Year of the Calendar
Positive reaction to Tulane's online calendar of events has increased markedly from a year ago. As many as 4,000 people a day visit the website, up 20-fold since a makeover last summer. Also, more event organizers are submitting events and reporting greater attendance as a result of posting their events.
Tulane's calendar of events spotlights featured events on the front page.
The newest calendar was developed with input from various university constituents and inspiration from other universities' calendars, according to Aaron Martin, manager of web communications. He adds that continual improvements are in the works, such as building departmental calendars.
“The calendar is significant for recruiting students and employees who look at it to get a sense of our campus life,” says Martin. “At the same time, it is vital to strengthening the community of everyone who's at Tulane now.”
Martin employs a Twitter account to promote events that are open to the public to the New Orleans community and to students at other local universities.
Besides improving the look, content, resources, searches and sharing functions for visitors to the calendar, Martin says that making it easier for contributors to enter events was important. “All you need is your Tulane user name and password to submit an event.”
The calendar provides several contributor resources including guides for submitting events, planning events, promoting events and a web image generator.
