Twice this week I’ve been asked about online year-planner solutions. Roger is looking for a big-picture calendar that he can project on the screen and discuss with staff during planning of the year ahead. I’m not aware of any “year-on-one-page” calendar solutions, but I thought I’d share how my church is tackling this same goal.
Google Calendar is an online calendar solution that’s great for churches and church planning. Here’s how my church uses it.
- We created a calendar – it’s free and easy. Click here to create your own calendar.
- We then added calendars within our calendar. For example, within the one calendar we added calendars for:
- Staff Leave
- Year Plan (all the events happening at church during the year)
- Bookings for the church building, and our ‘Hall’ and ‘Hub’
- Community events
- Notices (what we need to announce at church at particular times)
- Website (what we need to update on the website at particular times)
- Finally, we determined who could view and/or edit particular calendars. For instance, only staff can view and edit ‘Staff Leave’ but a number of people can see the Year Plan – to suggest events that we might have left off. You can easily invite people to view the calendar, or if you would like to make a particular calendar public (e.g. to place on your church’s website), you can get the code to embed the calendar wherever you like.
There are different ‘views’ you can select for your calendar – you can view your calendar as a day, a week, a month, the next 7 days, or an agenda (ie. a list of the things that are coming up). Here’s what the monthly view looks like (you can click on the image to enlarge it):
Each calendar has its own colour (or ‘color’ for our American friends!) and can be ‘hidden’ at any time, so it’s easy to see all or some calendar events for a particular day, week or month.
This doesn’t exactly answer Roger’s question, but I hope it does many of the things Roger was hoping to achieve with an online calendar solution (and hopefully has been a helpful post for you too). Google Calendar is a great way for everyone to know what’s happening when, without each person needing to update their diary each time there is a change.
One of the best things about online calendars is that they eliminate the need to write events into your paper diary week after week. All those weekly meetings or church services that you had to write in over and over again (“Church at 6.30pm”every week for 52 weeks!)?
Now just set up a recurring event, and the event will automatically appear in your calendar as often as you need! Now that’s a definite time-saver and reason in itself to switch from a paper diary!
Another cool thing about Google calendars is that you can sign your mobile phone up to receive a notice (to any time/s of your choice) before any and all events. I use this feature all the time as it helps remind me when things are starting when i’m not online (and also it’s free!)
Steve,
thanks for your post-it gives me some good ideas. The challenge still remains is there a calendar that gives you a year at a glance?
@&rew – I think the email notification idea is great – unfortunately my provider isn’t on the list of supported carriers, so I miss out
@roger – sorry Roger, not that I could find. I’ll have to throw this one to the crowd – any ideas for a way of view the whole calendar for 2009 on one screen?
Steve
Have you found it a problem that events can only be in one google calendar at a time? For instance, when a special event from the year plan is occuring in one of your venues, don’t you want that event to be in both of those calendars?
Tom
There’s a YEAR VIEW lab that google made available for calendar. Not quite what I was looking for (it’s just a calendar) but it’s a start.
Thanks for the heads up Sean. Hopefully Google keeps on developing this functionality – year view is a feature I constantly hear people requesting.