Quad Cities - WVIK, Quad Cities NPR and the Quad Cities Convention and Visitors Bureau (QCCVB) are proud to announce an exciting new collaboration: They will be combining their online event calendars. Both free, local events calendars, at VisitQuadCities.com and WVIK.org, will now all be fed by the same shared database. A submission to either calendar will show up on both. Additionally, Experience Quad Cities' arts, culture, and heritage calendar at ExperienceQuadCities.com is fed by the same database in a more narrowly, focused manner.
"This is something everybody in the Quad Cities has been asking for and because of our position as a public institution we could lead the way," said WVIK Station Manager Jay Pearce. "Every media outlet in town runs its own events calendar and it can be very frustrating for our listeners to figure out what's going on." One of the major benefits of this new collaboration is the broadcast component WVIK brings to the partnership. WVIK's on-air event announcements will be fed by this calendar for all of WVIK's listeners to hear. While all unpaid, on-air announcements will be made at the editorial discretion of the program producers with the interests of their listeners in mind, WVIK sees this as an improvement in their offerings now that the on-air calendars will directly reflect their online counterparts.
It is the QCCVB's marketing & communications department that built the infrastructure that facilitated this merger. "For as long as I've been in marketing, the wide variety of local calendars has been one of the biggest challenges," says Charlotte Doehler-Morrison, Vice President of Marketing & Communications at QCCVB. "We were happy we could help make this happen. It is a valuable partnership for all involved, and many of the events on the calendar will be promoted through the QCCVB's monthly event emails and weekly emails to our QCCVB partners. Our events calendar is the most visited page on our website. We want to ensure visitors and residents are getting as much information as possible."
It was the sharing of the QCCVB's calendar with Experience Quad Cities that served as the model for this merger. "When Experience Quad Cities set out to create its website and new online events calendar, the last thing we wanted to do was create one more online calendar," said Experience Quad Cities Board Chair, Carmen Darland. "As anybody in arts marketing knows, you can spend a substantial amount of time submitting events on dozens of local calendars or just searching to see what other events might conflict with your own. Sharing the categories that fit our niche audience with the QCCVB's calendar just made sense. I hope to see the other media outlets in town follow WVIK's lead in this endeavor."
The joint calendar launched today and is now accepting submissions at VisitQuadCities.com, ExperienceQuadCities.com, or WVIK.org.
