I’d like to explore the opportunity of creating a private community events calendar on Get Connected that only people with an agency login can view. This community events calendar could be populated by organizations selecting “private” or “public & private” when they create an event on Get Connected. Private events would only be visible on a private community events calendar that can only be viewed by people with an agency login. Public/private events would be visible on both the general public GC calendar that currently exists AND the private community events calendar.

The purpose of this calendar would be to help organizations with scheduling events so that we do not overlap. The reason it would need to be private is because some events might not be open to the public (donors only/invitation only). In these cases, we would want other organizations to know about the event for scheduling purposes, but we wouldn’t want the general public to know about the event.

Heather,

I am the current administrator for the United Way of Yellowstone County's GC website. I am very interested in a calendar feature similar to what you proposed in your April 7, 2017 post. Did anyone from Get Connected ever get back to you about this? What is the status of having a private calendar for community events?

Christopher, no, I didn't hear back yet. When I initially reached out, the answer was that it would have to be a system-wide change and couldn't be implemented only for our site at United Way of the Piedmont.

I'd be curious to see how many other agencies using Get Connected would also use this feature. Did you reach out to any other United Ways about this? Did you reach out to any other organizations using Get Connected? 

Since Get Connected does not yet provide this feature, did you move forward with creating a community calendar through another system? If so, what do you use?

We just had all our partners add their events to the regular, public calendar and denote private events as invite-only. I'd love to hear from other UWs, but didn't have the bandwidth at the time to do that.

1.19.2018

Good Morning!  I am the executive at United Way of Medina County in Ohio.  Did this calendar concept every come about?  We are very interested in finding a way to create this tool for our community.

Hi Cheryl, please see my response above. If you're interested in pushing this up to GC Admins, please vote using the up arrow by the number 1 by my original post.

Did I get the vote right; did it register?

Kelly,

In our particular case, there are 4 major funders in town and numerous nonprofits. There is a need to deconflict major fundraisers since they often have similar guest lists. Ideally, this calendar would be private to the public, but viewable to agency managers. There is no need for an RSVP function or any automated emails, as this wouldn't be used to drive attendance, merely as a method of ensuring that nonprofits aren't scheduling overlapping events. Let me know if you need more detail.

Kelly,

My initial goal is for an events calendar that highlights the major nonprofit events in our community. This would be a private calendar that I would populate and then share with agencies registered on our United Way volunteer recruitment website. Along the lines of what Heather mentioned, the primary purpose of this calendar is to allow our partner agencies to know when other events are occurring so they can avoid, as much as possible, hosting events on or around the same dates.