In part one we start a conversation about how Yodel is reinventing the local event calendar.
There was a time when the community event calendar was a corkboard in the front window. The reach of those promoted events were magnified with an advertisement in the newspaper. Then these promotional tools were merged into a page on a website.
Today, the event calendar has the potential to become something considerably more important, a promotional tool that provides the entire community with an international audience. The problem is that many organizations are still treating the event calendar like a corkboard or an advertisement. Someone must collect the events, enter them into the system, confirm the dates and remove old events. Then someone needs to chase organizations that forgot to submit their information and delete duplicate listings.
This process is taking place at the chamber of commerce. It is also taking place in the tourism office as well as Visitors and Conventions Bureau. But the three different calendars contain different information. This is where Yodel’s AI-powered event calendar technology transforms everything. Our platform is an “Event Cloud” that discovers, cleans, and continuously updates local event information based on the criteria you set.
More Than An Event Calendar
Rather than relying exclusively on organizations to submit events manually, Yodel gathers information from websites, social media, public calendars and other sources. It then indexes that information through a centralized event calendar. And that seemingly simple change has much bigger implications. Because an event calendar isn’t really about events. It is about people.
Ask a chamber of commerce, tourism office, Main Street organization, downtown association or municipal communications department about maintaining an event calendar. Often, you see the same expression you get when somebody mentions cleaning out the garage or gutters. It needs to be done and is important. Nobody particularly wants to do it.
Yodel estimates that chamber and destination marketing staff can spend approximately 350–450 hours annually gathering local events for their calendars. Think about that number and the investment of time and money it represents. Four hundred hours isn’t simply an administrative inconvenience. It represents staff time that could have been spent recruiting members, developing tourism marketing campaigns, working with businesses, cultivating sponsors, developing partnerships or simply talking to people in the community.
How Yodel Is Reinventing the Local Event Calendar
So, how is Yodel reinventing the local event calendar? The traditional event calendar essentially asks talented people to become data-entry clerks. Yodel proposes something different. Let artificial intelligence handle repetitive discovery and organization while people remain in control of the calendar.
With Yodel the system gathers event information from sources including websites, Facebook pages, Eventbrite, Ticketmaster and calendar feeds, with most sources updating approximately every 24 hours. That provides a substantial change in workflow and productivity. Yodel clients establish rules based on organizations, categories and other criteria while retaining control over which events appear publicly. That is automation with a human being still sitting in the driver’s seat.
Here is where the concept gets interesting for tourism professionals. Events are often the reason people begin searching for a destination in the first place. Yodel’s tourism materials make the case that events can become trip motivators. And a comprehensive calendar can encourage visitors to remain on a destination website longer and discover additional things to do. That transforms the event calendar into something more than an information service. It then becomes a hub for destination marketing infrastructure. Consider the possibilities.
Building a sense of community is the foundation for the development of tourism. And the local event calendar is
Written by Jim Hinckley’s America
