Manage time zone differences - RandomCoffee Help Center

When your participants work in several time zones, some matches are hard to schedule: a coffee between Paris and San Francisco leaves very few common working hours. You can make sure that people are matched with colleagues in compatible time zones in two ways:

with a matching rule: you decide, and the rule applies to everyone in the program (option 1);
with matching preferences: each participant chooses the time zones they want to be matched with (option 2).

Both options rely on a “Timezone” category, which you create first.

Create a Timezone category

Open the categories.

In the menu, go to “People” > “Categories”, then click “New category”.
Name the category and choose its type.

Enter “Timezone” in the “Title” field, and choose “Dropdown: list of options to choose from” in the “Type” list.
Add one value per time zone.

In “Category values”, enter each time zone your members work in, starting with its UTC or GMT offset, for example GMT+01:00 (Central European Time). Click “Add field” to add more values. You can copy the full list below.
Keep the category visible to members.

Leave “Hide category to members:” turned off if you want members to fill in their own time zone and use it in their preferences (option 2).
Click “Save”.

You can also start from the library: on the “Categories” page, click “Browse Library” and use the “Timezone” template. It is a Dropdown category with values such as UTC-8 (Pacific), UTC+1 (CET) or UTC+5:30 (IST). Add the time zones you are missing.

Why the offset matters in each value

With the “Is the closest” and “Is the furthest” comparisons, RandomCoffee reads the value of each member to measure the distance between them:

an offset with UTC or GMT (UTC-8 (Pacific), GMT+5:30) or a signed offset (+05:30) is compared as a time difference;
a time zone name such as America/New_York is compared with its current offset, daylight saving time included;
a plain number (-5, 9) is compared as a number;
any other value, such as Paris, is only compared by text similarity, which says nothing about the time difference.

That is why each value should start with its offset.

Full list of time zones

Copy the values you need into “Category values”:

Fill in each member’s time zone

Once the category exists, give each member their time zone:

update your member list with a CSV file: see Update members;
or ask members to fill it in themselves in their profile, from their Member Portal.

If you sync your members from your HRIS, you can import its “Timezone” field: RandomCoffee then creates a “Timezone” Dropdown category for you, filled in from your HRIS. See Sync members from your HRIS.

You can also use a “Number: only accepts answers as numbers” category and enter each member’s UTC offset as a number, from -12 to 14. “Is the closest” works the same way. A Dropdown category is easier for members to fill in, and the same category also works for their preferences (option 2).

See Create categories for more about categories.

Option 1: add a matching rule to your program

With this option, everyone in the program is matched with colleagues in compatible time zones, as long as their time zone is filled in.

Open the matching settings of your program.

Open your program, go to the “Settings” tab, then to the “Matchmaking” section.
Choose an algorithm that uses rules.

In “Matching algorithm”, choose “Cross-groups”, “Group composer”, “Lottery” or “Mystery 1
”. Matching rules are not available with “Randomly”. See Matching algorithms.
Add the rule.

Under “Matching rules”, click “Add a rule”. In the first list, choose “Category”, then choose your “Timezone” category and “Is the closest”.
Click “Save”.

RandomCoffee then favors matches between members whose time zones are the closest. Like all matching rules, it is an optimization: depending on your other rules and on who takes part in the session, some matches may still be between distant time zones. See Matching rules to combine and order your rules.

“Is the furthest” does the opposite: it favors matches between distant time zones, for example for a program that connects people across regions.

Option 2: let participants choose their time zones

With this option, each participant decides which time zones they want to be matched with.

Create the Timezone category as described above, visible to members, and fill in each member’s time zone.
Invite your participants to set a preference.

Ask them to sign in to their Member Portal at app.random-coffee.com/login, open “My Preferences”, click “New preference”, choose “I want to meet specific profiles” and select the time zones they prefer.

Acme

My PreferencesCreate a new preference

I want to meet specific profiles

You will get more intros with these profiles

I want to avoid specific profiles

You will get less intros with these profiles

What types of profiles do you want to meet?

GMT+00:00 (Greenwich Mean Time, Coordinated Universal Time, Western European Time)GMT+01:00 (Central European Time, West Africa Time)GMT+02:00 (Eastern European Time, Central Africa Time)

742 members

Create preference

Below the selected time zones, members see how many people match their preference (742 members in the example above). Share Set matching preferences with them for the detailed steps.

Preferences are taken into account by the default rule “Match members according to their selected matching preferences”, present in every program that uses matching rules.

Choose when the messages are sent

Matching rules decide who meets whom, not when messages arrive. Each session has a single sending time for everyone, in the time zone you choose in its “Timezone” field: see Schedule sessions. All participants receive the messages at the same moment, so a message sent at 9

in Paris arrives at 3

in New York.

Choose a sending time that falls within working hours for most of your participants.
If your participants are spread over very distant regions, you can create one program per region, each with its own audience and its own sending time.

Members can also set their own time zone in their availabilities, so that meeting slots are shown in their local time.