Your vibrant campus community has a lot to offer students. But if they can’t find information about upcoming events, everyone loses. Event planners will get frustrated with poor event attendance, and students will feel disconnected from campus life, which we know helps with retention, engagement, and community-building. Building a campus event calendar is a great solution.
A campus events calendar offers the promise of streamlined functionality that connects attendees with the university events that matter to them. Also, building out the events calendar offers a unique opportunity for cohesion and on-brand marketing.
In this article, we’ll explore the benefits of building a campus event calendar. Take a closer look at having a dynamic campus events calendar and how to select events across a range of categories designed to engage every member of your campus community.
Why Your Campus Needs a Well-Organized Events Calendar
We know that involvement in campus life is connected to better retention, overall success, and student engagement rates. But involvement is often uneven, and some segments of the student population are disconnected from these benefits.
A robust and easily navigable campus calendar helps ensure that there’s a centralized location for event management. In turn, more students can find the campus group, in-person event, or virtual event to meet their unique needs. So, make building a campus event calendar a priority for the upcoming semesters.
Benefits of a Dynamic Campus Events Calendar
Imagine a centralized, dynamic campus events calendar with a clear landing page inviting current students, alums, and prospective students to explore the opportunities available easily.
By building a campus event calendar that’s centralized, it’s easy for users to quickly navigate through recurring events for specific student organizations, special events designed to bring together the whole community, and events geared toward particular segments of the target audience and their needs.
Selecting Your Annual Events
It’s important that your university calendar is robust and welcoming without being overwhelming. As you consider your annual events, look at these primary categories:
- Academic
- Social
- Creative/Craft
- Musical
- Cultural
- Community engagement
- University traditions
Academic
Academic events include lectures from high-profile speakers within specific disciplines and conferences that showcase scholarship. Particularly at institutions where research is a priority, you should aim to have academic events in multiple disciplines each semester. Draw from the rich pool of your own faculty and their work whenever possible. These events help showcase your institution’s strengths. They also provide ambitious, academic-focused students the opportunity to connect more deeply with their chosen fields.
Social
From small online events designed to help prospective students meet one another before coming to campus to campus-wide mixers that bring together the entire student body, social activities are a cornerstone of any university calendar. So make this a priority while building a campus event calendar.
It’s especially important to build in community-building events like kickoff week at the start of each school year and events targeted around shared experiences like finals week and graduation.
Large-scale social events should be spaced far enough apart that they feel unique and have a “can’t miss it” quality. Smaller, more targeted social events can occur frequently and in a variety of formats (virtual events over Zoom, in-person, and hybrid). This helps you meet the needs of students with non-traditional schedules.
Creative/Craft
Your faculty and student body harbors a ton of talent, and you can use it to create meaningful events around these creative crafts.
From poetry slams to art exhibits to theater productions, your campus calendar should be filled with regular opportunities to feel inspired and get involved with the more creative side of student life. Aim to include these kinds of event listings multiple times a semester. It can be easy to build a variety of offerings when you allow student groups to directly submit to the online calendar.
Musical
High-profile music events are an excellent way to connect the larger community to campus. From stadium-style concerts with big-name artists to outdoor music festivals, musical events are an excellent way to build connections and excitement.
Make sure you consider a wide variety of interests and genres to build excitement around these events from all segments of your student population and the community at large.
Aim to have two or three headlining events a year with smaller performances designed to appeal to a range of interests and tastes.
Cultural
Showcase the diversity of your student body and the rich experiences and perspectives they bring by hosting cultural events. These kinds of events are more important than ever as they help foster a sense of belonging and camaraderie between students.
Consider hosting film festivals, dance performances, art exhibits, and food booths aimed to highlight a range of cultural backgrounds representative of your student body. This is a great time to make sure your student groups have easy access to the calendar and can submit individual events with ease.
Look for an annual opportunity to hold a large-scale festival that brings together a wide range of cultural elements. Also, smaller, more focused cultural opportunities should be included throughout the year.
Community Engagement
From blood drives to community health expos to Earth Day celebrations, events that inspire community action and connection are key to a robust campus culture.
You can make your campus a center of community engagement by providing a centralized location for these kinds of events. Be sure to partner with community organizations and bring these event types to your campus multiple times a year.
University Traditions
Give your alums a chance to show their school spirit. At the same time, make your current students excited about belonging to a vast network of graduates. Events that get people dressed in the school colors, sporting the mascot, and excited about their membership in a fun community are invaluable to student engagement.
From sporting events to homecoming celebrations, make sure you schedule two to three of these large-scale opportunities to put tradition front and center each year.
Best Practices When Building a Campus Event Calendar and Scheduling Your Campus Events
The success or failure of your campus events schedule rests on your ability to coordinate the events seamlessly. It also depends on your ability to communicate them clearly. In short, your events calendar becomes the hub of campus life.
Scheduling your events is something of an art form. Here’s what you need to consider in order to optimize event posts:
- Avoiding repetition
- Minimizing overlap
- Avoiding scarcity
- Choosing dates and times
- Ensuring accessibility and inclusivity
Avoiding Repetition
When your event calendar looks the same week in and week out, students will stop checking in. They’re looking for novelty, interest, and surprise. It’s fine to have recurring events that are part of a specific student group. But you don’t want to fall into a routine so practiced it feels boring. So, make sure your event descriptions wow your students with the unexpected, creative, and new.
Minimizing Overlap
If you have three amazing events that all meet simultaneously and appeal to the same audience, none of them will be as successful as they could have been. When you plan a new event, you need to check existing events and avoid overlapping schedules.
Eliminating overlap and overwhelm is particularly important for large events designed to bring multiple segments of your audience together at once. These more ambitious events — especially ones that will require travel — should be spaced out on the calendar.
Avoiding Scarcity
Scarcity can be a powerful psychological motivator for driving sales. But it’s important to remember your goals of creating community engagement and a positive campus life experience for your audience. You want your campus calendar to be full of multiple opportunities for getting involved at many different price points (including many free events) and formats (including in-person, hybrid, and virtual events). Choose which events need an RSVP and which can be drop-in to encourage inclusive participation for busy students.
Choosing Dates and Times
Students, faculty, and alums are all busy with their primary schedules. Be sure to use your institution’s enrollment data on class schedules to plan the days and times of your events with intention. For example, suppose the art department primarily holds its largest classes on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Then that’s not a great time to schedule the art festival.
Ensuring Accessibility and Inclusivity
The modern-day student body is increasingly diverse—in many ways. Make sure that your campus calendar reflects these interests and needs. Your events should consider the physical and neurodiverse needs of your audience. Ensure that event descriptions and FAQs include details about:
- Interpreters
- Captioning services
- Wheelchair access
- Other accommodations designed to ensure a wide range of inclusivity and accessibility
Schedule and Promote Successful Events With Localist Events From Concept3D
Your campus calendar is at the center of your community, and your audience will benefit from a landing page that makes it easy to find the events they want. A centralized location for event management, including event pages, RSVPs, ticketing, and notifications, provides cohesion and functionality.
Localist Events from Concept3D is a robust campus calendar solution that makes it easy to add events with a submission form built to work seamlessly for all the event planners in your community.
To see case studies about building a campus event calendar and get a demo focused on your campus community’s needs, contact Concept3D today.
