There was a time when maintaining a community event calendar meant somebody had a full-time job managing a clipboard. Event information arrived by email. Or if you are a bit older you remember when that information arrived in a stamped envelope. Then somebody copied the information into a spreadsheet. Someone else entered it into the website or created flyers. Then came the inevitable phone call: “Did you get our event?”
A few days later, another call: “The time has changed.”
And eventually somebody discovered that the event had happened three weeks ago and was still proudly displayed on the community calendar. That isn’t really an event calendar. That’s a part-time job disguised as a webpage.
Change The Question
For chambers of commerce, convention and visitors bureaus, destination marketing organizations, economic development organizations, newspapers and tourism offices, maintaining a useful community event calendar has always presented the same dilemma.
Everybody wants one. Almost nobody has the staff time required to make one truly comprehensive. The Yodel AI Event Calendar changes that equation.
Rather than asking already busy people to continually hunt for events, enter information, format listings, check dates and remove expired events, Yodel uses artificial intelligence to continually gather public event information. It checks websites, social media, online calendars and other sources. Yodel technology continuously searches hundreds of thousands of websites and social sources for relevant information. That seemingly simple change has enormous implications. Because the real problem with the old-fashioned community calendar isn’t the calendar. It’s the labor required to feed it.
Building A Community
A community can certainly use a basic calendar application. Many are inexpensive. Some are free. And some are perfectly adequate if all you need is a place to manually enter a handful of events. But tourism is rarely about a handful of events.
A destination may have concerts, festivals, museum programs, farmers markets, sporting events, theater performances, classes, fundraisers, historical programs, car shows, business promotions, holiday celebrations and hundreds of smaller gatherings taking place throughout the year. Then there are the events that never arrive through an official submission form. A local business posts an event on Facebook, and a museum publishes a schedule on its website. Then a nonprofit announces a fundraiser, and a venue changes the date of a performance.
The information exists. The problem is finding it and that is where traditional event calendars begin to consume staff time. Someone must discover the event, enter it, verify it, update it, or remove it. Then somebody does it again tomorrow.
An Investment
The software may be inexpensive, but time isn’t. What is your staff’s time worth?
This is where communities should change the way they calculate the cost of an event calendar. Don’t ask only: “How much does the calendar software cost?” Instead ask: “How many staff hours are we spending maintaining it?” Compare the price of Yodel with other calendar curation programs. Then compare it with the value of the time being recovered.
Suppose an employee spends several hours each week searching for events, entering them, formatting listings, checking information and removing expired events. Those hours cost. But the opportunity cost may be even greater. What could that employee accomplish with those hours instead?
Dare To Dream
They could be:
Recruiting a new festival or event.
Building relationships with local businesses.
Developing tourism partnerships.
Creating visitor itineraries.
Writing destination stories.
Selling sponsorships.
Working with historic preservation groups.
Developing downtown revitalization projects.
Creating social media campaigns.
Meeting with community leaders.
Developing new tourism products.
Automation doesn’t simply reduce expenses. It allows human beings to spend their time on work that creates value.
Traditional event calendar software asks: “How can we make entering events easier?” Yodel asks a more interesting question: “Why are humans spending so much time entering events in the first place?”
The Yodel Solution
Yodel’s approach is to gather event information automatically, apply the guidlines established for the individual community or organization, and publish the resulting calendar through a website widget. The system can be customized by category and individual event, and the calendar can be branded to fit the organization’s website.
The process is remarkably simple. Put Yodel on the website. Set the guidelines. Reclaim the time. That’s a pretty good three-step plan.
One of the weaknesses of many traditional community calendars is that they depend almost entirely on people remembering to submit their events. The businesses and organizations that understand the importance of promotion will submit their events. Others won’t. Some will remember three months ahead. Others will remember three days ahead. And somebody will inevitably say, “I thought we sent that to you.”
Yodel approaches the problem differently by continually searching public sources for event information. Yodel uses AI to gather event information from local websites, social media posts, online calendars and other public sources. That means a destination website can become much more comprehensive without requiring somebody to become the community’s full-time event detective. And that’s important because completeness changes how a visitor perceives a destination.
Yodel is designed to make more of that activity visible. This system can gather significantly more events than conventional community calendars and emphasizes its ability to continuously update event information. That matters to tourism offices because every legitimate event can become another promotional tool.
Give This A Thought
Think about the traveler planning a Route 66 trip. The traveler may already intend to drive through a particular community. But then they discover something happening that weekend. Now their trip changes. Perhaps they will arrive on Friday instead of Saturday. And perhaps they will stay an extra night. That means that they eat at another restaurant, add a museum to their visit, and take time to explore the historic district.
One event can ripple through an entire local economy. That is why an event calendar shouldn’t be treated as a glorified bulletin board. It should be viewed as a tourism-development tool. And that brings us to the next important question. What happens when an event calendar is connected to everything else a destination has to offer? That is where things get interesting.
Search engines like useful, current information. A constantly refreshed event calendar gives the destination website a more robust presence. And regularly updated event listings result in increased website engagement and SEO as benefits of its automated calendar approach. This is not SEO for SEO’s sake. The content is useful because people are searching for it, and when the searcher finds an event, they may discover the rest of the destination. That is the real opportunity.
The Power of Tourism
A good tourism website tells visitors what exists and it helps them decide what to do. An automated event calendar can be the bridge between those two things. It becomes part of a destination-planning system. And one of the best examples of that concept can be found on Route 66 in Kingman, Arizona.
In Part Two, we will look at how Kingman Tours uses Yodel as one component of a larger travel-planning portal, connecting events with historic attractions, Route 66, downtown exploration, storytelling, and self-guided historic walking experience.
Because the future of the community calendar is not really about calendars. It is about helping people discover a place and giving them a reason to stay awhile.
Written by Jim Hinckley’s America
