NPR Digital Services Blog

We’re doing some Public Events calendar training via the web this Friday. Not quite a full blown webinar, but could be fun. Let me know if you’re interested in joining in.

Date: Friday, March 4, 2011
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST

We’ll focus on reviewing how to enter and edit events, feature events, and set up your events widget. If you have specific questions, please share them with us ahead of time. And yes, it’s free to our clients.

Want to spice up the look of your Public Events main page and draw attention to certain events?

Feature an event! This brings an event to the very top of your calendar regardless of its date or category, and will slowly scroll through all the featured events.

It’s easy to schedule featured events, just define dates when you want the event featured. To make the page even more appealing try adding graphics to the events you feature. For examples, see KWMU and KPLU.

To feature events, log into your Events admin:

• Click ‘Feature events on your Public Events home page’.
• Search for the event you would like to feature, and click the Schedule button.
• Set the date range and order accordingly.
• You can feature up to 10 events at a time.

What’s going on this weekend? A reminder that you can easily feed event information to your station home page to let people know about upcoming events in two ways:

Easier: Javascript Widget
Just cut and paste once and event information will update automatically. Choose featured, by category or by date.

RSS feeds and the RSS Wizard:
Share and display event information through RSS feeds. You can adjust your RSS feed to highlight events from specific dates or categories. Then, use the RSS Wizard to format the feed and style the appearance via CSS.

For instructions:
Log in to your Public Events Admin, scroll to the bottom of the page, click “Events Calendar Widget and RSS Feed”

Example:
MPR Minnesota

We have added a new feature in Quick Pledge that allows you to turn off the automated email receipt that is sent to the donor. This feature was requested by several Quick Pledge stations that use the back office form to enter phone donations, and don’t want to send an email receipt for these transactions.

While in general we recommend leaving the automated email receipt turned on for most of your web pledge forms, the back office form can be different.

To turn off the automated email receipt:

• In your Quick Pledge administrative tools, go to Manage Pledge Forms.
• Click to Edit your back office form.
• Then click the ‘Email Receipt’ link and you’ll see a Yes/No radio button asking whether you want to send out a receipt for this particular pledge form. Choose accordingly.