Mark your calendars! As of today (May 12), UC Davis has a new and improved online calendar, THE place to go for the most complete listing, all in one place, of what’s happening at UC Davis, from seminars and conferences, and arts and athletic events, to fairs, expos and exhibits.

The new calendar, from the Office of Strategic Communications, replaces a homegrown system more than 10 years old.

You’ll see the difference immediately: Images and logos, map links (for venues), search and filter tools, and “Add to calendar” and “Forward to friends” buttons. Open an event and you’ll see more options, such as email and text reminders to yourself. And, if event planners have opted to use the registration tool, you can sign up via the calendar.

Every event also includes easy-to-use sharing tools for social media. And you can easily subscribe to automatic feeds for all events that fit your personal criteria. Or subscribe to the entire calendar!

The new, Trumba-based calendar system is easily customized. A department, for example, can gather all of its events from the main calendar, and embed them as a calendar on the department’s website. This way, department personnel are inputting each event only once and displaying it in multiple locations.

“This is the first time we are offering one calendaring system to the entire campus," said Luanne Lawrence, associate chancellor for Strategic Communications. "Now everyone — faculty, staff, students and visitors — have a one-stop location to see the breadth of activities on any given day.

“I am looking forward to having this ‘One UC Davis’ tool provide a singular point of entry to the vast array of opportunities at our university.”

Sort the listings to your liking

Looking for today’s events? Open the calendar and there they are — as a detailed list, a simple list or in a month view. If you’d like to skip ahead, click on a different date in the mini calendar at the top of the right-hand column.

If an event runs for multiple days, you’ll see it listed for every one of those days — a big upgrade from the old calendar, which lumped multiple-day events into a separate category.

You’ll find the search tool under the mini calendar, and under that you’ll see three basic filters with boxes to check or uncheck:

• Category — Including “athletics and sports,” “ceremonies,” “conferences and symposia,” “environment and sustainability,” “family events for all ages,” “food and agriculture,” “health and wellness,” “lectures and seminars” and “workshops and training.”
• Audience — Including “all faculty and staff,” “alumni” and “all registered students.”
• Location — Davis campus, Sacramento campus and “other.”

You can also use prefiltered calendars, accessible via links in the upper left-hand corner. On each of those pages, you will see one or more related calendar links, allowing you to narrow your view within the broad category that you started with.

For example, say you start with “academic dates and deadlines.” From there you can drill down to “commencement schedule and graduation celebrations” and “university holidays,” among other selections.

Or, say you start with “arts, entertainment and outdoor events.” You can drill down from there to “Mondavi Center” and even further to “dance,” “film,” “music,” “speakers” or “theater.”

Oh, and here’s another feature: The calendar shows more than event listings. On the Mondavi Center pages, for example, you’ll find information about the venue: a photo, directions and parking, and ticket office website, phone number and hours.

Designated calendar administrators

The new calendar, like the old one, is open to all UC Davis departments and units, but there’s a change in how events are added. In the old system, anyone could enter an event, and Strategic Communications would review the listing and add it to the calendar.

Under the new system, departments and units are still entering their own events, but they don’t come to Strategic Communications. Instead, listings go to designated calendar administrators in the colleges and schools and administrative units. Once a designated calendar administrator reviews and approves a post, it goes live on the main calendar.

The process of inputting events is vastly improved. Take repeat events, for example, like the Meat Lab’s weekly sales: Instead of a new entry for every week, you simply check the “repeat” box.

Do you have events you’d like to add to the calendar? Contact your college-school-administrative unit’s designated calendar administrator, usually someone in marketing and communications. Not sure whom to contact? Send an email to calendar@ucdavis.edu.

“We want our new calendar to be as complete as possible, and that depends on everyone contributing their events,” said Strategic Communications Web architect Adam Napolitan, who has been working with designated calendar administrators around the campus.

A cornerstone of UC Davis website

All this prep work led to the calendar listings you see today. But it’s certainly not complete — not yet, anyway.

For example, the old calendar includes events that have not been transferred to the new one. “If you submitted one of those events, please consider adding it to the new calendar,” Napolitan said. “We transferred as many as we could, but we just couldn’t get to all of them — and we wanted to roll out the calendar as soon as possible.”

He said he also expects more departmental participation, once event planners see the new calendar and all it offers.

“You can give complete descriptions of your events, you can list the sponsors, you can add logos or speaker photos,” Napolitan said. “There’s a drop-down menu for campus venues, and each one links to the campus map.”

You can also choose the categories in which your event will be displayed to people who use filtering.

“This calendar will be a cornerstone of the UC Davis website going forward, as we work to bring greater awareness to all that happens at UC Davis,” Napolitan said.

“There are dozens of events here every day, and we’ve developed a robust and refined way to get the word out. Take a look, and we think you’ll agree.”

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