Vital Posts

Helping out the Calendar Master

by Richelle Thompson on November 28, 2011

Every congregation needs a calendar master.

This person oversees all the events in the church and coordinates with outside groups. The calendar master knows which group will leave the building spotless and which ones will leave half-full coffee cups on the counters.

It’s a heady, heavy job. Fortunately, a colleague discovered a free calendaring program that can help share the load.

The website www.localendar.com allows users to create and customize a calendar that can be integrated with a church or diocesan website. What’s really cool though is that it allows other people to submit calendar items – with final approval by the calendar master.

What I love about this is that the director of youth ministries can go on the web-based calendar and submit all of the upcoming retreats, complete with cost, contact information and other details. It waits in a virtual queue while the calendar master receives an e-mail about the pending event. Then the calendar master reviews and approves the event – at which point, it becomes public. (The check-and-balance here is that calendar master can also dismiss the event if it’s inappropriate or someone trying to spam the church site). 

This simple tool spreads the work. And hopefully it empowers others to check the calendar before scheduling events. 

For deanery or diocesan communicators, this is a great tool for topical calendars. For instance, we’re promoting it for Advent and Christmas events and inviting churches to submit their own calendar items. Normally we’re deluged with e-mails and calls, asking us to post various pageants and Lessons and Carols dates; this way, churches can put all the details they want, and our job shrinks to giving the final OK. 

All in all, I think the calendar master would approve. 

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Comments

1

Greg Troxell on November 29, 2011 at 12:46 pm

Great suggestions. At All Saints' in Carmel, CA we switched to using Google Calendars. We don't use google apps (our parochial school does but not at the church). What we've learned and are doing so far: 1) unique shared calendars allows us to see and manage all our events and facility uses. Each staff member uses gmail/calendars and we created several shared calendars: parish events, committees & commissions, community events at All Saints' 2) using appointment slots. our office secretary and even members can schedule themselves into any number of "open" time slots for pastoral care & financial assistance. 3) we created an "advertising calendar" so that when creating events on the parish events calendar we can "invite" advertising to the event (using our advertising gmail) which alerts the team to include the event in various forms of PR/Communication/Advertising. 4) use the "location" for rooms rather than the address and the "details" for contact and event information 5) print out a copy for office and bulletin boards 6) integrate the calendar on the church website 7) allow others/members to "add the church calendars" to their own gmail calendar list so that they view the latest changes and "details" to all our events at any time. Like you mention above, we've found many benefits to using their free web-based program: 1) accessible anywhere (computers and smart phones) 2) controlled permissions (viewing/editing rights) by staff, members or guests/partners 3) integration with gmail making invitations and RSVPs easy 4) free access, backed up, upgrades, support We are extensive google users also using: gmail, google + hangouts, google docs and taskforceapp[dot]com to keep our staff up to date with our various projects.

2

Richelle Thompson on November 30, 2011 at 8:45 am

This is great! Thanks Greg for all of these fantastic suggestions. I'm sending them to our diocesan calendar master right now! We use google calendar for most of our diocesan calendars but not in nearly as robust a manner as you. We added the localendar feature so that congregations could add their own events, which didn't seem like an option with google calendars ... but we'll have to explore more. Thanks for sharing the information with me -- and with all the readers of Vital Practices!

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