How do we plan this year's big event without starting from scratch?
Stop re-deriving the event every year. The knowledge is already in last year's planning spreadsheet — on SorrelSites it becomes a live checklist with owners and due dates, so this year starts from what worked instead of a blank page. On the day itself, one screen runs the door: check-in by QR code, announcements, live polls, and floor Q&A.
4 min read · Updated 2026-08-17
Every organization has one: the banquet, the annual meeting, the fall fundraiser. And every year it gets planned almost from scratch, because last year's plan lives in a spreadsheet on someone's laptop, half the tasks lived in the chair's head, and the chair is new this year.
The spreadsheet was never the problem
Last year's spreadsheet actually holds the good stuff — what needed doing, roughly when, and what got forgotten until the last minute. What it can't do is act: it doesn't remind anyone, it doesn't know what's done, and it doesn't belong to the team. On SorrelSites, that spreadsheet becomes a live checklist — every task with an owner and a due date, visible to the whole committee, so "who was handling the raffle?" has an answer that isn't an email search.
The day itself, from one screen
- Check people in at the door by QR code — no printed list, no laptop balanced on a folding table.
- Send announcements to the room when the schedule shifts: doors opening late, dinner moving up, auction closing soon.
- Run a live poll when you want the room's voice, and take floor questions in an orderly queue instead of a shouted free-for-all.
Next year, the checklist is simply there — what worked, who owned what, when things actually needed to start — waiting for a new chair who no longer needs the old chair's laptop, or their memory.
The real prize isn't a smoother event — it's that the job of "event chair" stops requiring heroics, which is how you find someone willing to do it next year.