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Put it on the Calendar

The Duke Event Calendar is an easy way to showcase, find out about campus events

Pages showcasing events on the Duke Event Calendar.

As the program coordinator for Duke’s Program for Arts of the Moving Image, Hank Okazaki helps organize around 30 film screenings each semester.

To get the word out, he uses a variety of methods but few can match the efficiency and reach of the Duke Event Calendar.

“It’s so expansive,” Okazaki said. “There’s so much on it.”

Whether you’re looking for something to do at Duke or hoping to draw people to an event you’re organizing, the Duke Event Calendar is a go-to resource for its simplicity and effectiveness.

Around 10,000 events appear annually on Duke’s main online resource for publicizing campus happenings. Searchable by date, topic, location, organization and event type, the calendar showcases the broad scope of campus activity. From a meeting of a knitting group and a community workday at the Duke Campus Farm to scores of academic talks and other public events, the calendar has an entry for it.

“We hope that the calendar tells the story of Duke as a vibrant, diverse, exciting place,” said Anne Light, who manages the calendar as project manager for the Office of News & Communication.

For calendar user Okazaki, his favorite feature is that the calendar entry links with most department websites, meaning posts automatically appear on both the main calendar website and the websites of Duke entities with ties to the event.

“I think that’s probably one of the great benefits,” Okazaki said. “Each unit at Duke has its own events section. I think the fact that my post feeds out to the departmental websites helps people see it more.”

To post an event to the calendar, anyone with a Duke NetID can do so by first requesting administrator privileges through the calendar’s landing page. Student groups approved by Student Affairs can do the same. Those without administrator privileges or recognition as an approved student group can still post an event, though it is first cleared by Light or colleague Maxine Borjon.

A few times a year, Light offers training sessions – usually scheduled near the beginning of each semester – for students, faculty and staff interested in getting more out of their postings. The next training session is scheduled for March 13. And you can find out more right here on the calendar.

Among the tips Light offers are to post events at least 30 days in advance, upload a strong image with the event and suit your event title to the audience you want to attract.

“The example I like to use is, if you’re having a presentation about monkeys and you want a lot of people to come and learn the basics about monkeys, put ‘monkeys’ in the title,” Light said. “If this is targeted more specifically to people in zoology and evolutionary anthropology, then you should just say ‘primates.’”