Localist CEO Featured in SmartCEO Magazine →

Our own Mykel Nahorniak is featured in August 2011’s SmartCEO Magazine.

Throw away your “month view” calendar Look at most websites that have a calendar, and you’ll likely be greeted with the infamous “month view” by default. Yes, the thirty-day grid of tiny text and limited real estate allows your users to see how many events are happening at a bird’s eye view, but when it comes to actually reading the information, the month view is the most inefficient.

Our research has shown that presenting information in a list view as the initial presentation is the most efficient, and best received by users. Our reasoning is related to why we also don’t sort events chronologically by default. People typically know they’re free on a certain day, so we provide them a way to quickly jump to a specific day and see more than just the event name.

Because the default Localist interface has no traditional month view, it takes a bit of adjustment for administrators coming from legacy calendars. Don’t fret - your users adjust very quickly, and will become more engaged as a result.

Want to read the rest? Check out our White Papers section

Top 10 ways to use Localist to engage your students

We’ve learned a lot about what makes a student respond to a school’s adoption of a unified calendar. Below are some best practices to get your students more engaged around events on campus.

Put a Localist widget on your school’s homepage
Many schools tuck their calendar behind a single “Events Calendar” link on their homepage, requiring that the user click that link exclusively to access the calendar. If a school includes a Localist widget on their homepage, the user is immediately brought up to speed on the trending events happening that day, and provides additional avenues to access the calendar.

Actively send newsletters, leaving students opted-in by default
Many of our partners consistently send out weekly “upcoming events” newsletters, and our student surveys from each have yielded an overwhelmingly positive response. On average, schools that regularly send newsletters are seeing a 10% click-through rate, which is above and beyond typical newsletter engagement of less than 1%.

Use Localist as your unified events calendar
One of the biggest issues universities face when it comes to managing events is that of decentralized calendars. Often, each department in a school has their own calendar; if a staff member in one department wants to share an event they’re organizing to the entire student population, it involves posting the event in several places and sending emails, without any guarantee of who exactly is seeing the event. With a unified calendar like Localist, there’s a single place to find all events happening at any one time, resulting in a more efficient, less confusing workflow.

Actively encourage students to connect their Facebook accounts to Localist
These days, every student is on Facebook. That’s why Localist has advanced tie-ins with it to keep students involved with your school’s events no matter where they are. Our integration allows students to send school events to Facebook, bring the attendee lists of Facebook events into Localist, share event details on their Facebook wall and more.

Create event groups to segment content
Localist’s powerful curation abilities allow your editors to slice and dice content into intuitive presentations. Show individual listings of academic, sports, and social events to highlight segments of events your users look for most often.

Add Foursquare profiles for your on-campus venues and link them in Localist
While Foursquare is a relatively new phenomenon, it’s already being used by many students on college campuses. A great way to keep students engaged is to create Foursquare profiles for all the major venues on your campus. Students can “Check In” and leave tips, which Localist can display on its venue profiles automatically. A great way to centralize information from several platforms.

Encourage student groups to use Localist as their event calendar, with widgets to post on their pages
Many student groups have their own websites, but at the cost of managing a decentralized calendar. Students have to visit the websites of each group to get a good idea of what’s happening. With Localist, groups can easily add their events, ensuring adequate reach, while simultaneously listing their events on the group’s respective website through a Localist widget. It’s the best of both worlds.

Give prizes to students who mark themselves as “Going” on Localist
A little healthy competition never hurts. Keep users coming back by offering incentives to engage.

Post events on Facebook and link them
Our tight integration with Facebook Events allows your administrators to link an event on Facebook to its respective event listing on Localist. This allows for a seamless integration between the two services, presenting more opportunities for information sharing.

Encourage usage on the go
Recommend that students and staff visit your school’s calendar URL on their smart-phones while walking around campus. They’ll be served with a mobile-optimized version of Localist that has all the features and functionality of the regular platform.

Want to read the rest? Check out our White Papers section.

Higher Ed Live: “Of all the calendar solutions, Localist looks the best”

Seth Odell at Higher Ed Live did a wonderful talk on the power of unified calendars at a university. He and Joseph Maddela go over the advantages a unified calendar can bring, and some of the challenges schools currently face when it comes to sharing information about on-campus events. Watch the video.

If you’re on the fence about implementing a new calendar for your university’s website, I strongly recommend watching this video to get up to speed.

Click here to jump to what Seth had to say about Localist: “There’s only one vendor that I thought really “got” campus calendars and made them look cool… that is Localist”

To address the content ownership question posed by Joseph, our customers are in complete control of their content and can export it in XML, CSV or any standard format of their choosing on demand, so there’s no cause for data loss concern.

Additionally, Maddela mentions the risk of working with an outside vendor, rather than building a calendar solution in-house. He argues that if a vendor goes out of business, all content could be lost. While the content concern has been addressed above, it’s certainly possible for any vendor to go out of business. That said, the only alternative would be to build the calendar technology in-house, which would cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. Looking at the overall cost/benefit, it becomes immediately apparent that working with Localist makes the most sense.

As Seth said, we’re just at the beginning of the unified calendar movement in higher ed. We can’t wait to see how the landscape changes over the next few years.

5 reasons why schools adopt a unified calendar

When a partner crosses its 1-year anniversary with us, we ask them to give us some insight on what they find most useful in having a unified calendar, and why they continue to use it.

Here are the top 5 reasons:

1. Vastly improves school calendar functionality across all campuses.
2. Drives student engagement more than any other events platform.
3. Promotes students engaged on campus with college sponsored events and student groups.
4. Provides appropriate tools for administration to help share information with students, faculty, staff and the community.
5. Retains students by giving them a sense of ownership on their social activities.

While a unified calendar platform is very powerful, it’s by no means a magic pill. Ultimately, the staff at a school need to recognize and actively promote the value of a unified calendar for it to be an integral part of a student’s college experience.

We’ll be sharing some best practices on how to promote a unified calendar next week.

Want to read the rest? Check out our White Papers section.

Johns Hopkins No. 2 in “social media colleges”

Based on analysis by StudentAdvisor, Johns Hopkins was ranked #2 in the nation’s top social media colleges!

Integrate with Facebook events

To help spread the word about an upcoming event, some events on a Localist platform are also manually created on Facebook by students. Many students would mark themselves as “Going” on Facebook, but their attendance wouldn’t be reflected on the Localist side. We’ve added a feature to fix that. When the URL of a Facebook event is assigned to an event on Localist, our platform will automatically pull in the attendee list from Facebook and append it to the “People Going” list. This will result in a much more accurate RSVP list on Localist’s event listings.

Turn this:

Into this:

Why we don’t sort events chronologically by default

One of our partners recently asked us why Localist doesn’t sort events chronologically when listing all events (example), instead sorting by our “trending” algorithm.

It’s a great question that deserves an explanation, as it sounds almost unfathomable to present a listing of events any other way.

Much of what makes Localist different is that we’ve rethought the behavior of how people use a calendar. We don’t just show a static list of events so all dates can be absorbed by users; other calendar platforms already do that. We’re presenting the information in a way that prioritizes events that are more interesting. Knowing when an event is taking place is secondary.

Our research behind this decision was based on what we wished we had during our own college experience, and by listening to what students on campuses today are asking: “Where are people going?” “What cool events are happening today?” Previous thinking pegged the important question as, “when is this event?” when the actual question a student asks is “would I want to go to this?”

In practice, a student will make the time to attend an event that interests them. The typical thought process from designers is that users will look at a calendar and say “I am free on Friday at 2pm. What is happening?” While that sounds correct on paper, most people actually make plans by saying “Wow, that event on Friday sounds amazing! I’m Going.” Thus, we prioritize events by relative interest over time of day.

That said, we do offer our customers the option to turn on a sorting drop-down to  allow users to sort events chronologically, but by default, our algorithm takes the reins.

McDaniel Launches its New Calendar →

Powered by Localist, of course! Our work with McDaniel demonstrates that every school, no matter its size, can benefit from engaging their students proactively through a robust events calendar.

The numbers don’t lie. Traffic on McDaniel’s calendar is up 2,000% month over month since switching to Localist.

Cornell's Events Calendar →

We’re really proud of this one. We worked closely with Cornell’s design team to deliver a highly customized look and feel that blends perfectly with the school’s brand.