Schedule Start Time allows you to schedule your Experiences, such as Trivia Games, Polls, Bingo Games, and Social Walls to start automatically at some point in the future. This is highly useful when you want to start an Experience at a future date and time without needing to log back in to manually start the Experience.
Set It and Forget It!
With Schedule Start Time, you can do the following:
- Create a series of daily/monthly trivia games in advance that run autonomously at the time you set!
- Educators at 2 PM can schedule evening trivia games at work for their students to take at 7 PM! Without having to log back in. FYI, Kahoot! doesn't do that. 😉
- Schedule trivia games to start in different time zones without having to jump back into the Experience Dashboard to start them.
- Combine Countdown Timers, the Fully Automatic Mode, and our Next Round feature to make completely automated, multi-round virtual Trivia Game and Bingo Game experiences.
Schedule an Experience's Start Time
To schedule an Experience to start automatically in the future, first navigate to the Experience Dashboard and ensure your Experience's status is in the Ready to Start state. If your Experience has a Countdown Timer enabled, you'll see the Ready To Start Countdown message on the status bar on the upper-right side of the dashboard. If the Countdown Timer is disabled, then you'll see a Ready To Start message instead.
| Ready to Start Countdown | Ready to Start (No Countdown Timer) |
After ensuring the Experience is in the initial Ready To Start state, click on the green Settings tab, then navigate to the Playback & Timing section. You can find the Schedule Start Time box under this section.
Playback & Timing section under the Settings tab
Once you locate the Schedule Start Time section, click the Calendar icon. By default, the calendar will be set to the current date and will suggest a scheduled start time of one hour later than the current time.
Schedule Start Time's calendar and time selector
Now, pick a future date and time you'd like your Experience to begin. Once you've specified your desired date and time, click the green Save button. After successfully saving the scheduled start time, the Experience Dashboard will display a notification stating, "The Start Time has been scheduled."
You'll now see the Experience's Scheduled Start Time on both the gray input box and within the green status bar on the Schedule Start Time section. Your Experience will now automatically begin on the date and time you have chosen to schedule it!
Feel free to test out Schedule Start Time by simply scheduling your Experience to begin within a few minutes. After it's scheduled, you can sit back and watch the Experience Dashboard come to life by itself without having to press any other buttons. You can always reset it to test it again and/or prepare for your actual event.
Remove a Scheduled Start Time
If you no longer want your Experience to be scheduled at a future time, simply click on the red Remove button with a trashcan icon.
Remove Start Time button
This will remove the scheduled start time, as well as display a notification on the dashboard that the Scheduled Start Time has been removed.
Schedule Start Time removed
Your Experience will no longer be scheduled to begin at a future date and will only begin once you manually initiate the Experience to go live.
Using Schedule Start Time with Countdown Timers
If you're also using the Countdown Timer feature, it's important to note that your set Countdown Timer will start once your Experience is activated by the Schedule Start Time feature. So if your Trivia Game has a 15-minute Countdown Timer and you want it to start exactly at 8 PM, you'll need to schedule it to start at 7:45 PM.
At 7:45 PM, the Schedule Start Time will activate your Trivia Game's Countdown Timer. Then the Countdown Timer will run for fifteen minutes before starting your Trivia Game at 8 PM.
Crowdpurr will also indicate that your Countdown Timer will begin counting down at the Scheduled Start Time, as displayed below.
The Countdown Timer will begin at the Scheduled Start Time
If you're not using the Countdown Timer feature, then your Experience will start exactly as set by the input in the Schedule Start Time.
Using Schedule Start Time with Automatic Playback Modes & Next Round Feature
If your Experiences are using automatic playback modes such as Fully Automatic Mode or Crowd Controlled Mode, then they will start and run completely automatically such as proceeding from question to question on their own!
Using both the Schedule Start Time and the Next Round feature, you can create entire sequences of multi-round trivia games that run completely automatically! If an Experience uses Fully Automatic Mode or Crowd Controlled Mode and has a Next Round set, it will automatically move players from round to round, proceeding through the questions of each round!
Schedule Start Time & Different Time Zones
An Experience's Scheduled Start Time is always saved in GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) according to the current time zone from where the Experience Dashboard is used. So if a 7 PM Scheduled Start Time is set, it will be 7 PM in the current time zone of the web browser.
If you wish to set a Scheduled Start Time in a different time zone, offset the set Scheduled Start Time to compensate.
For example, if you want to set a 7 PM Scheduled Start Time for New York City in Eastern Standard Time, but you're editing from an Experience Dashboard in Los Angeles in Pacific Standard Time, simply save the start time at 4 PM. Then when viewed from a browser in New York City, the Scheduled Start Time would show 7 PM PST. When viewed from Los Angeles, it would show 4 PM PST.
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