When you host a lot of live events, you start to learn quite a bit about calendaring and scheduling. Sadly, there’s a lot of terminology that can leave you completely confused.
One that’s kept us stumped for quite some time: Calendar invites vs. Calendar subscriptions - what on Earth is the difference?
If you’ve played around in calendar tools, community tools, or all-in-one cohort based course management tools, you’re likely familiar with these terms. And if you're anything like us, you’re probably stumped too.
Luckily, after working with 100+ online communities, not only have we figured out the difference between calendar invites and subscriptions, we’ve also learned the best circumstances to use each one to make sure you get maximum attendance and engagement. We share these insights below.
A calendar invite is simply when you send someone a direct invite to an event.
Recipients will usually get notified via email and can RSVP: Yes, No, or Maybe. The invite will also appear directly on their calendar.
A calendar subscription is when you share a publicly shareable link to a calendar and the recipient can subscribe to that calendar directly.
They won’t be able to RSVP but they’ll have any events added to this calendar show up on their own calendar. If at any point they don’t want to see those events, they can simply hide the shared calendar.
Read why you shouldn’t use Google Calendar alone to manage your live online events here.
Here are some best practices for calendaring to maximize attendance:
When to use calendar invites: Calendar invites are better when you’re hosting low-frequency events where it’s important for you to know about RSVPs.
Why: Calendar invites ensure that potential attendees get multiple direct notifications for your event so they’re way less likely to miss it. Additionally, having access to RSVPs can help you better prepare for your events - letting you know when to hit the gas on event promotion or push the breaks depending on your desired attendance.
When to use calendar subscriptions: Calendar subscriptions are better when you’re hosting a high volume of events and want to make sure the events are easily discovered. Not only does this provide access to all events, but any changes you make to an event on a calendar will reflect on the recipient's calendar without having to send a notification.
Why: Calendar subscriptions help decrease overwhelm, which is extremely important when hosting lots of live events. This makes it much less likely that potential attendees will simply ignore notifications they’d receive if they were invited directly. With calendar subscriptions, they can view the calendar whenever they’d like and attend the events that interest them most.
With Virtually, you can send direct calendar invites and build out a calendar which you can share via Google Calendar. In addition to event scheduling, Virtually helps you automate the hairy logistics of live online event management - automating reminders, attendance tracking, and more.
Learn all about automating your live online events at our upcoming webinar: How Ali Abdaal’s Team Uses No-Code to Automate Part-time YouTuber Academy.
Join us on Thursday, Feb. 24th @ 12pm EST. Register here.
Read Next: The 2022 Tech Stack for Building a Cohort-based Course
Laura Marks is Head of Customer Experience at Virtually