Introducing Campus Calendars

Each school/college/department has their own calendar and it's worked great until a few months ago. We realized a lot of activities were cross disciplinary and more than one department/group plans activities for the same event. Our solution was to introduce "campus calendars". These are available to everyone to add events to regardless of what calendars you own. Some of these calendars will show up year-round while others will only show up at certain times of the year. It will help pull together events from around campus into larger event groupings.

View by Category

The left hand column now has a "View by Category" heading. This allows visitors to just see events in a certain category. It works great when browsing for something to do based on interest. For example you can view all the "Art Shows" around campus in one listing regardless of what department is hosting it.

Facebook and Twitter features

We realized a lot of events are being shared through our "Add This" plugin (opens new window) and we wanted to make it even easier to tell friends about events. So we added the native Tweet and Like buttons from Twitter and Facebook to hook directly into the visitor's accounts and their friends'. We don't have enough stats from these services just yet but I'm sure we'll do a post about their use soon.

Removing the "I'm Interested" and "I'm Going" links

After optimizing the right-hand menu to hook directly into existing social services we realized the "I'm Interested" and "I'm Going" functionality were redundant and confusing. We looked at our statistics and realized they were not being used as much as we had hoped and the data wasn't available to the event owner and frankly wasn't helping anyone. We ended up removing them completely and rely only on existing services.

Cross Promote

Lastly over the last few months we have been battling with groups around campus wanting to promote events on their homepages and calendars from other areas around campus. The current calendar only allowed the event owner to add the event to different calendars. We decided to allow anyone to "pull" events into their calendar. These events will show up in the normal listing and display on their homepage but they won't have access to make changes to the event. You have to be logged in to see this option and when selected you can select the calendars you want a certain event to show up in.

All of the changes above were inspired by every user of the calendar. Our goal is to make the most useful calendar possible for the campus community. If you have any suggestions to make it better just drop us a line at web@wayne.edu.