows you to securely share information with anyone you wish.

Examples of how you could use Droppa

• General diary management and appointment scheduling for the entire family
• Scheduling babysitting & childcare with extended family and even childminders
• Arranging nights out, play dates or social events with specific groups of family and friends
• Making sure all parties know what is happening and when in separated, co-parenting families (thus helping to reduce potential clashes and tension)
• Simple scheduling for clubs or school classes

Any many more, I can even see potential for Droppa in the working environment.

Key Features

• Simple, easy to understand symbols mean you can see the status of an event at a glance
• Location, map & navigation function to allow you to add directions to any Drop
• Option to create Droppa groups if you regularly interact with the same people – for example one group for immediate family, one for extended, various friends groups, classes & clubs
• Chatroom function for every event, enabling you to share information easily with all involved
• Option to input recurring, annual events such as birthdays and anniversaries – meaning Droppa acts as a date book as well as calendar
• Option to add someone as info only for particular Drops – i.e. if your partner has an appointment that you need to be aware of but don’t need to attend
• Repeat/recurring appointments
• Alerts & push notifications, only requiring phone numbers and not email
• Completely safe & secure for kids to use – no more excuses that your teens didn’t know where they were supposed to be!
• No annoying advertisements

Droppa’s website contains lots of really useful How Tos to help you get to grips with the system initially.  They are very simple and easy to follow, I’ve admitted before I’m not really very ‘techy’ but truthfully if you’ve ever used an instant messenger and a calendar then you’ll have no problems at all!  I’m personally a huge fan of using Whats App to chat to friends and make arrangements and I see Droppa as the next step up – a way of organising diary events alongside the simplicity of group chat.  Droppa was even recently awarded the Mumsnet Award for Best Family App.

Droppa is available on both Apple and Android and is completely free to download for the first year.  After 12 months you will be asked to pay a small subscription fee of only £1 per year.  If you have a large family, complex working schedules or busy social lives and clubs then Droppa is definitely worth a try.  For more information visit www.droppa-scheduler.com or find them on Facebook or Twitter.

Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.  Words & opinions are all my own.