What’s happening tonight?

The Columbia Valley Chamber of Commerce thinks you should only have to check one place to find the answer and is launching a brand new community events calendar to bring all of the Valley’s happenings into one place.

“The feedback that we hear often is: ‘if I want to find out what’s going on, I have to visit multiple different sites,’” said Pete Bourke, executive director for the Chamber. “You might have to check six or seven different Facebook pages or calendars.”

The Pioneer can confirm that staff frequently have to search a variety of listings to get details for community events.

“It’s sometimes challenging to find updated information in any one source, so we knew we had to upgrade our calendar to make it more functional and to make it better. So we kind of took that and ran with it and have added some really great new features.”

The new calendar is easy to use, easy to understand and easy on the eyes, he said. It’s also made for sharing since everyone can take the calendar, customize it and add it to their own websites.

“It’s just moving into modern software, more modern technology, that should be more user-friendly for both people looking at the calendar and also for those submitting events,” he said.

Check out events

You can now use the Chamber’s fancy new calendar to check out all the upcoming events in the Valley.

Want to see only the ones in your town? No problem. Just click on the ‘categories’ heading to see only those offered nearby.

Add the calendar to your website

Everyone is welcome to take the Chamber’s calendar – for free – and pop it onto their websites.

You can even customize your version to only show the types of events you want to promote. For instance, you could choose to only display events in Fairmont.

“They can filter specific to their community or specific to their guests or to specific to what style of events they want to look for. If it’s live music they want to look for they can filter that. If it’s seniors’ events or children’s events they can filter for those as well,” he said.

List your events

When you add an offering to the community events calendar or your customized version of it, your event will automatically be added to all the other participating calendars, meaning you only have to post your listing in one place to have it show up across the Valley.

Even if you offer a recurring event, you can adjust the settings so you still only need to enter the details one time to have it post on every date the event occurs.

Eventually, event organizers might be able to sell tickets for their events through the calendar system too, Mr. Bourke said.

Space out Valley events

He said he expects the community events calendar will also help with another issue the Chamber has identified, which is the need to spread out the Valley’s offerings instead of holding a dozen competing events on the same day.

“If they are thinking about doing an event on a certain day or a certain weekend, they can see if there’s a congestion already at that time and maybe decide whether that’s the best weekend for their event or not,” he said.

Try out the new calendar

“Try it, use it, give us feedback,” he said. “The more that we can promote the Valley and the more that we can connect people to what’s here, the better as far as we’re concerned. We just want to make sure we’re spreading the word of everything good that’s going on in the Valley.”

To check out the calendar, add your events or embed a copy onto your own website, visit www.cvchamber.ca/events-calendar/.

If you have questions, would like to install the calendar, or need help adding your events, reach out to [email protected].