Publicizing Your Events

The calendar system is much more than a datebook for our departments. Prospective students, residents and faculty judge our school’s vibrancy, in part, by how active our calendar is and how interesting our events appear. Members of the community use it to find out about lectures, workshops and other events relevant to their professional and personal interests.

In terms of publicity, that big, important event you’ve worked on doesn’t exist until you post it to the calendar. It only exists for all your potential attendees when you write a posting that gives them complete, meaningful information. Also, the Office of Communications can help promote your events only when we know about them—and the calendar is our primary source for that information.

Core Principles

Every guideline on this page supports a few core principles for smart, successful event postings:

  • Consider all your possible audiences, on and off campus.
  • Be concise but complete.
  • Put information in the right place: Use the appropriate fields for speakers, costs (including information on free admission), URLs and so on.
  • Use correct capitalization and grammar.

Timing

Gather all the information your attendees might need so you can post your event at least four weeks in advance. People often need to see an event listing multiple times to decide to attend—and if they want to go, they still need enough lead time to work it into their schedules.

Professional Style

  • Spell out acronyms that refer to organizations: “American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET).” Users online can search our events on the school’s website, the university’s and even on Google. Many people may search for “experimental therapeutics” before they think to search for “ASPET.”
  • Don’t use ALL CAPS for emphasis.
  • After you save your posting, review it and edit it if necessary. Be sure to check for problems cutting and pasting from programs such as Microsoft Word. “Special characters”—like these quotation marks—can turn into “Special charactersâ€Â.
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Need technical help?

Using the Calendar System

This page outlines how best to use the calendar to publicize your events. For step-by-step instructions on creating posts in the calendar interface, see our guide to Using the Calendar System.

If you’re having trouble accessing the calendar or have technical questions, please contact the Office of Medical Computing for assistance:

Office of Medical Computing

Phone: (716) 829-2106

Email: omc-req@buffalo.edu

Elements of Great Event Postings

Eye-Catching Titles

  • Start all event titles with a short version of the department name, then a colon and a space, e.g. “Dermatology: [Event Name],”  NOT “Department of Dermatology: [Event Name].”
  • Give enough information in the title to draw a reader’s attention and no more. Enter full details in the appropriate fields: description, speaker, cost and so on.
  • Don’t try to cram your entire event description into the title. Long, dense titles push readers away, making them more likely to ignore your event, not more likely to find out more and attend.
  • Don’t use generic words and phrases like “Topic” and “Lunchtime Lecture.” The calendar interface includes an Event Type drop-down menu where you can specify that your event is a lecture, conference, seminar, etc.

Complete, Readable Descriptions

  • Describe the event in the description field. Don’t leave it empty, and don’t put other types of information there.
  • Explain what attendees will get out of your event: obtaining credit or learning about a new surgical technique or state policy, for example.
  • Describe any chances for participation. Will there be a Q-and-A session? An informal meet-and-greet? Any hands-on or group activities?
  • Give full details of registration procedures and deadlines.
  • Minimize speaker bio information. Instead, link the speaker’s name to a profile online or use the URL entry fields to provide a link.
  • Link our faculty’s names to their profiles on our school’s site. You can find all full-time faculty members’ online profiles at the Find Faculty listing.
  • If you do include speaker information in the event description, place it at the end.

Locations

  • Don’t use acronyms for locations.
  • Give room numbers as well as names (“Lippschutz Room/125 BEB”).
  • Give full, descriptive directions. Many of our buildings have sub-optimal signage, and potential attendees may come from outside our campus and affiliated hospitals.
  • Capitalize the first letter of building names (“Farber 220,” not “FARBER 220” or “farber 220”).

Contact Information

  • Always include contact information. Proivde readers with at least a name and email address in case they have questions before or after the event. Someone who means to attend but misses your event may want to know whether they can get a copy of a talk, for example.

Useful Extras

Costs

The Costs entry box in the calendar posting interface is small, but it will accommodate as much text as you want to enter. If your event has complicated cost information—$35 for non-UB attendees, $15 for UB faculty and staff, free for students—enter all that into the Costs box.

URLs

Readers can’t click URLs entered in the Event Details field, so use the dedicated URL fields to provide links to speaker profiles or CVs, associated websites or other materials, and so on. Give each URL a descriptive name (“CV: Marion DiSalva, PhD” or “Registration Details,” for example).

Series and Recurring Events

Only use the calendar’s recurring event functionality for events where none of the details change.

For series such as Grand Rounds that feature different speakers and topics each time, make a separate posting for each event within the series. Put the lecture’s individual title in the Event Title field and describe the lecture’s topic in the Description field.

Cancellations

When you need to cancel an event, don’t delete its posting from the calendar. Instead, edit its title to include the word CANCELLED. This is the only time you should use all caps.

If the event has been or will be rescheduled, edit its description to let people know where to find more information.