How to Manage Events on Ipswich.love

Event listings on the Ipswich.love website – they’re great aren’t they? It’s amazing to think there’s no one place to see what’s on in Ipswich – but hey, that’s why we created it!

It’s simple to add event listings and add times, dates and links. To help keep things simple, we’ve created this short guides on how to list events on Ipswich.love:

Get an account

Let’s start at the start. You’ll need to register here to list events on the website. You need to be based in Ipswich and have a venue or location that members of the public can visit. Once you’ve registered, we’ll add your venue information and give you access.

Venues & Events

Once you’re logged into your Ipswich.love account – you’ll see an admin area with a grey bar on the left with some text in.

Events

Click here to manage and create new events on Ipswich.love. For the time being, all new event listings are moderated – so we’ll need to approve them before they go live.

Directory

Click here to edit your Venue information including image, description, website address and colour scheme. You can only edit the information of venues that you are registered to manage.

Adding an event to Ipswich.love

Once you’ve gone to the Events area of the site admin, click the New Event button at the top of the page next to the Events heading. You’ll then see a page that looks a bit like this.

Let’s start at the top and work our way down.

Add a title for the event

Just under the Add New Event heading, there’s a box to add the title of the event. Keep the title relatively short – you there’s plenty of room for more information later.

Add the event description

Under that main heading you’ve got what looks like a simpler version of Microsoft Word. This is where you add the bulk of the information about your event.

• Keep the text mostly as Paragraphs, use Heading 3 and Heading 4 Styles to break out the sections ot the event information. Avoid using Heading 1 and 2, these are already set on the page.
• You can add links here, and have some basic formatting options. Don’t change colours or get too fancy, the site looks after the design and layout for you.

Event Dates & Links

This is possibly the most important bit – adding dates and times for your event. At the moment, we’re not supporting repeating events, so you just need to add all the dates and times in.

You can add as many rows as you like. To speed things up, you can duplicate an existing row of dates by holding the shift key down when adding a new row.

These dates will determine the order of where your event shows. If there are multiple dates for your event, we only show the next closest date of the event on the  listings pages so nobody can take a big share of the space if they’re a bigger event. Once anyone visits the event details page, they’ll see all the dates available.

Adding an event link

If you have a booking page or a page on your site with more information, paste the link in here. We make all events “do-follow” so you’ll get the added benefit of a site like Ipswich.love linking directly to you (Search engines love this kind of thing!)

Over on the right of the page

Publish options

Once you’re ready to set your event live, you can set what date to set it live and ask the Ipswich.love team to check everything is in place. Once you’ve been using the site for a while, we’ll upgrade your account to be able to publish events without needing moderation.

Featured image

Add a nice image to represent your event. Please don’t images that have loads of text, they’re hard to read for people and won’t look too good on our page layouts.

Target Audience

We’ll be launching this feature soon so visitors to the site can filter events by age group. For now, just tick the boxes for who your event is aimed at. Leave it blank it it’s suitable for all.

Further down the page

Ok, we’re nearly there! Now’s the time to choose the venue for your event.

Performer

If there’s a known performer headlining your event, and their name (i.e Nik Kershaw) here. This, and all the other information gets fed directly into Google’s event listings and will get your event in front of people looking for that performer.

Event host

In most cases, you just need to choose the Event host. Find your listing by searching and click on the venue that’s the event host. In some cases, the location of the event might be at a different place to the people organising the event. In these cases, you need …

Event Location

Pick a location from the list and the map on your event page will show that as the event address, rather than that of the Event Host.

And, you’re done!

Congrats! You’ve just loaded everything you need to create an event on Ipswich.love.

A few final things.

• If you want to run the same event again, but on a different set of dates (like an Art Club that happens on Saturdays), it’ll usually be best to use the event you’ve already created and just add more dates. Search engines like to know that links they’re promoting are reliable, have an element of longevity, and are up to date!
• Don’t give so much information that people don’t know what to do with it! The aim of your listing here is for people to click through and book – keep them moving on their journey
• If you’re stuck – we’re here to help – email [email protected] and I’ll jump in to get you up and running.
• The more the merrier! We created this free listing service so people in, around and outside Ipswich can see all the amazing things going on in our town. If you know someone who should be listing their events, let them know they need to register!

Surely Facebook is better for listing events?

Not really no. Posting events to Facebook can help get some attendees, but you should be using other channels to list your events. Take a look at this post about Why Listing on Ipswich.love will beat Facebook Event Listings