Churchwide events

I've been one of those looking forward to having a Churchwide Events calendar and I'm glad that it's finally here. However, now I see some potential issues with it and I'm wondering out other stakes approach this.

The Churchwide events are only showing the date they appear, not the specific time it might be broadcast in my time zone (CES Firesides for example). Also, our single's ward has a dinner prior to the broadcast, so a lot of the building needs to be reserved for the CES broadcast (and also the dinner before). I obviously cannot modify the Churchwide Events calendar to add location/room reservations as well as specific times.

Prior to the Churchwide Events calendar appearing I had created a Stake Calendar named General Church Events and added those types of events, times, and room locations. I can still maintain this calendar, but it seems redundant to have two calendars for the same event, but I don't see another way around it.

So I'm curious: what's everyone else doing?

Because of time zones, in our stake we tape delay many of the broadcasts including the CES Firesides. Up until now, the church hasn't put church-wide events in the calendar so it hasn't been a problem. What's going to get sticky is the RS Broadcast at the end of September. We've always delayed that until Sunday.

I'm guessing we'll keep doing what we've been doing - entering the events on the appropriate calendar and reserving the building as needed for the rebroadcast.


If for some reason you only need to reserve the rooms and don't need an added event, then I'd handle it the same way you do private events such as weddings, etc. We place those on a special calendar. In this version, you can make it private so it doesn't appear to the general membership.

Our stake's in the Mountain time zone, so we don't have the issue of different times, but we're still going to enter most of the events on our own stake calendar. We still need to set specific times, and we sometimes have a dinner before, and we need to reserve the rooms, and let members know where the broadcast is.

We will also have to enter details specific to our stake in Germany, because of the aforementioned challenges.

As a suggestion, how about defaulting subscriptions to church-wide events to OFF. That way we can turn them on to help plan the calendar, but hopefully few members will see it and cause confusion.

I'd be sad to see a feature so long requested be "turned off" so quickly because it is not meeting the intended need. I'd much rather make adjustments if possible to make sure the feature meets the needs.

From what I'm reading the main need is to know what time an event will start in the user's own timezone. Is that correct?

Are there any other adjustments that need to be made to the Churchwide Events calendar functionality?

kyleq wrote:I'd be sad to see a feature so long requested be "turned off" so quickly because it is not meeting the intended need. I'd much rather make adjustments if possible to make sure the feature meets the needs.

From what I'm reading the main need is to know what time an event will start in the user's own timezone. Is that correct?

Are there any other adjustments that need to be made to the Churchwide Events calendar functionality?

It's not so much about what time it starts in the user's timezone but where and when broadcasts will be shown in a particular stake or ward. Often broadcasts have multiple broadcast times or they may be recorded and shown at a later time. And the broadcast may not be shown in every building so users need to know which building to go to. These are all local decisions and require local input of information.

However, I'd say that the Churchwide Events calendar is still useful for leaders who need to make those decisions even if it's unsubscribed by default, especially if additional details (like broadcast schedules) are included as suggested in another thread.

kyleq wrote:From what I'm reading the main need is to know what time an event will start in the user's own timezone. Is that correct?

Are there any other adjustments that need to be made to the Churchwide Events calendar functionality?

The time zone is important for many people. But the bigger issue in my mind is local details. For a broadcast (which many of these events are), we need to reserve a building/rooms, and we need to tell people where it is (some stakes have multiple buildings with satellites, or where they might be doing Internet-based broadcasts).

The time zone is one factor, but with many events there are multiple time options. For example, the CES YA devotionals are typically at 6:00pm with a rebroadcast at 8:00pm. The YSA ward in our area chooses to watch the 8:00pm rebroadcast. And when there are events such as WWLT, or President Monson's birthday celebration, there may be a dozen different options for times. Simply adjusting for the time zone isn't enough -- there needs to be a way for a stake to choose the broadcast time.

I don't know if it's possible, but it could be helpful to allow local editing of Church-wide events. The event would appear on the calendar because someone at CHQ created it, but it could be edited by each stake as needed. It might be a bit like an exception to a repeating event, where the series defines the original state of the event, but the exception allows different times, locations, details, etc.

aebrown wrote:The time zone is important for many people. But the bigger issue in my mind is local details. For a broadcast (which many of these events are), we need to reserve a building/rooms, and we need to tell people where it is (some stakes have multiple buildings with satellites, or where they might be doing Internet-based broadcasts).

Agreed. But in some cases we need to suppress the event altogether. For example, so far no one has asked us to show the Pioneer Days broadcast. So we'd prefer not to show that at all or only provide details for personal Internet viewing.

RussellHltn wrote:Agreed. But in some cases we need to suppress the event altogether. For example, so far no one has asked us to show the Pioneer Days broadcast. So we'd prefer not to show that at all or only provide details for personal Internet viewing.

Of course, if you expand on the idea of exceptions to recurring events that I mentioned in my previous post, one of the possible exceptions is a deletion of an instance.

This is awesome feedback. Thank you very much everyone! We have some ongoing internal discussions on how exactly this is going to work in the future and I will make sure the items discussed here make it into the conversation.

kyleq wrote:I'd be sad to see a feature so long requested be "turned off" so quickly because it is not meeting the intended need. I'd much rather make adjustments if possible to make sure the feature meets the needs.

From what I'm reading the main need is to know what time an event will start in the user's own timezone. Is that correct?

Are there any other adjustments that need to be made to the Churchwide Events calendar functionality?

Over here in Australia, I just received the broadcast details for the General RS Broadcast and note that it shows on Sat 29th September - which is the correct date for those in the US but in Australia the event at 6pm on 29th is 8am on 30th. It would be great if the calendar item had the actual start time rather than just the day so that we could see when this event is going to happen locally on the calendar.

aebrown wrote:The time zone is important for many people. But the bigger issue in my mind is local details. For a broadcast (which many of these events are), we need to reserve a building/rooms, and we need to tell people where it is (some stakes have multiple buildings with satellites, or where they might be doing Internet-based broadcasts).

The time zone is one factor, but with many events there are multiple time options. For example, the CES YA devotionals are typically at 6:00pm with a rebroadcast at 8:00pm. The YSA ward in our area chooses to watch the 8:00pm rebroadcast. And when there are events such as WWLT, or President Monson's birthday celebration, there may be a dozen different options for times. Simply adjusting for the time zone isn't enough -- there needs to be a way for a stake to choose the broadcast time.

I don't know if it's possible, but it could be helpful to allow local editing of Church-wide events. The event would appear on the calendar because someone at CHQ created it, but it could be edited by each stake as needed. It might be a bit like an exception to a repeating event, where the series defines the original state of the event, but the exception allows different times, locations, details, etc.

I think what aebrown proposes is what would be ideal, if it's at all possible. I was one of those clamoring for a Churchwide Events calendar so I don't want to see it disappear, but hopefully it's functionality can be modified such that local leaders can alter that particular calendar item with specific local details as is being suggested here. Thanks for paying attention to these discussions!