Say, you are hosting a party at home (maybe, a Halloween party since we are only a few days from it!), and want to ensure everything goes perfectly as planned before, during and after the party. If you decide to use Pitch (and we sure hope you do!), here’s one way of going about it.

Let’s make a few assumptions along the way in the interest of getting you onboard with the product features but what we essentially want for the tool to do is help us (along the way) with answering the 4 fundamental questions – When, Who, Where, How.

Key: Create a “Halloween Party 2019” Key

Look at a Key as an entry to one of your worlds. For example, here are some of my current worlds –

• Home Maintenance
• Next Vacation
• Technology Meetup
• Pitch Product Roadmap
• Halloween Party
• etc.

I have a Key to manage each of these worlds, and in this blog, we’ll focus on one of those keys called Halloween Party 2019. Whatever we do in this key will be confined to this key for the most part except being reflected on the Dashboard.

Key Pod: Create (Key) Pods to make a determination on the “When”

A Pod lets your structure your content under a Key, and it can either be directly under a Key or in a Block (under a Key). Since one of the first things you want to make a decision on is maybe the Event Date, let’s create a few Pods to help us with that.

• Option 1: October 31, 2019
• Option 2: November 1, 2019
• Option 3: November 2, 2019

There may be several factors that play a role in finalizing the date (Guest Availability, etc.) so we will come back to this in a bit. For now, let’s just create the 3 Pods above.

Block: Create Blocks to categorize your party elements

Now that we have a Key, and some Key Pods, we can get started with creating the structure we need using blocks. While there is obviously no hard and fast rule as to what should be a Key Pod vs a Block vs a Block Pod, there certainly is a method to the madness, if you will, and it will become more obvious as you use the product more and become more comfortable with its features. Having said that, if you create something as a Block and then realize, it is better off as a Pod, there’s no need to fret. Just archive the Block and create a new Pod. It’s that simple.

Back to planning our party. Here are some of the (first set of) blocks that come to mind –

• Potential Guests (the Who)
• Potential Venues (the Where)
• Potential Themes
• Dinner Menu
• Potential Activities
• Cleanup

That’s a decent start. If you are wondering why we have used a Potential prefix in naming some of the blocks, that’s a fair question. But, hold your thought just for a little bit & it should become clear shortly.

Block: Potential Guests

This block will include all your potential guests. You intend to invite a number of people as you want to have a Big Party. Who doesn’t! It is likely you are going to start off with a larger list because not everyone is probably going to be available. Say, you actually want 10 guests/families to show up. You would probably invite 15 of them so there is room for some of them to not come, and for you to still make the count.

This Block will include a (Block) Pod for every guest/family. Let’s create a few pods by taking a couple of families into consideration and see how goes.

Block Pod: Pal Family

This Pod will help us consolidate all activity related to Pal’s family. At this point, we have a number of questions:

• Is Pal’s family available, and interested, in attending?
• Given where they live, what’s a venue that will work for them?
• I recall that they are vegetarians so what kind of food would they prefer? Are they vegans?
• They have 1 child (a son in college). Since a lot of our other guests have younger children, what kind of activities should we plan so the Sophomore is entertained and has a good time as well?
  • Is he going to be able to help with cleanup (aka, after-party tasks)?

Rather than make incorrect assumptions!, why not ask them directly, and keep all of this information in one place that is easy to look up. It will help us not just this time but in future as well, when we invite the Pal family again. So, let’s create some Block Pod Tasks to follow up on all these questions.

Block Pod Task: Check Availability

Block Pod Task: Venue Preferences

Block Pod Task: Dietary Restrictions

Now that we have a few tasks, let’s share this Block with the Pal Family so we can start collaborating.

Share Block

- You can share a Block by granting all members of Pal's family 
access.
- As to what access you grant, it is entirely up to you. 
- Maybe you grant adults "Admin" access, and younger children "read"
access.
- Or, you choose to grant "Write" access to everyone. You get 
to decide!

Once you share, they will all get notified. They can click the notification to redirect them to the Pal Family block. At this point, you have a Pod that is common to both you and the Pal family, and everything you do that relates to your party and the Pal Family will be confined to this space thereby keeping it scoped.

• Add a detailed description.
• Add a start date/time and end date/time.
• Add comments.
• Add attachments.
• Add notes. These are private to you. No one else will see them so they are unlike all the other attributes above that are available to all of you.

Block Pod: Caprio Family

We will not go into the details here but it should be clear at this point that whatever you do within the scope of this pod is private to you till you share it with the Caprio Family, at which point they will have access to it. And when they do, you would be working actively on 2 Shared Pods, one that you share with the Pal Family, and another with the Caprio Family. As you add pods for more families, you can choose to share them with the respectively family.

Block: Potential Venues

to be continued…

Block: Potential Themes

to be continued…

Block: Dinner Menu

to be continued…

Block: Potential Activities

to be continued…

Block: Cleanup

to be continued…

Note

A quick note before we end. Our periodic & subsequent releases will have an ever growing list of vertical services, with one of them being an Event Service (or what would be called “Event Key”). It would be a very rich service that does just about everything you might possibly want when it comes to organizing an event, but till we have these niche services available for you, you will still be able to use our generic platform to manage a plethora of your daily activities. The above example is just one of the ways you could use it as of right now, and it chose to focus on an event. Expect more such blogs where we share other examples of using Pitch that have nothing to do with events.