Yesterday we ran a live webinar on how to create a community event calendar in Proxi. We had a great turnout and got a lot of good questions -- so here's a written recap of everything we covered, in case you missed it or want a reference to share with your team.

Why most event calendars fail

We started by talking about why the tools most organizations already use -- Facebook events, Google Calendar, Canva graphics, PDFs -- aren't actually built for community-wide event discovery.

Facebook buries events in the algorithm. Google Calendar is personal scheduling software, not a public discovery tool. Canva graphics go stale the moment details change. None of them live on your website, which means you're constantly redirecting your community somewhere else and hoping they find their way back.

The goal is to make your website the place your community actually checks when they want to know what's happening. That only works if your calendar is embedded, live, and easy to maintain.

The two views: month and agenda

We walked through both of Proxi's calendar views.

The month view gives a visual overview of everything happening in the coming weeks. It's great for planning ahead and for signaling to visitors that your district is active. A full month view tells people: there is always something going on here.

The agenda view is a clean, scrollable list of upcoming events in order -- exactly what someone wants when they're checking their phone on a Friday afternoon asking "what's happening this weekend?" It's also the easiest view to embed in a website sidebar or homepage section.

Both views update automatically when you add or edit events in your dashboard. Embed once, and your website always shows what's current.

How event submissions work

The question everyone has: how do you keep the calendar full without manually tracking down every event yourself?

The answer is a public submission form with an approval workflow. You share the form with your member businesses, local nonprofits, and event organizers. Anyone can submit an event. You review it in your dashboard and approve what goes live. Nothing gets published without your sign-off.

Chambers of commerce have used this to let members submit directly instead of emailing staff. Main Streets have opened submissions for festival weekends so organizers can post their own programming. Nonprofits have used it to let partner organizations add events without going through a coordinator every time.

You stay in control. The calendar fills itself.

Organizing events by group and venue

We also covered how to organize events using groups and venue tagging. Groups let you filter the calendar to show just one event series -- like a recurring farmers market or a restaurant week -- and embed that filtered view anywhere on your site. Venue tagging makes it easy for visitors to find everything happening at a specific location.

For organizations running multi-event campaigns like restaurant weeks or arts walks, this is one of the most useful features in the platform.

Embedding it on your site

The last piece we covered was the embed. Proxi gives you a short code snippet you paste into any webpage -- no developer needed, no ongoing maintenance. You can embed the full calendar, the agenda view, or a filtered version for a specific event series or venue.

Update anything in your dashboard and it updates everywhere the calendar is embedded. One central place to manage everything.