Because you want a calendar that blends in seamlessly with your site
Your website is great. Just like you wanted it! But when visitors click that “MORE EVENTS” button they’re directed to a calendar interface that looks totally different from your main site, with weird buttons and lots of links and options that people don’t need.
Can’t you just have a nice, simple calendar that looks exactly like the rest of your website?
(Spoiler alert: yes, you can. We set you up with a calendar built on the same template as the rest of your site and you can update it yourself.)
Because your campus calendar tells the story of your school better than anything else
So much great stuff happens on your campus every day: performances, lectures, demonstrations, sporting events, pie-eating contests. You know that when prospective students visit campus, they’re twice as likely to apply.
Can’t you use your campus calendar to project a real sense of how amazing it is to be at your school?
(Sure, you definitely can, if you have the right calendar. When your events look great, and when they come from all over campus, your calendar looks more like your school.)
Because you have five different calendaring solutions and people still complain that they don’t know where to post events
You have one calendar for room reservations, another for student organizations, and another for alumni events. Half your academic departments use Google Calendar, and the other half just post flyers on bulletin boards. And athletics has an entirely separate CMS and calendar system.
Shouldn’t your calendar be able to gather all that stuff in one place?
(For sure. And if your current campus calendar can’t incorporate feeds from those other systems, well, you’ve come to the right website. LiveWhale Calendar can integrate all your third-party calendars into a single, consistent presentation that brings it all together.)
Because the calendar that comes with your room reservation system isn’t good enough
A lot of schools use room reservation systems, and a lot of those systems have a “calendar” view, or even a separate add-on calendar product, that’s supposed to fill the needs of a public web calendar. But room reservation-driven calendars tend to be clunky-looking and hard to use. And what’s more, they only show events that take place in reservable rooms— not cultural events in your area, academic calendar dates, scavenger hunts on the main campus green, etc.
Can’t you have both a room reservation system and a great calendar?
(You most definitely can, yes. LiveWhale has some great tools for managing room scheduling, but if you’ve already got a system in place, we can bring those events into your main calendar seamlessly.)
Because all the best things happening on campus wind up on Facebook and not on your calendar
People have a built-in incentive to use calendars, because they have events they want to promote. Take a look at your own calendar. Does it look like an effective tool for event promotion? The fact is, people who are promoting events want them to look great. They post events to Facebook because that may be the easiest way to reach a community, but also because they can add images, descriptions, and videos.
Can’t the events on your site be effective promotional tools for calendar creators too?
(You guessed it: Yes! If you’re trying to promote your event, a few words of text in an ugly table-looking page won’t cut it. When your events can incorporate photos and video, there’s a return on investment for your event publishers.)
But wait, can you also publish those events to Facebook automatically and have the best of both worlds?
(Totally. We’ll show you how.)
Because you’d like to have more people on campus creating and posting events
When more people can post events to your calendar, your calendar becomes a more dynamic and exciting tool. And when you’ve got a communicator or two to curate that content on main public-facing pages of your site, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for telling your school’s story.
For your calendar to be embraced by students, faculty, and staff across campus, it’s got to be easy to use; it’s got to be an effective tool for promoting events; and it’s got to be integrated with all the systems people already use, to minimize hassle and duplicated effort.
Is it possible for a calendar to be all those things?
(Heck yes, it is!)