Optimal number of stake calendars

I am interested in hearing others' opinions and experience with the layered calendars. How many are you using? How are you encouraging members and wards to use the lds.org calendar? We are looking for best practices as we enter year 2 with the new tools.

I currently have about 10 stake calendars. I have tried to group them by type of event: leadership meetings and trainings, stake meetings (PEC mostly), athletics, service, devotionals and firesides, institute, stake and ward conferences, stake RS, etc (we are a YSA stake). I guess my approach is to take advantage of the layering and set it up so you can have visible on your calendar just the type of events you want see. It means more calendars, but once you've set the ones you want visible, it's pretty easy to manage. I could see how this approach, when coupled with a ward calendar, in a conventional stake could make the list of calendars quite long.

Initially we are only doing a few calendars (Stake Calendar and Stake Resource Calendar) as we migrate from the old calendar system. The stake presidency wants to maintain similar control of what is being scheduled. I know this kind of goes against the new model of the calendar, but they want to ease into it. We do have several private calendars as well. We have recommended that wards also minimize the number of calendars they implement initially, minimizing editors until wards and leaders are more comfortable using it.

My stake currently operate a calendar for stake events, stake youth events, and one for non-stake affiliated events (we get a lot of youth conferences from other stakes coming to our area) for a total of three calendars. It has worked well for us. As an added benefit, when we look at calendar subscriptions, we have the 10 or so from our ward, and don't have to sift through that many from the stake, which seems appropriate since the majority of functions happen at the ward level.

We have 2 stake calendars because more makes it harder to manage for less experienced users. On the other hand more calendars makes it easier to choose what person really wants

lproff wrote: How many are you using?

Start simple and grow is perhaps a good way to get started...I think we had a tendency to jump in with too many, and now perhaps I feel we might consider consolidating some.

For me, there is a delicate trade-off between complexity and convenience. And I see "email notifications" as a factor for deciding how many. If your YW want every sister notified by email each week about their specific events, then a separate calendar for them makes sense-then the YW and their parents can subscribe, and the rest of the ward can choose not to, and only those subscribed will get the emails. Our ward has 4 young women calendars-one for each age and one combined.

lproff wrote: How are you encouraging members and wards to use the lds.org calendar?

Honestly, this has been a tough sell for us. If your leadership sees it as valuable, you'll have better luck. If they don't buy in, nobody will. The new Directory is a hit, though, once you show it to your members.

lproff wrote:We are looking for best practices as we enter year 2 with the new tools.

While there are many ideas here, and we can all say what we've tried and like, I'm not sure any of us will say our way is the best way yet.

kisaac wrote:For me, there is a delicate trade-off between complexity and convenience. And I see "email notifications" as a factor for deciding how many.

To me the driving factor is subscriptions. To make the most of the system, you'll want members to subscribe to the relevant calendars and sync them to their personal devices.

If there are too many events that don't apply to them, they won't subscribe, and then the members ignore it. OTOH, you don't want to create a separate calender just for the annual High Priests social.

An example of the former, my ward went an put the Sunday Sacrament meeting, Sunday School, Priesthood/Relief Society AND the PEC, Youth Committee and Ward Council all on one calendar. Three guesses which calender I'm not going to be subscribing to. Which probably means I'll miss the Christmas social.

I'm trying to figure out the right number of stake calenders myself. I exported the CSV file from 2011 and then sorted and classified each event. I ended up with something like 20. I'm not sure how we'll handle it. There may be some stake calendars that are not intended to be subscribed to, but just there for the ward leaders to copy to the appropriate ward calender for the members. (Although that seems like it shouldn't be necessary.)

Our stake has created calendars for the following;

Broadcasts == All Satellite Broadcast Events
Stake Meetings == Stake meetings PEC, Public Affairs, etc.
Ward Assignments == We have an individual calendar for each ward and their assignments (temple, DI, etc).
Stake Calendar == This one takes the bulk of the events, which don't go into one of the above. Most members would subscribe to the "Stake Calendar" which would keep them informed on all events of general interest, except for Broadcast Events, which would require them to also subscribe to the Broadcast calendar.

So far the above has worked well for 2010's usage and unless someone complains, we'll carry it forward.