Updating the Mobile Ministry Event Calendar for 2013 Events

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As part of one of the resolutions that we’ve set forth this year, it was to be involved with and keep an eye towards events that would be relevant to mobile ministry (#mobmin) activities. Whether or not we attended them wasn’t the concern. We wanted to make sure that there was some kind of public listing of events, that you could easily subscribe to (RSS, email updates, mobile, etc.) and be informed as to what is going on. So we created and released the Mobile Ministry Event calendar, and its been one of the more popular links on the site for just getting heads wrapped around what’s happening in this space.

Well, 2013 is almost here and there are a ton of events that have not yet made it to the calendar. Part of that is on our end of getting lots of emails towards items and not sitting down to add them here. The other part of that is that there are just a lot of events we don’t know about and so what might be relevant isn’t heard about until the last minute, or even after the event has happened. So to help things along, I’m asking for your help towards getting this listing updated before the year turns. And in part, if you’ve got an event, this is a great way to get some additional visibility to those events.

All you need to do is send us a note about the event including as much detail that can be copy/pasted into the Google Calendar listing and we’ll get it added. That’s it.

Subscribing to Updates from the Calendar

For those of you who don’t have an event to add, but definitely want to follow along, here are some instructions on how to do so (bullet point per method of keeping up with the listing):

  • For those of you with Android devices, you should simply need to go into your Google Calendar account (use a desktop web browser), and then add this calendar to have it appear alongside your calendar
  • For those of you not using an Android device, but do have a Google Calendar account, you need to copy each event (individually) into your main calendar, and those events will appear there. However, they will not update when the calendar updates.
  • You can subscribe to this calendar via RSS (link here); items will show in your RSS reader when they are added to the calendar, not when they occur
  • You can also add to your Apple devices calendar using iCal (link here). If you add this link into iTunes, it should transfer to another (layer) calendar in your iOS devices; this link does update when the main calendar is updated.
  • Depending on the mobile device you are using, the RSS/iCal item should show an individual item download, so that (for example) from a mobile device, you can download a specific event into your calendar. From your calendar, sharing is as simple as hitting the “share” button on your device and it sends as a vCal item in an MMS message
  • I have a workflow running using ifttt which automatically tweets out newly added events using the #mobmin hashtag – so if you are looking for an easy way to have your audiences keep up with events, that hashtag just got more valuable.