Akron Two things here, for two different kinds of partner. The embed puts our calendar on your website. The portal lets you manage your own events yourself. Plenty of organizations want one and not the other, and both are free.
The embed, in one paragraph
It is a live Akron Pulse calendar running inside a page on your own site, themed to fit, showing only the events you want it to show. Your visitors never leave your domain. It updates itself, because it is reading the same data the main site reads, so it is never the stale calendar page that every organization's website eventually has.
What you get to control
- Theme, so it sits on your page without looking like somebody else's widget.
- Categories, so a music venue can show music and a library can show family programming.
- Geography, so a neighborhood group can show its neighborhood.
- Layout, list, calendar or map, plus a compact density option for when space is tight.
Open the embed builder and change the settings around. The preview is live, so you can see the actual thing before you talk to anybody. When it looks right, send it to us from that page.
Why we set them up by hand
There is no copy this code snippet button, on purpose. Every embed gets configured with us, which takes one short email exchange, and there are two reasons for that.
The first is that we want to know who is running one so we can tell you before anything changes. The second is that an embed that is filtered slightly wrong is worse than no embed, and five minutes of a person looking at it prevents that. It is not a sales call. Nobody is going to follow up with a quote.
The partner portal
For organizations that post often, we can set up an account that lets you create and edit your own events directly, without emailing us at all. This is newer, and we onboard people one at a time. If that sounds like you, email byron@akronpulse.com and we will get you set up.
Once you are in, you see your organization's events and nothing else. You can create, edit and cancel. A few rules are worth knowing before you start, because they surprise people.
- New events go into review first. They are not live the second you save. This is the same queue everything else goes through and it usually moves same day. Once we have worked with you a while we can turn that off for your account.
- You cannot feature your own event. Featured slots are picked by hand, they are not for sale, and there is no button for it anywhere. That rule is what makes featured mean anything.
- Cancelling is final. If you cancel an event you cannot un-cancel it yourself. It is deliberately a one way door, because a listing that flips between cancelled and live teaches people not to trust the calendar. Email us if you cancelled something by mistake and we will sort it out.
- Editing an event that is still in review keeps it there. Changing the title or the start time on a pending event resets the clock rather than sneaking it through, which is the behavior you would want if you were on our side of it.
Which one do you want
- You want a calendar on your site: the embed.
- You post a few events a month and email is fine: keep emailing, honestly, it works.
- You post weekly and want to control your own copy: the portal.
- You have a website that could publish a feed: read the machine readable guide first, because that beats all three.