Tech Forum

Man, 34 stake calendars! We have five. What are we missing?

dbollard99 wrote:Omigosh!!! Fixed it!

That's good news!

dbollard99 wrote:So, problem solved for me. Although, most users in my ward will not know to do this I'm guessing, as i think the default is for them to be subscribed to all 51 calendars! And if they don't know about the 42 calendar limit, they will be confused as I.

That's certainly true for most users -- they either don't know about changing the auto-subscribe setting, or they leave it on, so they will be subscribed to all calendars.

dbollard99 wrote:I would still suggest that there be more than 42 colors available for those of us with many calendars. Or some other solution that I'm not thinking of.

It's tough enough to distinguish among the 42 colors, so I don't think adding more colors would help very much. But reusing some colors automatically when there are more than 42 colors, instead of using the white background, would be a big help.

dbollard99 wrote:Or is it just not recommended for the Stake to have that many calendars?

It's tough to say what the optimal number of calendars is. Certainly having more calendars allows you to have finer control in administration. But when you have a large number of calendars, you are asking your members to sift through a lot of calendars in order to decide what calendars are important to them. Just sifting through all those calendars can be a bit overwhelming to some members.

To take one example, I saw from your first post that you have a separate calendar for each of the 6 youth classes. I don't know, but you might also have a YW calendar, a YM calendar, and a combined Youth calendar. That would be 9 calendars. Such an approach lets you give specific control over the Deacons calendar to the Deacons Quorum Adviser, the Deacons Quorum President, and perhaps others. Then a Laurel wouldn't subscribe to that calendar and thus wouldn't see any of those events. There are advantages to that, but you have 9 calendars just for the youth.

An alternative approach is to have one combined Youth calendar, or perhaps Youth, YM, and YW calendars. Then you have 1 or 3 calendars instead of 9, which is a great simplification. You would then have to name events on that calendar in a way that makes it clear that this event is a Deacons event, and that event is a combined YM event, and another is a Laurels event. Subscribers to the calendar would see events they may not be interested in. But with this kind of approach, you might be able to run a stake with half a dozen calendars (our stake has only 8 public calendars, one of which is a Holidays calendar and another is used for reserving resources that are not associated with calendar events).

There are obviously pros and cons to either approach, and different wards and stakes will make different decisions, but 51 calendars does seem like it might be a bit daunting for your regular users.

dshepher wrote:Man, 34 stake calendars! We have five. What are we missing?

To me, there's two criteria for splitting calendars:

1) Do people want to subscribe/unsubscribe from a given category of events? For example, members without youth at home are not likely to be interested in the youth activities. Placing those events in the "General Events" calendar may prompt many of them to see it as "event spam" and not sync events to their personal calendars. That could affect their attendance on events that does apply to them.

2) Administration Different calendars can have different access controls. For example allowing YM to control one calendar and the YW another.

Obviously one can go overboard on the number of calendars. One general rule I use is if an event only happens once a year, it's not worth a separate calendar.

Here is a list of our 34 Stake Calendars:

[font=&quot]1. Activities/Events @ Maryland Pavilion
2. Activities/Events @ Topaz Pavilion
3. Baptism
4. CCSD Holidays & Staff Days
5. Facility Cleaning Schedule, etc.
6. Las Vegas Temple Schedule & Mtgs.
7. Liberty Building Other Units Activities/Events
8. Maryland Bldg - Other Units Activities/Events
9. Missionary Firesides & Meetings
10. Stake Activities
11. Stake Conf; Mtgs; HC Sun; etc.
12. Stake Ctr - Other Units Activities/Events
13. Stake Emergency Communications (hams)
14. Stake Music and Cultural Arts
15. Stake Primary
16. Stake Relief Society
17. Stake Single Adults
18. Stake Welfare Assignments
19. Stake YM/YW Combined Activities
20. Stake Young Men
21. Stake Young Women
22. Stake-BE
23. Stake-DB
24. Stake-HA
25. Stake-LP
26. Stake-PA
27. Stake-RB
28. Stake-SE
29. Stake-SI
30. Stake-ST
31. Stake-SU
32. Stake-WS
33. Topaz Building Other Units Activities/Events
34. US Holidays [/font]

What does yours look like?