Release

📆 Bring your community together online with our new Events module

Related products: CC Events
📆 Bring your community together online with our new Events module

Events are all about community, whether you’re hosting an online webinar, running your yearly conference, or arranging a local meet-up for your community members. As we see more and more in-person events being cancelled in the wake of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), getting your community together online and keeping them engaged has never been more important.

That's why we want to make it as easy as possible for you to publish and promote events on your community. Not only is this a great way to keep your users engaged, it allows you to measurably prove the value of your community platform within your organization.

By putting your online community at the center of the event experience you facilitate knowledge sharing between community and ensure the conversation around your event goes on long after it’s finished.

 

Thanks to @bjoern_schulze for suggesting Content Type: “Event” as an idea on inSpired!

With events you can:

:white_check_mark: Help community users discover events via the community with brand-new events widgets for the homepage and an overview page with upcoming and past events.

:white_check_mark: Boost interest and signups with event RSVPs (you can even use our platform as an end-to-end event management tool for more informal events).

:white_check_mark: Increase community engagement by promoting featured topics to encourage meaningful conversations before and after your event takes place.

We’ve prepared a whole new suite of documentation to help you navigate the new events feature - learn more in our events knowledge base.

Events functionality is also available via our API - see our API documentation for more details.

Let us know what you think of the new events module in the replies - we’re excited to hear whether you like it, and any feedback you have so we can improve it further.

Thank you for building this new content type!

I had two issues while setting up the first test event (on staging).

  1. The time changed on its own → I chose “Europe / Amsterdam (UTC +1)” as timezone and 10:30 a.m./ 2:30 p.m. as start / end time → after saving it was changed to 11:30 a.m. / 3:30 p.m.
  2. I can’t add featured topics to the event → neither when I search for text nor when I try to paste a URL any content is found

Apart from this it seems to work as expected (I still need to test the widget though).

For future versions the most important feature request we have is the ability to limit the visibility of the event (and therefore the ability to RSVP) to certain user roles. We regularly (on a monthly basis) do private events that are only available to our power users and right now we can’t use the event function for this because event details are should only be shown to users who signed an NDA.

We also suggest adding the comment function to events.


Thanks for your feedback @bjoern_schulze! We believe those issues you mentioned are isolated to your staging environment.

Great to get your input on future iterations of events as well - very much aligned with how we see the future for the events module :)


The current layout of the events landing page has a lot of white space, Wondering if it would be better to layout events as tiles like the groups page.


The current layout of the events landing page has a lot of white space, Wondering if it would be better to layout events as tiles like the groups page.

@aluciani thanks for your feedback - I can see indeed that with a lot of upcoming events, the page becomes a bit more challenging to browse. Copying @xiaoyu-shen into this thread :)