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FAQs

We're Not Just Another Online Calendar

"We have recommended you to other teams, you have a great product."
- Coach, Bartlesville Wrestling Club (Oklahoma)

How much does the MyKidsCalendar Service Cost?

MyKidsCalendar is completely free for all parents. Teams using the system are entitled to employ all its features and capabilities for a monthly subscription fee based on the number of youth athletes in its program:

1 to 25 Players/Participants - $5/month (Total - Not Per Participant)
26 to 150 Players/Participants - $10/month (Total - Not Per Participant)
151 to 500 Players/Participants - $15/month (Total - Not Per Participant)
Greater than 500 Players/Participants - $20/month (Total - Not Per Participant)

Subscriptions are only purchased for the months your Group uses MyKidsCalendar. For example, if you have 3 baseball travel teams, each with 15 players, using MyKidsCalendar for the spring season from March through June, your Group’s total cost for MyKidsCalendar would be $10/month (for 45 total participants) x 4 months or $40.00 for the entire season.


What is MKC-ad?

MKC-ad allows Groups using MyKidsCalendar to generate income for their programs by selling the ad space on the bottom of the emails sent by them through MKC, perhaps even turning a "profit" on the MyKidsCalendar relationship.

When you use MyKidsCalnedar, your Group (for example, the Johnsonville Youth Football Program) sends a number of emails through MKC to Parents in your Group. Those emails could be automated ones generated by MKC, reminders, or custom emails created by your Group Administrator.

Now, your Group may know of a local business like a pizza restaurant that would like to purchase the ad space on the bottom of those emails. If your Group is small, the cost to run the ads through MKC is $5.00 per month. Now, say the local pizza restaurant would like to buy the exclusive rights to the email ads for $100 for your entire 4-month season. Your Group just made an $80 profit on the ad space for the season. Furthermore, if your MKC subscription is $5.00 per month, your total MKC cost is $40 for the season ($20 for the 4-month subscription plus $20 for the 4-month email ad space). Given the $100 ad revenue from the pizza restaurant, your Group just made a $60 net profit using MyKidsCalendar.

MKC-ad is now available to all subscribing Groups/Administrators.


Are there any additional charges?

We do offer the option for Team administrators to permit MyKidsCalendar to send automated text messages to parents who have agreed to receive them. A good texting example would be a late-day rain or snow storm that results in the cancellation of a practice, you’d like to send messages about the cancellation to parents on their way to the practice, and our automated email might not be the best communication tool. There is a charge to send text messages, but that feature is completely optional (and only recently added).


Why Does MyKidsCalendar Charge for Text Messages While Some Websites Advertise Free Texting?

In a word: reliability. Services that advertise free texting do so by sending an email converted to a text message. For example, if your carrier was T-mobile and your phone number was 480-555-5200, we could send you an e-mail from Microsoft Outlook or any other e-mail program with 14805555200@tmomail.com in the "To" field of the email. This would then get converted to a text message to be received on the end user’s phone. Carriers that support this functionality do so with the intent that it is NOT utilized for any commercial traffic. So, the downside is that there is minimal reliability and carriers do not support this in any significant volume. Companies who send messages this way run the risk of their servers being blacklisted which means their messages will not go out.

MyKidsCalendar uses a legitimate server with a reputable company (CellTrust) to send our text messages, but this requires us to pay a fee for the service. This, however, means that messages sent through MyKidsCalendar will be delivered reliably and quickly. Since the majority of our customers use texting in time-sensitive situations (e.g. cancelling a practice at the last minute due to weather issues), we felt that reliability was an important requirement for our service.


What is your email privacy policy?

The MyKidsCalendar service asks for your email address to use as a convenient log-in name, and also to automatically build your children's coaches' email lists for communication. Our email privacy policy is unambiguous: we will not sell, give away, trade, or otherwise distribute your email address to any organization, company, or individual under any circumstances. We do plan, however, to send the users of MyKidsCalendar email notifications of changes to our system, upgrades, or new features on rare occasions as necessary (a few times a year, typically), and may use your email address for that purpose.


How long does it take for parents to register?

Parents register for free by providing their name and email address (providing mailing address information is optional, and used for automated directions), which takes less than 1 minute. Once a parent registers, they never have to do so again.


What is my "Personal Calendar"?

Every user of the system is provided their own empty calendar to start. You populate your calendar with the specific schedules in which you're interested (i.e. the schedules for the teams your children play on). If your son plays on the 7-Year-Old Red Intramural Team in the Kansas City Youth Soccer League, you're not really interested in the schedule of the other 20 teams in that league, just your son's. Therefore, you would "Add" your son's team to your personal schedule. Your daughter might be on the 11-Year Old Travel Team of the Kansas City Girls Softball Club, so you would download that schedule as well, combining the two (or more) into your "Personal Calendar".


Can I Put My "Personal Calendar" on My Microsoft Outlook at Work?

Absolutely. Just quickly install our Outlook Synchronization plug-in on your PC once, and then synchronizing your kids' sports schedules with your work schedule is as easy as one click of the mouse.


What If All My Children's Schedules Are Not on MyKidsCalendar?

Clearly, we'd like parents to encourage coaches/team managers to post their schedules on the system. Once they try the service, they will most likely agree that it is the easiest scheduling software to use, and the process of building their schedules is an annual requirement for them anyway. Indeed, we designed MyKidsCalendar with coaches and team managers in mind first and foremost. However, if they are reluctant to do so, you can manually input your own events (i.e. practices, games, etc.) into your "Personal Calendar" to unify all your children's activities onto one calendar. Without question, however, the best scenario by far is that your coaches all take advantage of MyKidsCalendar, more for their benefit than even their parents.


As a Coach, How Do I Build My Parent Email List?

You have two options: you can register parents pro-actively using our "Register Parents" function, or you can instruct parents to register on their own. Either way, your email and parent contact list is built, by team, for you. As you register parents, our system automatically generates an email that introduces them to MyKidsCalendar and instructs them as to how to access their children’s schedules. By registering parents, you assure that they all have the correct team schedule, and is an attractive option for smaller Teams or Groups.

Alternatively, the list can be built automatically for you. As parents register on MyKidsCalendar, they "Add" schedules to their "Personal Calendar". If they add your team's schedule, their email address - which they use to register - is automatically added to your team's email list. Thus, if you make changes to that team's schedule, they are automatically emailed. Also, if you use the "Email All" button, you can send a custom email that you prepare and send it to them. You can also post that same information on a message board they will see every time they log onto the system.


How Do Parents Use the System to Get Directions to Events?

When parents register, they have the option to provide their home address. When coaches insert a schedule event, they identify the location with the address. When a parent clicks on a particular event, the directions function uses their address and the address of the event location to automatically link them to an on-line directions site. Parents can simply print out the directions at that point. If coaches desire, they can insert directions for certain events in the "Notes" section of each event.


Can Other People Access My "Personal Calendar"?

It’s up to the parents. All parents have the option of adding a password to protect their Personal Calendar. If parents decide to add a password, only those with knowledge of the password can access their Personal Calendar. If parents decide not to add a password, then their Personal Calendar would be generally exposed to anyone who knows their email address (which is needed to log on even without a password).


How can I learn more about the MyKidsCalendar Service?

We invite you to peruse our Learn More page or additional details. Also, we encourage coaches or administrators to register for our free 30-day trial and take a few minutes to read through our "Getting Started" guide that you’ll see after you’ve finished registering. And at any time, we encourage you to contact us at either support@mykidscalendar.com or (908) 872-8560 with any questions or feedback.


Can I Embed MyKidsCalendar Into My Existing Website?

This is perhaps the most common question among those interested in our service. With MyKidsCalendar, each Parent (Parents use the system free) has their own "Personal Calendar". That Personal Calendar is populated with only the Team schedules unique to their children: a Parent with a boy on the 3rd Grade Team would not see the 4th Grade Schedule, for example. That means that if our system sends an automated email to the 4th Grade Parents about a practice time change, the 3rd Grade parent will never see it since they don’t have to. That same 3rd Grade Parent might have a daughter on the 7th Grade cheer team, so all events from the 3rd Grade Football Team and 7th Grade Cheer Team would be combined into that parent’s own Personal Calendar. Furthermore, if the local soccer team is using MyKidsCalendar, that Parent may also have a child on the Select Soccer Team, and they can combine THAT schedule into their MKC Personal Calendar as well. So, each Parent could have a unique Personal Calendar different from others in your program. This means that embedding MKC into your site is not really possible given the way it works. Our customers usually provide a link to our home page (www.mykidscalendar.com) where Parents log in to see their own Personal Calendar. After a short time, Parents usually go directly to MKC for the information



Can we have more than one Administrator Log In for a Group?

You can, but we don’t recommend it. We strongly recommend you maintain one login email and password per Group, and provide that to as many people as you like, controlling the distribution.

If you add additional logins (we have a mechanism to do so) then those emails can’t be used as Parents (an email can only be used once in the MKC system). So if you have an assistant coach, for example, and you add their email as an Administrator login, then they can’t be a "Parent" in the system unless they use another email. It is likely that assistant coach would benefit from being a "Parent" in MKC and having their own Personal Calendar using their primary email, and you would lock them out of that benefit if you add their email as another Administrator login.

Frankly, there is really no advantage to having multiple email logins for one Group, so we discourage it.

Now, if you’d like the ability for emails from MKC to be sent from multiple email addresses, you can do that very easily by adding "Contacts" (e.g. assistant coaches, team managers, etc.). Any Contact you add will then have their email appear in a drop-down menu when you send an email (or when MKC sends an automated email at your direction), but they can still register as Parents and have their own Personal Calendar, and enjoy all the benefits of the Parent-side of MyKidsCalendar.


Does MyKidsCalendar have a mobile phone application?

We have a simplified version of MyKidsCalendar specifically designed to run on any mobile phone browser now, and you can also access the complete MKC site using more advanced mobile browsers. Both are accessible by simply typing www.mykidscalendar.com into your mobile phone browser.

We are currently developing native iPhone and Droid applications. We estimate that the Parent-side mobile application will be available by the end of October 2011, and the Administrator-side application by the end of 2011.
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