How to Create a Calendar for Higher Education on WordPress
Creating a calendar for Higher Education or university group can be tricky. With so many events across departments, you need the right tools to simplify your complex calendar.Â
Luckily, if you run your university group or department website on WordPress, you have tons of great calendar tools right at your fingertips.
A calendar makes it easy for your community to keep track of upcoming meetings, conferences, celebrations, and other events. Whether you want to connect with faculty, staff, students, or alumni, a calendar is crucial for building up your community.Â
A calendar also makes it easy to sell tickets and crowdsource event submissions. You can even import events from others calendars to keep track of all your events across campus.
In this post, we’ll run through how to amplify your events by creating a calendar for your college or university on WordPress.
First things first: Does your campus group or department really need a calendar?
The short answer: Yes!Â
A website calendar helps bring your campus community together. It also gives your audience a reason to check your website regularly for updates and new events. With a website calendar, you can create a one-stop events hub for your organization.
Choose your tools
Once you have a website on WordPress, all you need to do is start picking your plugins and set up your calendar.
Whether you just need the basics or you need a way to sell tickets, crowdsource events, and import events from other calendars, here are a few options to consider:
When you just need a calendar
The Events Calendar is the most trusted calendar on WordPress with more than 800,000 installs and counting. Once you install the plugin on your site, you’ll have your calendar up and running within minutes. Create events right from your WordPress dashboard and keep organized with event categories and tags.
If your campus group or department needs features like recurring events or additional calendar views, opt for Events Calendar Pro, which is backed by our premium support team.Â
Tip: Recurring events are useful if you regularly hold events at the same time each week. Instead of creating a 2 p.m. staff meeting every Friday, for example, you can create a recurring event that repeats indefinitely.
When you need registration and ticket sales
If you’re looking for a way to gather RSVPs or sell tickets to events, check out the Event Tickets add-on to The Events Calendar.Â
You can use Event Tickets alongside your favorite ecommerce plugin to easily sell tickets and collect payments. If you’re hosting a free event, you can gather RSVPs in order to plan ahead and get an accurate headcount.
When you need to highlight virtual events and integrate with Zoom meetings
Use the Virtual Events add-on for The Events Calendar to highlight your online events. Whether you’re hosting a remote faculty meeting or a virtual conference, you can use Virtual Events to make online events pop.
Automatically generate a Zoom link when you create a new event, or embed a livestream from YouTube on your event page. You can also choose to keep livestream information hidden until attendees register or until right before the event starts.
When you need a collaborative calendar
If you rely on students, staff, or faculty to submit their own events, check out Community Events. This plugin simplifies crowdsourcing by adding an event submission form to your site.Â
Once people start submitting events, you’re still in control. You decide whether events publish immediately or if they require approval by a moderator.
When you need to import events and sync with other calendars
Sometimes, you want your calendar to show other events happening around campus. Whatever you need to import and sync, you can do it easily with Event Aggregator.
Events Aggregator lets you import events from Meetup, Eventbrite, Google Calendar, iCalendar, and CSV files. Schedule imports to run automatically for seamlessly syncing with other calendars.
When you need to get your calendar up ASAP
If you need to get your calendar up and running quickly and you don’t have time to configure plugins, try Loxi for an easy yet powerful solution.Â
Loxi allows you to create a custom calendar in minutes. You can embed your calendar on your website, or you can link directly to your Loxi calendar using your custom Loxi URL. Linking directly to the calendar is a great option for student groups that don’t have a website, or for sharing a link to a calendar from Instagram or other social media sites.