Wigadoo designed to ease the pain of money collection

We have all been in the situation where we have arranged a group outing, for example a trip to the theatre and then have stupidly volunteered to cough up the cash in one lump sum. The outing goes well and everyone enjoys themselves, but then you seem to spend the next three weeks trying to get the cash from everyone who attended.

Likewise the thought of having to keep track of who’s paid you and who hasn’t is also a drag, not to mention the problems faced trying to pick a date that suits everyone who wants to attend an outing.

All of these issues are enough to put any one off doing anything, which is one of the reasons why we thought it would interesting to check out the upcoming Wigadoo website (note: we tested a Beta version of the site for the review).

What does Wigadoo Provide?

Wigadoo is not a site that will actually book online events for you, so for example it’s not a travel agent or theatre booking system, it’s simply a website that has been setup to provide a range of tools that you can use to plan outings and keep track of not only which people are attending said event, but also keep track of the money pledged by friends/family members and more importantly who has paid.

In order to understand how collection of payments work and how events are organised, we first need to run through how the site is designed and structured.

Design/Ease of Use

Design wise the Wigadoo site has been setup pretty well, account details/payment areas of the site are governed by https access, so you will get piece of mind that the page you are working on has been encrypted.

We also liked the screen layout and the colours/images used by the design team, which are certainly inviting.

Actually using the site is pretty straightforward to, you start off by first creating an account - which will then allow you to become an organiser - and then once the latter is created you can gain access to a couple of features, providing you with ideas of what you want to propose to your friends/family, for say a day trip/holiday/nightout.

The ideas board is one said feature, this provides a list of activities that you and your friends/family could potentially go on. So if you are wanting to do something different, but don't know what to look for, the Ideas board could be pretty enlightening.

Currently there are only 40 suggestion on offer (including James Bond events, hiring castles or even windmills) alongside a range of useful links which point you to websites that run the events, but this list should improve as the site reaches maturity.

There is also a search engine, which can be used to see what events are available in your area, but like we said before this will need padding out a touch, as currently there are not that many activities available to search for (will increase though).

Personally we liked the above suggestions on offer and you can also add ideas to your own personal scrapbook if you so wish, which saves you from having to go back and search for the ideas again.

The ideas board is also joined by a list of group discount resources, so for example what discounts you could likely get by going to places such as Alton Towers.

Once you have your idea in mind you can then move on to proposing an event to your friends/family members, however before you do that you could take advantage of Wigadoo's voting system, which is simple to set up and offers you a cool voting tool that allows you to create a poll of possible dates that people can attend.

So for example if you wanted to go on a night out on the town, you could setup a vote poll with several possible dates, Wigadoo then creates an online link that you can send to your friends via email and everyone can pick a day that best suites them and at the same time also see what days other individuals have selected.

From this you can then get move onto the planning stage...

Planning your Event

Creating a plan is also easy and fun to do, you first add the minimum/maximum number of people that you want to attend and then you key in a date that people who want to attend need to sign up by, followed by the money you would like said individuals to pledge (this can be broken down for individuals).

The pledge part is essentially a rough idea of how much money that a trip will cost each person - but not necessarily the total amount. At this stage no money is taken from the recipient, but it will give your friends and idea of how much they will have to cough up.

Then you can key in the actually date of the event, where it will take place and more importantly what the event is all about.

Once you have keyed in the above you can enhance the proposed idea by providing your friends with details about the planned outing, adding a map, photo or web link.

We liked the above system as it saves your friends the hassle of finding out the details fro your proposed idea and also they can't come back to your bitching about the lack of info.