Partner Admin handbook
Partner Admin handbook

Partner Admin handbook

PlaceCal Administrators (Admins) are the people who physically update the events listings and other information for their organisation in PlaceCal. They might also be responsible for other tasks in their organisation, like running the reception desk or answering phone calls.

For some idea of the knowledge you’ll need to be a Partner Admin, see

Partner Admin Skills

This guide takes you through the steps of creating and adding a calendar to PlaceCal.

Theoretically, once a calendar (e.g. a Google calendar) is set up and linked, a Partner Admin won’t have to log into PlaceCal or interact with it much. It should just run from the feed, and events appear on PlaceCal.

Not all organisations have people with IT skills. If any of this is outside your comfort zone, you can ask the curator of your partnership for help - this will usually be the person listed as public contact on the PlaceCal site you want to join.

How to create and import your events

1. Create a calendar in your favourite software

The core design principle of PlaceCal is to make it as simple as possible for you to get your events in front of the largest number of people.

Unlike other platforms, PlaceCal works directly using the software you already have in your organisation. You can see a full list of currently supported platforms below. This means it can take a little bit longer to get set up – but once you’re rolling everything you update is imported automatically into PlaceCal.

If you already publish a complete and up-to-date events listing on your organisation’s website, then stop here and send us an email, support@placecal.org. It’s possible that you already have everything we need work with. We can instruct your IT person or team how to import the information directly from your website.

If you already have a partial online calendar that has some – but not all – of your events, we can use that as a starting point. Maybe you use Eventbrite for all your big events, but don’t include smaller the day-to-day events as it’s too much hassle.

If you don’t have any online calendar at all and are setting one up, we recommend Google Calendar for small day-to-day frequent events, and Eventbrite for bigger events that need tickets.

Writing good event descriptions
Common Concerns

2. Create a feed link to share the data with PlaceCal

General instructions

TODO: Generic iCal

TODO: Generic ld+json

Platform-specific instructions

💨
Airtable
🎲
Dice.fm
Eventbrite
Eventbrite
Google Calendar
Google Calendar
Mac Calendar
Mac Calendar
🤝
Meetup
Outlook 365
Outlook 365
📤
OutSavvy
Squarespace
Squarespace

Unsupported platforms

Platforms we don’t support
  • Google Sheets - we can’t meaningfully import unstructured data. There are various Google Sheets to iCal integrations you can try but we can’t support these as they are constant moving targets.
  • Facebook - have closed their APIs and make it impossible to scrape public data. If you’re extremely brave you can try to improve our abandoned faceloader facebook scraping app but again, we can’t support this.
  • Fatsoma - they provide no suitable API or metadata output for organisers.
Platforms we could support with additional funding
  • TicketTailor - have an API we could use.

3. Add the calendar feed to PlaceCal

📅
How to add a calendar to PlaceCal

Adding Partners to a Partnership Site

A Partnership Site is a collection of partners and their calendars that are based on a shared interest as well as a geographic relation. For example - https://trans-dimension.placecal.org/

To indicate that partners belong to a site they must be given a tag specific to that partnership

image

This can be done on the individual partners page like the screenshot above. Or you can bulk assign to multiple partners on the individual tag page.

image

To gain this privilege a Root user will need to give you permission to access this specific tag.

Deprecated guides