There is a lot happening at your church, and you want to make sure everyone feels welcomed and informed. You want events seen in all the right places, and to remove the risk of mis-publishing information. Plus, you want a church website calendar that connects all the dots for you, keeping your community and groups organized.
Here are some tips for effectively using a calendar feature on your church website.
A homepage calendar or list of upcoming events immediately communicates a vibrant church community to website visitors. That’s a great first impression! Just don’t over-crowd this list of highlighted happenings or it will be too difficult for people to navigate.
This calendar should contain events welcoming all or a good portion of your flock. Consider your worship times, church socials and picnics, coffee and donut hours, service days, large annual happenings for youth like lock-ins.
It’s best to leave off regular group meetings on your homepage calendar. For example, a Habitat for Humanity group’s weekly meetings would be best elsewhere; however, their big annual fundraiser or community build days would look great for a homepage calendar.
Remember those Habitat for Humanity weekly meetings? Those would be perfect for a calendar located on an interior page about that ministry. Or on a page sharing a directory of your service ministries.
Beyond a meeting and event calendar, ministry pages can also include short descriptions, welcome messages, shared group documents, leader contact information, email sign ups, and even news posts about major happenings. Whatever you add, the calendar itself will be a big reason for people to return to the web pages about their own groups.
Utilizing a website calendar tool that allows your event to show in multiple places without having to create a new post every time, is a key function that will save time and confusion.
Take, for example, a youth field day. This event involves your children’s religion classes, youth groups, and the bible group members who serve as event volunteers. However, different groups will need different event information.
The youth field day event needs to appear on the homepage calendar because it’s a pretty big deal. The same post also needs to publish on the youth group, children’s religion, and bible group calendars and pages. Now everyone, no matter their role, will have the information at hand.
An integrated calendar tool (like the one that comes with GabrielSoft) also means that any change made to the event will populate on every calendar it appears. The big plus is that information will remain consistent across your website.
When calendar events have several details (just like in our youth field day example), consider using a link in place of a calendar descriptions. This way you can direct people to the best resource when they click for more details.
Having a calendar tool that can link events to other locations is a must and perfect for when you have an entire webpage dedicated to an event, or when ticket sales are located at a third-party solution. Send your members to these most valuable pages the moment they click on a date listed in the calendar.
A big challenge can come when ministries plan events and need to see space availability. Looking at event calendars won’t give them details like volunteers arrival time versus attendee arrival time.
This is when your website calendar can become even more versatile. By creating a calendar specifically for facility use, you can add internal information, such as the exact time that a space is occupied from set up to clean up. And if your website platform allows it, you can even make this page private to only your staff and group leaders.