Calendar Central Home
Overview
We're the FIRST...


Scenarios

Demos
Clients
Download
Support

Online Community
Building an Online Community on the Internet

Sarah is a marketing director for a large corporation. Most of her company's customer community already has access to the web from home or at work. Sarah is a visionary who realizes the potential of building an online community.

The company's target market is made up of a coherent community who share common interests. They are members of the same organizations and are looking for ways to communicate with one another. Sarah would like to use the company's web site and the Internet to provide a forum for this community. This accomplishes two goals; 1) the company will get a lot of marketing good will; and 2) this will dramatically increase the number of opportunities to make people aware of the company's products and services.

Before Calendar Central

Sarah had her staff added a Chat Server, Bulletin Board, and Calendar of Events to the site. The Chat Server and Bulletin Board have gone well. They are accessed frequently and are easily managed.

The Calendar of Events has received a tremendous response and accounts for fully two thirds of site visits. This has also proved to be the most time consuming part of the site. They receive about 20 postings a day (from 400 organizations) requesting that an event be added to the calendar. Someone has to receive the email, screen it, and update the site. One of her staff spends half his day on nothing but managing the Calendar of Events.

Viewers of the Calendar appreciate the information, but are frustrated at having to scroll through long lists of events to see the one or two that match their interests.

After Calendar Central

After spending just 30 minutes installing Calendar Central, Sarah's group contacted the different organizations in the community. She gave each organization permission to publish their own events directly into Calendar Central. Instead of sending email, each organization can now login and enter their own information. Each organization is restricted to entering events in the particular categories and locations relating to their organization.

Since the organizations are entering events themselves, the Calendar of Events maintenance is limited to adding new groups who would like to publish events.

Using Calendar Central, Sarah also chose to give each organization permission to embed the calendar within their own web site. There is a banner add displayed above the calendar which markets the company's products and services. Now, instead of one site for the company, it has a marketing presence on 400 sites.

Viewers coming to the site are very pleased with the new graphical calendar. They are able to select the locations and types of events they are interested in - that's exactly what they see.