Automate event reminders using Microsoft 365

Custom reminder emails in Outlook add a great touch to your event organisation

Reading time: 4 minutes

We’re used to reminders from Outlook calendar meetings. Unless they’re played with, the classic 15-minute warning often pops up, at a guess, a hark back to the days when you might have had a long walk to the meeting room (or needed to liberate it from the room pirates, who’d stolen it).

Reminders exist in new Outlook and Outlook on the web, and they have an extra super-power, the ‘add email reminder’ a handy way to automate multiple reminder emails to yourself and your meeting participants.

Find the feature in the ribbon in the reminder dropdown.

Let’s think about an effective use case for this feature.

Isaiah is organising his departments’ quarterly all-hands meet up, this time it’s in-person at the London office. Isaiah’s boss wants to build his presentation around the results of a short survey. Participants will be travelling from all over to attend, they’ll need to remember to book a desk and a visitor pass (they normally forget!).

Isaish creates the calendar invite as normal, includes an exciting preview of the agenda, a link to his boss’ survey and a link to the facilities team intranet site.

Isaish schedules a custom email to everyone for a week before the event to remind them to fill in the survey. He then sets up another email to everyone for 9am on the Monday before the meetup prompting them to book their desk.

Finally, he sets up an email to himself at 10am on the day, with the username and password of the presentation equipment in the room, it’s a pretty crude reminder technique, but Isaish will be busy on the day so having it in the inbox on his phone will be handy.

Isaish creates the custom email reminders, and they look like this:

Isaish doesn’t have to do anything else, he can now get on with organising the event knowing that the reminders like the ones below will send behind the scenes.

Some questions you’ll probably have 

Can you add or edit reminders after the invite has been created? - Yes, you can

If you add someone to an existing event, will they receive the reminders? - Yes, they will. 

Can you format the text in the reminders? - Currently no. The reminders do have a professional format, but you can’t add formatting or links. How Isaiah used the reminders was to put the links in the meeting invite and signpost to them. 

I’m not using new Outlook yet, can I use this feature? - You can but you will have to create your calendar invite using the online version of Outlook (www.outlook.com)  

What happens if the meeting or event is cancelled? - The reminders will not be sent 

We think this is a really useful feature, that might have slipped past a lot of event organisers. Give it go, we’d love to hear if you’re using it as part of your planning.  

Published: 17 April 2024

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