Managing Public Events with Yale-Localist

Through the main university events calendar, Yale-Localist enables you to manage and promote your public events, synchronizing event listings automatically to your Drupal 10 YaleSites website should you decide to set up the Localist feed. If you have questions about setting this feed up, or if your team is on Drupal 7, contact calendar.support@yale.edu.

No matter your role, these training and reference guides are designed to help you effectively navigate — and leverage — the calendar’s dynamic features to boost audience engagement with your event. Although the guidance contained here addresses how you can mainly expect to use the tool as either a calendar admin or end-user, it is not comprehensive, and we encourage you to visit Localist’s training guides for additional insight, recommendations, and guidance.

Please note that the calendar’s Editorial Best Practices & Guidelines should serve as an important supplementary resource to these instructions for both admins and users. To ensure consistency in Yale branding and presentation across the calendar, the Office of Public Affairs & Communications (OPAC) Calendar Team will be monitoring calendar use regularly.

Need assistance?

For technical questions about Yale-Localist not covered in these guides, reach out to the YaleSites team at calendar.support@yale.edu.

For content-related questions, contact OPAC’s calendar staff at yale.calendar@yale.edu for assistance. 

Key takeaways for calendar admins: 

Throughout this guide, areas where calendar admins must pay close attention are marked with “Important!” However, the takeaways below are considered the most important to remember when managing your events in Yale-Localist: 

  1. Multiple tagged campus groups: Do not tag another campus group if they are not an established co-host or sponsor of your event. Once the event is approved by any group tagged, that event listing will go up on every tagged group’s calendar. Further, for any multi-group event, content updates will affect every tagged group’s calendar. 

  1. Always, always, always tag your campus group for your events: Because of the shared admin dashboard, your event may go undetected in the pending queue if it is not appropriately tagged. Tagging your event with your group allows you to filter your search and streamline the review and approval process, avoiding confusion around whose calendar the event is for. This practice also ensures events will import to your YaleSites website if allowing for integration. 

  1. Check the Editorial Best Practices & Guidelines: How your event appears on the Yale public events calendar matters. This resource will guide you on editorial best practices for consistency and adherence to Yale branding and style. Remember: OPAC’s calendar team will regularly monitor the live calendar and happily assist with any style questions you may have. 
     
  2. Updating and deleting events when you have a YaleSites website with an integrated events feed: If your event needs updating, make those edits in Yale-Localist only — not on your YaleSites website. The Yale-Localist sync feed runs hourly; you can also manually sync the feed to your site if you need the update to come through sooner. If your event needs to be deleted, delete the event from Yale-Localist first before deleting it from your site. If you only delete your event from your YaleSites website, it will still appear in Yale-Localist until it’s manually removed from the system.

  1. Events on the Yale calendar are typically public events: Any events, meetings, or gatherings considered private or limited to a highly specific audience group should not be posted to this calendar. These include (but are not limited to) staff, student, faculty, or volunteer meetings for your campus unit or department; university classes closed to the public; and deadlines or calls for academic papers or creative arts proposals.