If you don’t already take advantage of EventU’s public calendar features, it’s never too late to start. One of the simplest ways to get more people within your church and surrounding community involved is to keep a continuously updated calendar available on your church website. In order to encourage more people to become involved, your church has to make it easy to find out what’s happening. If the only place current events are listed is in the weekly bulletin, then that list of events is in the trash can right now.
One survey found that 70% of people that visited a church websites were seeking current event information. With EventU, you can show the latest event information on your website instantly, and automatically update it to reflect any changes. Each department or ministry can have its own calendar, making it easy for people to find information that matches their interests. Through a drop down menu online, visitors to your site can easily choose to view all calendar items for the entire church, or just the events for a specific ministry. Users can put in a date range so that they see one month’s events at a time. Also, the calendar page is a great place to put a link to “open registrations” if your church offers online registrations for any of the events offered.
For each event listed on the public calendar, users can click on the hyperlink that takes them to a pop up window with specific time and date information for that event. You can event click “add this to my calendar” and download the event as a vCalendar file and save it to your Outlook calendar. It’s really that simple.
For many people in the community that might be searching for a Mothers of Preschoolers group, Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, Bible study, or preschool class, the online public calendar gives non-church members a look inside what the church has to offer. It can truly be a window into your church and provide an entrance for outreach into the community.
More than just a convenient tool to minister to your church body, providing an online calendar can be one of the most effective tools to reach out beyond your church doors and welcome those who don' t attend church into the fold.
To read about how Westwood Community Church uses a public calendar to reach their community, click here.