Great Example of A Community-Wide Calendar

To me one of the key services any Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) can contribute both as part of its role and for its community in general is a through, comprehensive community calendar.

Click on the image to see two-week snapshot, the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau sends out to nearly 6,000 residents each week.  It is pulled from a searchable online calendar.

You’ll notice that it also provides a link where producers of any event held in Durham can submit their events to the editor online.  There is also a link to quickly share it e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc. and a place to forward to friends so they can subscribe.

The calendar itself can be mined for information on thousands and thousands of events throughout the year.  This e-version is broken down into types of events with a showcase example from the upcoming two week period but a click through takes you to a comprehensive listing for each type of event.

DCVB also has arrangements with other calendars, e.g. Duke to feed their events directly into the community-wide Durham calendar.

There are many ways DMO’s can do this and should.  No organization is in more need of the listings and in a better position to make a consolidated database of events available, providing a one-stop resource for residents and visitors alike, and saving other organizations and facilities throughout the community the trouble or reinventing the wheel.

DCVB can even customize a pull for any organization still reticent to be viewed as leveraging the assets of others.  DCVB launched the community-wide, consolidated calendar in 1990 at the suggestion of the then City and County managers.  It went online a few years later when the Internet became available.

There examples in other communities but none more comprehensive.  A community-wide calendar is one of the conversation-thought-starters noted in a toolkit for communities, shaped by a Joint Task Force of Americans for the Arts (AFTA) and Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) now posted for comment.