Knowing what a total nightmare getting all those long lost friends of yours together in one place, at one time and all in one piece is, we have thrown together a few killer tips to be the hero behind the plan. NB: We cannot guarantee there wont be the odd teary eye or relived bike shed romance.

Reunion Tips:

1. First its time to think up a catchy plan title.  If you weren’t all in a giant gang with a funky nickname try and think up something that’s going to get people super excited about the big re-union. Just rolling with ‘Class of 78: reunion’ is a sure fire way to get ignored.

2. Have a think about all the fun people in your life and who you miss most.  We recommend unless you’ve thought up a good reason, try and avoid anyone whose homework you copied or lunch money you stole.  A great tip here is to avoid any school bullies.  They may now be really nice, but we think its not worth the risk.  

3. Hunt down your old pals on facebook, this is an easy way to get back in touch.  Unless you use to go to a tiny school or your friends have a history of being a little mischievous, it might be worth letting your participants know this is an open invitation, in case you forget anyone who may be a little upset, jealous or get angry with you.

(use plan.nr you can invite your friends from facebook straight into your plan)

4. Pick a venue that’s loud enough to cover any awkward silences, but quiet enough that you can hear each other speak. It’s important to find somewhere that’s easily accessible, it might be worth polling some of the participants and letting them suggest a good place to meet.

5. Now its time to put some dates into play. Its probably a good shout to give people a bit of time so there are no excuses as to why the lazy people can’t attend.  Make sure your date doesn’t clash with any major holidays or sporting events as this is a sure fire way to a poorly attended reunion.

6. RSVP - Make sure its a clear Yes / No to attending opening up the possibility of a maybe means its all to easy to avoid your plan entirely. Things aren’t quite as simple as they were back in the day, unless you can successfully re-introduce the school bell back into your friends workplaces.

Once you’re ready, get that plan dispatched and start thinking about who you told you’d be a millionaire or an astronaut and start thinking up what it was like to walk on the moon, in the space car you bought yourself.

A really easy way to organise your reunion is by setting it up on Plan.nr, you can poll your old friends on the date / location and make sure you don’t alienate anybody. Use the plan wall to catch up, and post pictures to the private plan gallery after the big event .. even better use your plan template to create the next meetup!

Image Credit Flickr

Our servers are smokin’ having just been updated with the ability to handle private photo galleries. We have been waiting for this functionality for a while, and are now delighted to announce a simple way to store and share the photos from your plans.

Just hit the photo link (under the plan title) once you are viewing the plan and either select or drag and drop photos straight into the plan page.

This makes is so easy to nab all the photos from the events you create with your friends, and store them privately for when you are popping down memory lane.

Snow season is upon us, whether you enjoy a leisurely slide down the slopes or prefer to crush some pow off piste, we’ve got a bunch of tips to help you plan the perfect trip!

1. Get your crew together

Great place to start, find out who wants to join you! A good crew is crucial to any plan, put out a bat signal to your buddies and see who wants in.  

Tip: watch out for ‘maybes’ they will just slow down your plan, get a simple yes/no from everyone as quickly as possible. Use the date picker in Plan.nr to work out a date that works for everyone. sorry slackers!

2. Destination

Ok so you know who you’d like to join you, now figure out where to go! Drop a few suggestions around your gang and get some feedback from everyone. Remember to check the weather reports, and the ski area, you don’t want to be heading to a resort that doesn’t suit your style. 

Tip: If you are flying to your destination keep an eye on transfer times, no one wants a looong transfer after a flight - get the maximum time you can on the slopes.

3. Accommodation

This is where your budget comes into play, if you are on a shoestring then find a cool hostel that has the essentials (a bed and a bathroom) there are some good sites for checking out reviews such as tripadvisor, snowheads or scroll through the new foursquare explore feature. If you are in a group a chalet is always a great choice, look for ski in/out if you can, it makes it nice and easy at the end of the day gliding back into your snow home. 

Tip: You are in a group, push for a discount - the bigger the group the better the deal you can get

4. Lessons

First time skier to experienced rider looking to get to the next step, lessons make a huge difference in pushing you forward. Find out if anyone in your group wants to get lessons and team up, you can save money on a personal tutor the more of you there are. If you are on your lonesome then find a ski school and get involved.

Tip: Lessons work best if you have a gap between them, don’t try and do full day sessions, use the mornings for learning and the afternoons for putting the lessons into play. Work hard - play hard!

5. Travel

Plan your route, do you need to fly? can you get the snow train or drive instead? Check out what works for your group, if you are all leaving from the same place figure out who the driver is and treat them nicely!

Tip: Make it easier and plan how you’ll all meet up, who is gonna drive to the airport? If you don’t need to fly you can save some serious $$ on your baggage allowance, get the car loaded up and head on your way - everyone loves a roadtrip!

6. Insurance

Only a fool heads on holiday without some cover, check in with your traveling group to see who needs to purchase their insurance. You can save money here on group deals.

Tip: In europe you can add Carte Neige insurance for around 8 euros a day, this gives you cover off piste as well and makes sure there are no added problems if something goes wrong. You can buy this at the lift pass office in your resort - you still need to get your usual winter trip cover, so don’t try and scrimp!

7. Hire

As with anything arranging hire in a group is the best way to do this, find out who needs what, and plan your hire before you go. Purchasing hire or buying kit in the resort will be expensive - Plan early save time!

Tip: Save time once you pick up your kit, know your details weight, height etc if you are just renting ski’s/board and already have boots make sure you take them with you for fitting. It’s a long cold walk back to your accommodation to pick them up.

8. Apres Knowledge

Nothing beats kicking back after a long day and indulging in some Apres Ski. Check out the hot spots before you go, use foursquare tips to get insider info and cruise the happy hour spots. 

Tip: When planning your resort check out the Apres, if you are looking for a quiet week you don’t need a resort packed with bars and clubs and vice versa. Check out some of the following sites for resort reviews.

Phew there you go, now save yourself a ton of hassle and use Plan.nr to get your trip going, poll your friends and make decisions quickly… figuring out all of the above over email is the shortest route to no snow time at all!

WOWSERS we can finally unveil the overhaul we’ve been slugging away at (time for some sleep anyone?) for the last few weeks. 

Since we launched into private beta at the start of January we’ve had boatloads of feedback from you guys, and now we’ve had a chance to put some of your suggestions into play. 

1. Plan creation needs to be quicker

We heard you loud and clear on this one, go and check out the *fresh* plan creation page, that’s right PAGE.. no more clicking through multiple steps just a single page to create your plan in warp speed.

2. Date / Location picker

Wave hello to a shiny new date picker, you can now add an end date and pick start and end times optionally. We have also bolstered our location search functionality, which is now powered by google auto-complete, this is a huge improvement and makes it super easy to find your favourite spots.

3. Finalise Plan/ Statistics integration

This one was bugging us for a while, we are delighted to have been able to add a way to let the plan admin finalise a plan and email all participants. We’ve integrated the plan statistics into the choices so you can clearly see the most popular choice as soon as you hit the plan view.

Just for good measure we’ve also redesigned the homepage, invite emails, added comment notification emails, daily digest, merged the dash/activity feed and implemented a new templates system (see what I mean about not sleeping).

All these changes were made possible by you telling us what you think, go and check out the updates and drop us an email with your thoughts. There are plenty of features yet to be implemented, keep your eyes peeled for a mobile app and a bookmarklet that we think will go down a storm (we’ve been testing it out, and it’s blown us away).

Now run, go get planning!

- Plan.nr HQ

There once was a time when notifications on facebook meant something, wall posts were exciting, game notifications were few and far between and event invitations were relevant. 

We are not the first to comment on facebook becoming a theatre of noise and we certainly won’t be the last. The problem is no one pays attention to anything any more, which makes organising an event with your facebook friends nigh on impossible. The daily invites to such thrilling events as ‘National Not Voting Conservative Day’ and ‘Cuddle Your Cat Week’ mean the personal invites from your friends get lost, you are simply numb to notifications.

Just to make things slightly harder you’re not notified of events via facebook messaging either, so the chances of you actually discovering the single event you’d consider attending are reduced even further.

The sad thing is this means that actually inviting friends to an event, working out who is attending and keeping your guests up to date is not easy, this is madness when you consider we have the ability to rent and start a car using a phone!

Luckily there is an easier way (did you see this coming?) plan.nr makes it super easy to plan your event, trip, purchases .. heck anything that you want to organise in a group.

Try us out and make planning easy, your friends will get a personal invite from you that will only be ignored if your friendship has bigger problems than notification numbness!

Planning is a pain, it’s frustrating as an organiser and just as frustrating being a participant. Everyone knows that feeling, logging into your email inbox after having only checked it 25 minutes ago and finding an email thread that’s 30 emails deep. By this point everyone has expressed their opinion, the plan has changed numerous times and you’re just about to complicate things further by throwing in your decision. 

Having been on the end of such email delights for too long we knew there was a better way to do this, we started discussing it and over time formulated what has since become Plan.nr.

What we needed was a way to contain the plan details in one place, we needed to give the participants a place to choose and suggest options whilst keeping the only fun part of planning (the banter) in the process. We realised we needed something that went beyond just organising events, we needed to be able to organise anything within a group.

Enter Plan.nr

Plan.nr is a web app (mobile app on its way) built for planning and organising within groups. The process is simple, invite your participants, pick your choices, publish your plan and make a decision using the feedback.

Invite your friends

Our users can plan with their friends by sending invites via email, facebook and twitter (as well as importing contacts from other major services).

Add your choices

Provide custom choices for the participants to pick, or let them suggest their own (great way to organise dates, let the participant say when they are free)

Make a Decision

Make decisions based on participants feedback, see who chose which option and make a final decision based on everyones choices.

Privacy

Finally and most importantly your privacy is very very important to us, everything that you do within Plan.nr is private to you (unless you create a public plan - duh). We’ve already built in privacy controls and we won’t pass your details or information to anybody else ever.

Progress

We’ve got a never ending long roadmap and some great features we want to build into this service. Make sure you are part of our beta your valuable feedback will help us build an even better solution!

Who are you guys?

Ali, Rich and Dom are the guys behind Plan.nr, we started development in August 2011 (only a few years after having the idea..) with the aim of making group planning a breeze. 

Firstly we’d like to wish you a Happy New Year from all of us at Plan.nr HQ, to celebrate we are releasing some shiny new updates!

We’ve been beavering away over the Christmas break implementing more of the functionality we’ve got on our roadmap (don’t worry there is plenty more to come) to kick things off we have updated profile pages for our users, you can now see your friends activity stream and follow count by clicking on their name within Plan.nr

Profile Page Snap:

This update makes it nice and simple to see what your friends are up to, we also now display if your contact has emails rights, which means you’ll get email notified if they engage with you on Plan.nr.

We have also updated the activity stream, you’ll see that there are create plan icons sat at the top of the stream to make it nice and easy to kick start a new plan (don’t worry you can still use the create plan button up top on every page).

Activity stream snap:

Finally our blog has been given an overhaul, we’ll be using the blog to announce new features as well as posting handy tips and commenting on our progress as we go!

Happy Planning!

p.s If you’ve not got a Plan.nr account but would like to give us a try please signup for beta access on our homepage.

Nice work on publishing your plan, as your participants start making their choices you can use the statistics tab to check out which is the most popular.

The plan wall is the perfect place to house all the discussion for your plan, you can comment on peoples suggestions or just use it to throw in any info that you want the attendee’s to know!

Add some options for your participants to choose from to do this:

Pick the choice type in the new choice box (click the orange tick to see the options)

Choose from:

Simple

Location

Date

Click the arrow next to the ‘add’ button to toggle the advanced options

Choice description - Add a text description for the choice

Multiple selection - Allow participants to choose more than 1 option

Required choice - Force participants to make a choice 

Open suggestions - Allow participants to suggest extra options

Then type the choice title and click ‘Add’

The choice box is then created and you can start adding options to the choice, to add an option type the option in the box under the choice title and hit the + button (if you wish to add a description then click the advanced settings cogs seen in the option form)

You have now created a choice and added options, if you have included more than one choice in your plan, you can re-order your choices by hitting the up or down arrows seen at the top and bottom of the choice box.