We heard some feedback about our existing events calendar and it being a little clunky to add and update events. We also have a key performance indicator from the City of Newberg to develop a more interconnected events calendar experience that works well with the whole town.

We got a hold of Newsberg, whose calendar features events from all over the community, and tried to figure out a way to build the calendar on our site as well and…

Meet the new Chehalem Valley Chamber of Commerce Events Calendar!

There are a lot of benefits to using this new calendar — it’s easy, fast, and arguably most importantly, it automatically sends events straight to Newsberg’s community calendar so that we don’t need to go around submitting to all the calendars anymore.

It’s still pretty new and we’re populating events over there, but please take a few minutes to upload your own events.

You can watch a video about how to submit at THIS LINK (or watch the video below), or read along to learn how to use the calendar:

  • Click on “Add Event” on the upper right hand side of the calendar.
  • Create an account or sign in.
  • Fill out the form in its entirety. The more information, the better. The system also will offer some stock photography if you don’t have a poster or something ready.
  • Press submit event.

There are a few small hitches as with anything. For one, if the event already exists in the system, it will flag a duplicate warning. To bypass this, all you have to do is change one small element in the description, and the system will recognize it as a new event. I usually put a period at the end of a random sentence and that does the trick.

Once you’ve made an account with CitySpark, you’ll have that account across all organizations that use it, which right now is Newsberg and Chehalem Valley Chamber. If you wanted to promote the event to get more visibility on Newsberg’s calendar, you can do that by searching your event on the Newsberg calendar and clicking on “promotion options.”

Lastly, it’s important to know that the connection to the Newsberg calendar is one-way. So if you want your event to show up on the Chamber calendar, submit it here to start, and then it’ll automatically go to Newsberg.

Mostly, let us know with any questions! This is a new system, but one that hopefully will act as a resource for this community to grow networks and get more exposure to the great things happening in town.