Ninja trick: Generate interest in featured events

Our thanks to Nicole To of Arbor Road Church, Long Beach for showing us what she does and allowing us to share her ninja trick with you.

What is special

The Arbor Road Church website has several calendar views such as Featured Events, Weekly View, This Month. However, what stood out the most was their Featured Event view: how they are using the current system to spotlight ministry events of their choosing.

Why it’s special

Featuring events is a great way to bring them forward, more to the attention of your membership, encouraging attendance and participation. They do not get lost in all the other wonderful things happening at your church.

And the events don’t have to be all in the same month. As you can see, Arbor Road Church’s featured events are over several months. This allows you to generate interest in upcoming events even before they appear on your current weekly or monthly calendar views.

At the moment, this cannot be done automatically within DCE. Nicole has found a way to use what there is to create this often-requested feature.
We are working on developing this feature.

Many of our church partners have asked us to create a Featured Events option: a way for D.C to automatically filter events of your choosing to populate this type of calendar view. Since it is a popular request, we are thinking about how to get it done. Yet, it is not always easy to add a feature since we are syncing from different ChMSs, each of which has its own coding and logic.

It looks like we might be able to use the “departments” feature in Church Community Builder (CCB) and the “tags” feature in Planning Center (PCO). You would create a special department (CCB) or tag (PCO) named “feature”. When syncing, D.C would be able to filter these “feature” events to the calendar view you have set up for them. We’re still experimenting to see if this will work and how it could display.

In the meantime, Arbor Church’s ninja trick is a great way to do this now.

How to

To do this, you will need at least two calendar views: your Featured Event view and another view of your choosing.

Basically, in the D.C Set up the tab, you are using the Show private events option (CCB) or Show hidden events option (PCO) to filter the items shown on your calendar view.

Arbor Church uses the CCB ChMS. Here’s what they did:

Step 1

Nicole created a separate group called Featured Events on CCB. She classified all the events in this group as “private events”.

[If you are using PCO, the events in your separate group would be classified as “unpublished” events.]

Step 2

She duplicates the events that she wants to feature and stores them in the Featured Events CCB group. So, now she has two copies of the relevant events: one copy which will show up on the Featured Events view (the “private” copy), and one public copy which will show up on the other calendar views.

[If you are using PCO, you will have two copies of the relevant events: one copy which will show up on the Featured Events view (the “unpublished” copy) and one published copy which will show up on the other calendar views.]

Step 3

In Display.Church (DCE), Nicole created a Weekly View calendar named Featured Events.

Step 4

In the Setup tab for this calendar view, she toggled on Show private events.

[If you are using PCO, you would toggle on Show hidden events.]

The result?

Since Show private events [Show hidden events] is toggled off in the other Arbor Road Church calendar views but toggled on in the Featured Events View, Nicole can add both the normal and featured version of the same event, but it won’t show as a duplicate on the other calendar views on their website.

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