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How and Why to Get Your Community Onboard with a Community Calendar

If you are an organization that serves the interest of your community, chances are your organization has at one time or another considered adopting a community calendar to showcase the great events your community has to offer. Community calendars are a great way to cross-promote and dare we say it, piggy-back on the successful marketing strategies of fellow organizations or businesses. Let’s look at some of the key questions your organization and your community may be asking.

Why would my organization want to promote the events of other organizations?

It’s a fair question to ask, as your administrators or management may be wary of creating additional work for employees if it is of no benefit to your organization. The truth is, you may host great events, but what if you have no money to promote them? By pooling together the events of other organizations onto your website calendar, you will attract the visitors of the other organizations or businesses when they do a general search for events in the community or specific events hosted by those other groups. With LocalHop community calendars, this creates no additional work for your employees. Community organizations and businesses only need a free LocalHop account to promote their events and all you have to do is add them to your calendar in your dashboard. No coding changes, no scraping and loading events for other organizations, and you are always in complete control as to what groups you add and remove from your calendar.

Why would other organizations want to load their events into my calendar? 

So, you have adopted a community calendar, what now? How do I get others in my community to load their events? For many of you, it may be as easy as writing a short email to your community contacts or a quick Facebook post extending the offer out to the community. For others, LocalHop is here to help. We can help you with print materials to send or content to include in your email or Facebook correspondence. Ah, but why they may ask should they join your calendar? Here are just a few of the benefits you can provide them.

• IT’S FREE! They just need a free LocalHop account to start loading their events.
• Cross-promotion – All of your patrons’ eyes will be able to see their events
• Promote local – it’s all about community pride! Small businesses and organizations working together to benefit the community. Shop local! Promote local!
• Share the love, share the code, share the cost – The code that displays your community calendar can be shared with other organizations if you choose. For smaller groups with limited budgets, it might benefit you to share the community calendar across all of those organizations that are part of the calendar. The best part…as long as one organization is managing that calendar, you can split the cost of one calendar across multiple organizations!

It’s EASY – Loading events just take minutes or use LocalHop’s bulk upload template and let us do the work. Note: the bulk upload spreadsheet will not allow groups to add images to their events or create registration & ticketing. Those items will need to be added after the bulk load is complete.

How does my organization get started?

Creating your community calendar only takes minutes. When your organization purchases LocalHop website calendars, the possibilities are endless. Create unlimited calendars for your site, including several widgets. Customize your calendars by using the LocalHop customizable style sheet (CSS) to match your organization’s branding and logos.

1. Sign up for a LocalHop account with calendars
2. Load your events
3. Copy and paste the calendar code snippet onto your website
4. Add the organizations that you want to appear on your community calendar

How do I tell other organizations to get started?

Groups can get on your community calendar in 4 easy steps.

1. Sign up for a free LocalHop account at getlocalhop.com
2. Have them mention in their form that they would like to be added to your community calendar. Note: we will notify your organization that an organization would like to join your calendar, if you would like to add them, we can help, or you can load them yourself.
3. LocalHop will vet their organization and create their LocalHop account within 48 hours of receiving the form.
4. As soon as they load their events, they will publish directly onto your community calendar.

We believe that when organizations work together, it benefits the whole community. LocalHop calendars are easy to use and look great on your website. Events are coded to display on Google Event Finder results and can quickly be shared on social media or via URL. See how easy it is to get started, get a virtual demo today!