Hi everyone! Jamil Rhajiak here. For my first real blog post at UBCevents (though astute observers will note I had the first real post on this site), I’d like to share some of the great work that’s been happening in the Faculty of Education by their Communications and Web Coordinator, Bjorn Thomson.
The Faculty of Eduction has recently, like many units in the UBC-verse, gone through an entire website redesign, and turned to UBCevents to help manage the event portion of their website. Here are some of Bjorn’s thoughts on how they’ve used UBCevents:
Some of the benefits are immediate and others are longer-term. Potentially, UBCevents opens our events up to a much larger audience. We haven’t looked at how many more people find our events through events.ubc.ca, but we know it’s a widely-used site. We want our events to reach the public and to avoid the silo that many units end up in, where their events attract only internal folks.
Faculty of Education website screenshot
However, I think for us, it’s more significant that we can bring UBCevents RSS feeds into our sites. It’s all about the RSS.
Through RSS, we’re able to pull UBCevents feeds into both our departmental and Faculty site. Departments are happy because they can input text once, and have it show up on the UBCevents site, the Faculty site, and the departmental site.
As a communications office, we’re happy because we’re not calling departments constantly and asking them to tell us their events for the month. And we’re not missing events any more, which inevitably happens when you have a relatively big, decentralized faculty with lots of subunits. Content is delivered, so to speak, right onto our doorstep. That allows us to plan our promotions strategy in advance (radical concept, I know) and to prepare posters and so on.
We also use a content management system that pulls the events and actually creates entirely new pages for each event on our site. In other words, we’re grabbing your RSS feed to provide dynamic content for our sites (we hope you don’t mind). This is great for search optimization as it provides regularly updated relevant content automatically on our sites. Magic!
Does your unit have a UBCevents success story that you would like to share? Feel free to send it our way at info (dot) events (at) ubc (dot) ca.
If you are thinking about integrating a UBCevents RSS feed, here are some resources that are available to you:
- For a basic technical guide on how to integrate UBCevents into your website, we have a handy RSS Guide.
- The UBC Faculty of Education website