To the Campus Community:
You have probably noted the deluge of e-mail messages announcing the many interesting events at Union—we have a very socially and intellectually active campus! The problem is taking note and keeping track of what is of particular interest to you: how often have you missed events you meant to attend because you deleted an announcement or forgot to note it down?
And how often have you arranged an event and sent out the required notice all the while dreading it would often slip by unnoticed or unremembered and thus unattended by precisely the people most interested in it? And what about the possibility of schedule conflicts where your event and someone else's compete for the same audiences?
And what's the best way to reach the broader community outside of the borders of the campus? Many folks from off-campus are interested in our events, but they don't receive campus announcements, are not on campus mailing lists, and don't know about special department events or lecture series which are edifying or touch on issues of great pubic significance.
An alternative avenue for reaching the community is now available via the Campus Calendar, a one-stop resource for our campus community. It is easy to use, keeps track of campus events and important dates and deadlines, can send alerts and reminders to your mobile devices or computer, and you can download it to your desktop or sync it with your mobile device and Outlook or even set up an rss feed (yeah!). You can filter what is most interesting to you – be it athletics (athletics events now feed automatically into the Campus Calendar!), the arts or academics. You can have reminders sent to you hours or days in advance.
And for planning events you can target audiences – faculty, the larger public, students. You can provide crucial information – details about the nature of the event, who to contact, the location and so on. This page shows how easy it is to submit information. The Office of Communications and Marketing is eager to help you understand how to use the Calendar and has provided documentation and videos at http://www.union.edu/offices/calendar. There will be an "Open House" for those who would like a friendly introduction.
We don't imagine the Calendar will immediately stem the e-mail deluge; we have to grow accustomed to using it, submitting events, going to it or getting it to come to us (via the use of reminders, feeds, etc.). Most of us probably have a set of 'favorites' we look at each day, why not include the campus calendar? Events, dates and deadlines are fed to the gateways and other portions of the website. In any case evolution towards using it, fast or slow, should bring tremendous benefits for Union, for the wider community and our recruitment efforts.
For a look at the Calendar, go to http://calendar.union.edu/ (be sure to bookmark this link!) and here is the spot for submitting events http://calendar.union.edu/oePublicForm.aspx. For further questions have a look at the FAQ ( http://www.union.edu/calendarfaqs) or contact Ken George, Director of Web Communications at georgek@union.edu; (518) 388-6432.
Sincerely,
The Liaison Committee on Academic Computing and Technology
http://minerva.union.edu/accsc/
