With fall comes events... From the return of NFL and NCAA football to the season premiere of the X Factor – whoa don’t forget the – calendars are filling up fast! This got me thinking about ways you could improve event management and promotion on your Websites.

As you may know, the Event Calendar application was totally revamped in SiteExecutive 2011. Its new features now include a component for displaying your “Upcoming Events.” We call this component an application viewlet.  It can be used on your site’s homepage or any relevant page (or template). The viewlet is highly configurable, it offers control over the number and types of events displayed – there is no longer any need to display your entire event calendar. To see the viewlet in action, check out the list of events on the homepage of the award-winning Flagler College website.

In addition to giving you control over which events you display, you have complete control over the look and feel of the viewlet and the entire Event Calendar application using CSS. This includes fonts, colors and the use of images, such as individually styled icons for various event types.

Got lots of calendars?

Another enhancement in 2011 Event Calendar gives you the ability to roll-up multiple calendars into a single view.  You retain control over the display of these aggregated events; you can even keep events marked as private from displaying on public-facing calendars or lists.

The event calendar application is especially useful for colleges and universities – actually, any organization that has multiple calendars and has a need for calling attention to specific events that are “of the moment.” Thus, if there’s some activity that you’re promoting heavily, you can have it display in the Upcoming Events section on your homepage and draw more attention to it. This provides a much better user experience than having visitors sort through all the events on a single calendar to find the one they’re looking for. 

What about social media?

Social media and events go together like milk and cookies – OK, fall and football. To help you incorporate social media with your event marketing, the event calendar application was designed to work in tandem with the new SiteExecutive social media module.

Let’s say you’ve created a Twitter hash tag for an individual event. Now you can display an event-specific twitter feed along with your event information in the event detail view.  Simply embed the social media module on the calendar or template layout and include the event’s hash tag in the details and you’re all set.

Become an event calendar guru…

Learn more tips and tricks about the Event Calendar and other new applications at Empower 2011 -SiteExecutive User Conference, November 15 – 17, 2011. Register now!

Check out more event calendars:

http://carey.jhu.edu/news_events/Events/index.html

http://www.baltimorecountymd.gov/MeetingsandEvents/meetingsandevents