There’s a lot happening every day at the University of Iowa—everything from concerts and games to scholarly lectures and readings—and now there's a new online resource that makes it easy to keep track of it all.
The UI Events Calendar—located at events.uiowa.edu—provides a one-stop shop for information about what’s current and what’s popular. The system doesn’t just show you what’s coming up—it can also show who’s going.
What you can do at events.uiowa.eduSee everything: Stay organized: Get social: Find your venue: Spread the word:
It’s the single best source for what’s happening on campus.
Tag the events that interest you to get updates, or add automatically add them your personal calendar.
Invite friends to events, see who’s going, and integrate with Facebook and Twitter.
Google maps are built in.
Make it your first stop when promoting an event.
“The social aspects of the Events Calendar are what set it apart,” says Lin Larson, director of creative services in the UI Office of Strategic Communication (OSC). “Overall, this system is easier to use for people promoting events and people looking to discover what’s going on.”
Create an account
Everybody, everywhere can view the full range of public events on campus. But UI students, faculty, and staff who log in with their HawkIDs and create an account can access the calendar’s full range of functions.
- Use the “I’m Going” button to track interesting events.
- Get email reminders for events.
- Invite friends to go along, and see who’s going to what.
- Find event locations using integrated Google maps.
- Post event reviews and photos.
- Subscribe to a department's events and have them automatically posted to personal calendars.
Post events
Anyone with a HawkID can add events quickly via an easy-to-use form. They can link Facebook event pages, post Twitter hashtags, and add filters that associate their events with different departmental and general-interest calendars.
Topic- or audience-focused event sites like Arts Iowa and After Class are integrated with the central UI Events Calendar, making events.uiowa.edu the go-to spot for publicizing events on the UI web. Any changes to the original event post will show up on all the sites that pull from the calendar.
Add events to other websites
The new calendar system includes a widget-builder that makes it easy to add event listings to other websites. Event planners also can post private events that don’t appear in the public calendar listings.
“If you want to let the world know about your event and boost attendance, posting on the UI Events Calendar should be your first step,” Larson says. “For campus users, the easiest way to get acquainted with the system is to create an account and try it out."
More to come
OSC and Information Technology Services (ITS) teamed up to develop the new system, which runs on Localist, a commercial event-promotion platform. A core group of UI webmasters, marketers, and calendar administrators has helped steer the project.
Over the next few months, OSC and ITS aim to bring in other campus units, offer training for calendar administrators, further build the calendar’s user base, and eventually retire the old campus “master calendar” system.
Have questions about the new system? Email events@uiowa.edu for more information.