...Hold a national day of action

Your organization wants to have a day of action for climate change awareness. You want to allow your supporters to easily search for their local event and create their own* if there isn’t an event happening in their area.

Setting Up the Calendar

To allow your supporters to take part in a day of action, you can use ControlShift’s calendars tool. To get started, create a new calendar. You’ll have a few options when creating the calendar, so you’ll want to consider:

• What instructions do you want to provide for hosts? Within calendars, you can provide specific host instructions for users creating events in this calendar. This can be useful to set expectations, provide additional information/materials, and really sell the user on hosting their own event. If you don't want to provide instructions, you don't have to – they're optional.
  
• Do you want to provide default text for the events? You can pre-fill the description, date, time, etc. Event creators will be able to edit this default text when creating their event, but this text will allow you to show the type of events you want users to create and make it a bit easier for a supporter to become a host.
  
• Do you want to skip moderation? By default events will need to moderated to good to appear on the calendar. If you don’t want to moderate each new event, you can click to “set all events to good on creation.”
  

Recruiting Hosts

Once you’ve created your calendar, you need to recruit event hosts. To recruit hosts, consider using your CRM to send an email to your most committed supporters directing them to the calendar hub page. You may want to pre-create a few staff events so that your supporters will see that events are happening and want to get involved too. 

Your recruitment efforts shouldn't be a one-time step. Keep asking people to join or host events in the area as the day of action approaches. You may also want to host an information webinar or kickoff call to get people excited about the day of action.

Publicizing the Calendar

After some events have been created, and generally after you've sent an email to your most committed supporters, send an email to the rest of your list directing them to the calendar hub page. You can also share the hub page on social media.

From the hub page your supporters can find and RSVP to their local event. We’ll automatically send emails to the host and attendees immediately after they RSVP. Additionally, we’ll send them a reminder before the event. You can customize these emails if you’d like.

Supporting Hosts

Getting people to create events doesn't mean that your work is done! Remember that most supporters will not have hosted this sort of event before. Your organization should have a plan for how you're going to ensure that these events are successful. You may want to consider:

• Hosting a call/webinar for all hosts where you give more details, answer their questions, and get them excited to be involved.
• Assigning a staff member to each event. This staff member will be in charge of contacting the host and letting them know that the staffer is available to answer questions or provide support.
• If physical materials will be needed for the events, you can collect the hosts' address during the event setup process.
• Updating the thank you for creating an event email (and event host reminder emails) to include more information about this day of action.

Report Back

Once the day of action is over, don't forget to ask for feedback from both hosts and attendees. Find out what went well, what needs to change, and are there areas where you could have provided better support (especially for hosts). You send that email via your CRM or main mailing tool.

*Note that you can also use calendars for a set of events that are pre-selected by the organization. If you’re running this type of day of action, you should click to disable new event creation.