Online calendars are an effective and affordable way to improve attendance at your events and generally promote what you do. Zip them up with calendars, directions and sign-up forms, and you’ll have even better attendance. Here are a few tips to help you create your best-ever listings.

Full Attendance at an Event

1. Add a map.

If your event is in a physical place, a map answers questions about location before they’re asked. Google Maps makes it dead easy to embed an interactive map into the event detail page, and makes it easy for your attendees to find driving directions. Use the Link feature on Google Maps to find the website code you need to include the map.

As a helpful addition, add any site-specific directions, such as, “Second door on the right,” or “Parking permitted in Lot A on Sundays.”

2. Link to sign-up forms.

It should be dead easy for registrants to sign up for your event as soon as they learn about it. Create direct links to your registration form with a call-to-action button: “Register now!” If you don’t accept online registration (and you should!), at least provide a downloadable signup form in PDF format with mailing directions.

3. Write a full listing.

Brevity has its merits, but it’s helpful to create as complete a listing as possible on the event page. Include goals of the events, dates and times, speaker information – as much information as you anticipate people asking.

4. Add pictures.

Include visual interest with pictures of the event location, speaker headshots or pictures of people enjoying previous similar events.

5. Let attendees add the event to their calendar.

Many online calendars (including Drupal) let you provide events in a downloadable format, such as ICAL or ICS. Attendees can then save the event to their Outlook or other calendar program. They’ll have a hard time forgetting your event if it’s on their own schedule.

[Image: Flickr user shinyai]

The Talance team will be at Drupal Design Camp Boston this weekend at MIT. We’re looking forward to sharing designing and usability ideas with others who work on Drupal. We’ll also be talking to nonprofiteers and Drupal newbies to pick up insight into how we can help you better. Stay tuned for special reporting of the event.

Give us a shout if you’re interested in meeting up!

Stuff goes on at your organization, and you need to tell people about it. That’s frequently the level of consideration people give their website calendar. That’s selling yourself short. Calendar tools, especially those that work on content management systems like Drupal, are full of features that can help you engage more people at your site and your events.

1. Automatically publish and expire events.

Sometimes you want to add events that don’t show up until they’re relevant. Maybe there’s a special launch you don’t want anyone to know about until a particular date, but you don’t want to have to remember to add it later. By scheduling your event to appear on a certain date, you don’t have to. You can also similarly set events to expire.

2. Subscribe to new events via RSS feeds.

If you have an RSS-using audience, they can subscribe to your calendar’s automatic RSS feed to find out what’s happening as soon as you add it.

3. Feature special events on your homepage.

Some events are really special, and you want them to show up on a particular page of your website, such as the homepage. You can have a Featured check box that lets you highlight events without having to redundantly enter them in two places.

4. Export events in iCalendar format.

ICalendar format allows you to share event information and display events in different programs, such as Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar. You can have a tool that lets people automatically convert your website’s events in iCal format so they can easily add it to their personal calendars.

5. Add a date-picker to the homepage.

Rather than a plain link that says Calendar, add a little date-picker that lets people choose a date in the month and see what’s happening then.

6. Highlight what’s happening this hour, this day or this week.

Websites can look much more active if you can see what’s going on in the immediate future. Your website can automatically create lists to show what’s happening in set timeframes.

7. Set regular events to recur.

If you have a training session that happens every Tuesday of every month, you can add it once and have it appear on every Tuesday thereafter.

8. Create event categories.

Some of your events may appeal only to staff members, some may relate to holidays. You can create categories on each of your events to create classifications that show events that match only those categories.

9. RSVP.

If you have an event coming up that you need people to RSVP to, you can do it directly from your calendar.

10. Sign-up.

Similarly, you might need people to register for an event. Why not include the sign-up form directly in the event itself?