Your website calendar is your organization’s online bulletin board. As a shared resource, members visit your calendar to 
learn about upcoming events, and prospective members check it out to gain a sense of the types of activities and events happening within your organization. When used to it’s full potential, your website calendar is an incredibly powerful tool with the ability to increase revenue, boost community engagement and add value to your social media presence. To help your community maximize your online calendar, here are our 3 tips to help you enhance your use of this resource:
Get Organized: Create an administrative email address (such as calendar@templeshalom). Request that all within your community send calendar event information to this address. The benefits of this approach are great. While streamlining your internal process, you are also ensuring that all committees and groups know exactly how to have their event added to your calendar. You can even consider creating a simple online form, making it even easier for community members to quickly and easily share information.
Build Community: The difference between a calendar that simply informs and one that builds community is the presence of event registration. Consider this scenario: a member is visiting your website and discovers an upcoming event that interests her, so now what? Harness this member’s interest and enthusiasm by allowing her to register on the spot. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for your members to RSVP. Congregation Kol Ami, through the creation of a dedicated RSVP for Events form makes online registration a snap. And, for Jmanage clients, your system allows you to integrate calendar events with your database. Remember! Don't forget that as the event date approaches, run a report on all participants and contact them again as a reminder.
Go Beyond Event Basics: Bring your calendar events to life by including more than the event’s date, time, and location. Your Jvillage calendar empowers you to add images, links, PDFs, video and even audio to make your events more appealing. Visit Temple Sholom to see how this congregation generates interest in an upcoming Shabbat on the Sound event. And, by enabling your members to sign up on the spot, you are quickly guiding them from event knowledge to interest to registration to community participation.
Calendars aren’t just lists of events; they are the gathering point for your community and are filled with possibility and excitement for what is coming in the future.
To learn more about the connection between calendars and community engagement, join us for a webinar spotlighting this topic on Thursday, July 21 at 2PM Eastern.
