The Hubvine Blog

Automagically Create Facebook Events

Did you know that every time you add an event to Hubvine, you could create a Facebook Event posting as well? Well, we have found a great third-party Facebook app that will allow you to do just that.

If you’re hosting a community calendar, you could also be doing your community members a solid by posting their events in your Facebook stream, helping to promote their events every time you approve one of their events on your calendar.

Sound interesting yet? Here’s how you can do this:

1. First, visit the iCal to Event main page.
2. In the upper left-hand corner, click on “Subscription List.” This will begin the process of having Facebook ask you to give the app permission to get access to your account.
3. Start a new browser tab or window, and login to your Hubvine profile. Then go to the admin panel for your chosen Group or Community profile.
4. In your admin panel, click on the Calendar tab. You will find your iCal URL here (this is available only for Hubvine Group and Community profiles).
5. Copy the iCal URL from your Hubvine profile.
6. Return to the iCal to Event page, then click on “subscribe a new calendar.”
7. Fill in the fields as you wish, pasting in the iCal URL you copied from your Hubvine account into the appropriate field.
8. When finished, click on “Subscribe.”

This will now link your Hubvine profile with your Facebook profile (or Facebook Page). Typically, a few hours after a new event is added to your Hubvine profile, you can expect it to show up in your Facebook stream. 

Here are some additional things to know:

• The first time you subscribe a calendar to your Facebook page, it will pull in all current events (it will skip events from the past). As you go forward, it will only add events to your Facebook stream as you add them to your Hubvine calendar.
• If you delete an event from your Hubvine account, it will also delete the event from your Facebook stream, although this may be delayed by several hours.
• Updates to events in your Hubvine profile will NOT appear in the Facebook Event listing - this is a limitation of the Facebook API and the iCal to Event app.
• This is a third-party app. Hubvine has no connection with this app, and this app was not built by Facebook. Any issues, concerns, or support requests should be directed to the owner of the app.
• Full documentation on this app is available from the app developer.

An Easier Way to Promote Events Online

Are you looking for ways to promote your events online? There’s tons of suggestions out there, such as this site that has 8 ways to promote your events, or this one (with 20 ways), or this one with a bunch of ideas, or a YouTube presentation with a lot of ideas, and more.

Go ahead and click on those links, but to save you some time, here’s a brief summary:

• Post your event to as many different online resources as possible.

That’s it. How they say it is different, but in the end, that’s all they are telling you to do. If we want to get a little deeper, here’s a more specific summary:

• Get your events on the big websites (like Facebook, LinkedIn, Upcoming.org, etc.)
• Get your events on as many local calendars as possible.
• Get your event on your own website, blog, Facebook page, etc.

And you know what? They are correct. The best way to promote your event is get your event noticed, and one of the best ways to do that is to put it up in as many places as you can (the real world equivalent of putting up posters all over town).

The problem is that it is a tedious, difficult, and mind-numbing process. Some have called it “soul sucking.” It requires multiple logins, account user names, passwords, and website visits. Each website has it’s own webforms, with it’s own requirements of data to be entered, frequently making you come up with new event descriptions so you can fit it into their requirements. In the end, the process barely feels worth it.

We’re trying to make this process easier. By using Hubvine, you can enter your event data once into your Hubvine profile, and with that singular effort, you can:

• update your own website
• automatically update your Facebook page with a Facebook event
• create an event listing at Upcoming.org
• get your event listed on a growing list of local calendars

What once may have taken 2 hours of work and hassle can now be done in just a few minutes. That’s how we help and make it easier than ever to promote your events online.

Try us out for free and let us know how it works for you!

7 Tips to Promote Your Event Online

Thanks to all of our Hubviners for choosing Hubvine to promote your events! We are growing rapidly and are very appreciative of all the support we receive.

We are working hard on our end to help make it easier for you to promote your events to many websites. As with any system, some good ideas can really kick start a program. Here are 7 tips to get the most out of Hubvine:

1. Open strong — The summary field for events is used everywhere your event is listed, so make this the best 200 character pitch for your event you possibly can.
2. Always finish — The description field is used with your summary on your event landing page. While your summary is the best 200 character pitch for your event, the description should delve deeper and provide more details for those that want to know more about your event. If they got past the summary, the description is what’s going to sell them on your event.
3. Add images to your event landing page — All Group and Community profiles can add their own logos and sponsor logos to their event landing pages. It’s a very simple thing to do, with a big benefit to your landing page. Don’t skip this one! [How to add images to your landing page »]
4. Show off your own calendar — Hubvine gives you a calendar that you can embed in your own website, blog, and you can even add your calendar to a Facebook page. Put this calendar in as many places as you can to help give your events as much visibility as possible. And using this tip will automatically update at least 3 different websites every time you add a new event to your calendar. 
5. Use social media — After you publish your event, visit the landing page and click on the social sharing buttons. With just 3 clicks, you’ll share your event on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
6. Get listed on calendars — Hubvine has a rich network of community calendars that want to list your event. Become a member of as many calendars as you can. Then share your event with other calendars — it only takes a few clicks to make it happen.
7. Try the iCal feed — All Group and Community calendars on Hubvine receive an iCal feed. This can be used to automatically update Facebook with Facebook events (not just wall posts), create an “upcoming event” feed on WordPress, allow you to use the native Joomla or Drupal calendar, update Upcoming.org, share information with Outlook and Google calendars, and much more. 

How do you use Hubvine? What tips or tricks would you recommend to someone who is looking to promote their events?

Promote Your Events on Upcoming.org with Hubvine

We recently announced that all Group and Community profiles on Hubvine will now be able to export their calendars as an iCal (.ics) file. This means you can connect your Hubvine calendar to many other websites, thus promoting your events without the hassle of having to re-enter your data all over the Interwebs.

One website of note that will allow you to promote your events through iCal is Upcoming.org. Here’s how you can do this:

1. Visit Upcoming.org and signin or create a new account. 
2. Click on “Add and Event.”
3. Click on “Upload Events.”
4. Scroll down to “Submit an iCal URL.”
5. Copy and paste your iCal URL into this field (you can find your iCal URL in your Hubvine account: go to your Hubvine Dashboard, click on the Admin button, then the Calendar tab).
6. Choose up to 3 categories for your events.
7. Click “Submit.”

You will then be given the opportunity to edit or delete any of the events uploaded to Upcoming. When you are done, click on “Finish Import,” and your events will be added to the Upcoming calendar!

Note that this is not a real subscription. You will need to go through these steps every time you want to add events to Upcoming, as it will not continuously read your iCal file. This is a decision made by Upcoming. Still, a lot of your event information is already added for you, so this process will save you a lot of time, plus will get your events listed on a great calendar.

Another benefit is that we add your landing page URL to the event description, which means your event page will be getting some great Search Engine love with the link-back to your event page!

How to Upgrade Events in Hubvine

If you’re looking for a great way to promote your events online, Hubvine’s free service is a great way to go. But sometimes you might realize you want a bit more. (Compare the different Hubvine proflies.)

If you’ve decided to upgrade to a Group or Community profile, you can take your existing events with you. Here’s how:

1. First, create your new profile (either a group or a community).
2. From your Hubvine Dashboard, click on the edit button for the event you want to move to the new profile.
3. In the section marked “Who Owns this Event,” click the drop down menu and choose the appropriate profile name.
4. Click “update,” and the event will be moved to the appropriate profile’s calendar, with all the benefits that come with it.

How to Get the Most from Your Community Calendar

Having a community calendar can be a great way to get your community involved. But simply having a community calendar isn’t enough. Here are a few tips on how to promote the use of your community calendar, and how it can benefit both your community and those that look to it for information.

Our first tip is perhaps the most difficult. However, even if you can’t pull it off, it will put you in the right mindset for all the other tips.

• Find a sponsor. Find a person, company, or some organization willing to put a few dollars towards a calendar sponsorship. Be careful how you do this, as there shouldn’t be any conflict of interests. However, if done well, this could boost not only the visibility of your calendar (and the sponsor), but it can also increase the credibility of your calendar, because the events will also be associated with that sponsor’s brand. With (or perhaps without) a sponsor in hand, your task becomes easier: start thinking about what would help make your calendar sponsor happy (hint: more eyeballs on the calendar).
• Highlight your community calendar wherever you have an online presence. Your calendar should be wherever your community can find you, such as a Facebook page, Twitter account, blog, or any other web/social media profiles you may have for your community. If, for any reason, your calendar cannot be displayed on a particular website/platform, then let people know where it can be found.
• Market the calendar. Don’t be shy—tell your members about the calendar. Tell others about the calendar. If you let your calendar become a secondary (or worse) level benefit for your members, then that’s how it will be received—and treated—by those involved, and that includes those that look at your calendar for information as well as those that would want to submit events.
• Actively recruit events. Invite others to post events. Place links on your website, in Facebook updates, in your email newsletters, and anywhere else you use to communicate with your community. Basic rule here is if you ask, and you shall receive.
• Actively promote events on your calendar. Whenever anyone posts an event to your calendar, tell people about that event on all your other online channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and let them know it came from your calendar.
• Create additional benefits for listed events. Write a blog post or email newsletter article on special events on your calendar. Give away promotional items, or provide free membership to dues-paying communities. The requirement would be that anyone who posts an event to your calendar are automatically entered into any kind of benefit.

If you have other ideas that you have used that have benefited your community and its event calendar, let us know with a comment below!

How to Add a Calendar to Your Facebook Page

When you have an event you want to promote — whether that event is yours or from your community — you want to list that event on as many web properties as possible. One of the most important web sites is Facebook. 

With Hubvine’s embeddable calendar, you can now place your calendar on your organization’s Facebook page, which gives you yet another place to share your event.

How to Add a Calendar to Your Facebook Page

1. Log in to your Hubvine account.
2. From your Hubvine Dashboard, click on the admin button for the profile’s calendar you wish to add to Facebook.
3. Click on the Calendar tab, then customize your calendar based on these suggestions:
   1. In the options for “Show,” deselect: Title and Tabs
   2. Set width to 400 pixels
   3. Set height to 600 pixels
   4. Click “Update HTML.” This will refresh the calendar and display it with your customizations. Leave this page open for now…
4. Open a new browser window (or tab) and log in to your Facebook account.
5. In Facebook, find the Iframe Apps page (we’ve linked to it here).
6. Accept the app, and follow through on its install instructions.
7. If you are an administrator to more than one Facebook page, choose the Facebook page you wish to add the Hubvine calendar to.
8. Return to your Hubvine page with your customized calendar. Copy the code displayed above your calendar.
9. Return to the browser with the Iframe Apps page in Facebook. Paste the code you copied from Hubvine into the field marked Text of HTML.
10. Click “submit” on the Iframes Apps page, then visit your Facebook page.

Congratulations! You’ve now published your Hubvine calendar to your Facebook Page. If you wish to customize it further, here are some additional steps.

How to Customize the New Calendar Tab

1. On the left-hand side of your Facebook page, you’ll notice a new tab labeled ”Welcome.” If you wish to change the name of this tab, follow these steps:
   1. Click on the “Edit Page” button in the top right of your Facebook Page.
   2. Click on “Apps” on the left hand side of the page.
   3. Find Iframe Apps in the list, then click on “Edit Settings.”
   4. In the field labeled “Custom Tab Name,” enter in the new name of your tab. We recommend something like Community Calendar or Events Calendar.
   5. Click on Save, then Okay.
   6. Return to your Facebook page, and you’ll see the new name in your page’s tabs.
2. On your Facebook page, you’ll see your new tab listed at the bottom of all the other tabs. If you wish to change the order of your tabs, follow these steps:
3. At the bottom of the list of tabs for your page, click on the linked labeled “Edit”.
4. Click and drag the tabs into any order you wish.
5. When you are done, click “Done.”

How to Add a Calendar to Your WordPress Site

The most important website on the Internet is your own. When promoting your events, this should be the first site you update with your event information. However, the process of updating your own site, plus promoting your event on several others is tedious at best, and possibly — as some people have described it to us — a soul-sucking experience at worst.

The goal of Hubvine is to help make this a whole lot easier. In previous posts, we’ve discussed how to share your events with other calendars, but today we’re going to show you how easy it is to update your own website. To do this, you will need to place your Hubvine calendar on your website. Once that is done, updating it with your events is as easy as a click of a button.

Adding a Hubvine Calendar to Your WordPress Site

The instructions below illustrate how you can add a calendar to a site powered by WordPress, and hosted on a service such as GoDaddy, DreamHost, and other similar services. However, if your WordPress site is hosted by WordPress.com, these steps will not work for you, as they do not allow for our technology to be implemented on their servers (we use iFrames to embed our calendars, just like Google calendars and many other applications). 

Here’s what you’ll need to do to prepare your WordPress environment:

1. Login as an Administrator.
2. On the left navigation, click on Pages, then click on Add New.
3. Give the new page a title, such as Event Calendar.
4. Where you would enter in content for the page, click on the HTML tab.

We are going to leave WordPress for a moment, but we’ll come back to it soon. We’re going to now go into Hubvine and setup our calendar, which we’ll bring back to WordPress.

1. Open a new tab or browser window, and login to your Hubvine account.
2. From your Hubvine Dashboard, click on the Administrator button  for the profile you want to use. 
3. Click on the Calendar tab.
4. From here you can customize the appearance of your calendar. Make whatever changes you want, then click on the “update HTML” button.
5. Highlight all the code shown in the text box below the “update HTML” button, then copy the text.
6. Go back to your WordPress environment.
7. Paste your Hubvine code into the HTML tab in your new page in WordPress.
8. Click on the Preview button to ensure you’ve embedded your calendar correctly. If things check out, click on the Publish button, and you’re calendar will be added to your site!

Adding Events to Your Calendar

Now that your calendar is embedded in your site, every time you add a new event in Hubvine, your calendar will automatically be updated. For more information on creating events in Hubvine, read our previous blog post “How to Create Events in Hubvine.”

Adding Images to Landing Pages

One of the benefits of using Hubvine to list your events is you receive a well thought-out, cleanly designed landing page for each of your events. One of the options you have to help improve your page is to add your logo and the logos of any event sponsors. Here’s a great example of a fully realized landing page from Turnstone.

Note: this option is available only to Group and Community profiles.

To add your logo to your landing page, follow these steps:

1. You will need to have an event listed in your calendar. For more information on how to create an event, read How to Create Events in Hubvine.
2. From your Hubvine Dashboard, click on the “Landing Page Options” button for the event you want to update. It looks like this: 
3. At the top of the next screen you see, check the box marked “Add Event Owner Logo.” This will use the image associated with the Hubvine profile marked as the “owner” of the event. If you have not yet uploaded a custom image (and are still using our default image), your landing page will not display an image, but will still show your profile’s name in text.
4. Click on the “Done” button at the bottom of the page when you are finished.

To add a sponsor image to your landing page, follow these steps:

1. Follow steps 1 and 2 above.
2. In the section marked, “Add Event Sponsor Logos,” click on “update” in the Sponsor 1 position. 
3. This will open a dialog box that will allow you to upload an image to Hubvine. 
4. Continue to do this to add additional sponsors if needed.
5. Click on the “Done button at the bottom of the page when you are finished.

Note that the images will display in order. That is, the image in the Sponsor 1 position will be the top listed sponsor, followed by the image in the Sponsor 2 position, etc.

How to Share Events on Hubvine

One of the best reasons to use Hubvine is that you can get your event listed on many calendars with minimal effort. Today we’ll show you just how easy it is to publish your event on multiple calendars.

You should have an event on your own calendar first. (Here are some tips on how to create an event in Hubvine.) Beyond having an event in your own calendar, you’ll want to make sure you’re connected to other calendars. Here’s how you can do this:

1. Visit the Hubvine Community Calendar Directory. Check out which cities/regions you want to connect with, then start choosing calendars you think would be a good fit for your events. Then click on the “join calendar” button.
2. This will take you to that community’s profile page. There, you will be able to see who else can share events with this calendar, the current list of events, as well as any rules the community might have as to who can post events and what types of events they’ll accept. If you think it’s a good fit, click on “become a member.”

You will receive an email notification once you have been approved for a calendar. Another way to see if your membership has been approved is to go to your Dashboard, click on the Share button, and see what calendars are listed. Only calendars you’ve been approved to share with are listed there.

Once you’ve been approved, head to your dashboard, click on Share for the event you wish to have listed on another calendar, then click “select” to share the event with the chosen calendar. That’s it! 

Once you’ve made a connection to a calendar, you won’t have to go through that process anymore. Just create your event, then click on Share from your Dashboard and select the calendars to share your event. What once would have taken you hours can now be done in minutes. We think that’s pretty cool.

Oh, and what happens later when you need to update your event’s information with a new venue, time, date, or some other important data? Click on Edit Event Info, update your event, and your event will be updated everywhere that it is listed.