Events for All Departments: St. Olaf College

When St. Olaf College approached Modern Tribe to redesign their website, they had two priorities at the top of their mind: the ability to customize the appearance of their site, and the functionality to support a multi-site network. As a prestigious liberal arts college with a rich Lutheran history, the ability to customize their calendar and maintain their brand identity across the site was critical. In addition to looking good, they also needed something that was extensible enough to effectively connect calendars and websites from their diverse range of departments.

Mastering the Multi-site

St. Olaf wasn’t just building one website—they were creating an entire multi-site network, with individual sites for each department. The main page includes a master calendar which hosts a complete list of events across the entire university. Our Event Aggregator service routinely imports all the events from every connected department’s website into this master calendar. Each event is submitted to the main calendar as a draft, so that an administrator can publish them immediately or make some edits first.

More than Just a Master Calendar

In addition to the main calendar, each department has a website with its own events calendar. Each displays a list of events unique to their department, with the option to import any events they choose from the college’s master calendar as well.

If they choose to import recurring events, they can decide if they want to automatically publish them using Events Aggregator for less administrative work, or require events to be imported with a “Pending Review” status to give them more control over what’s published on their department’s calendars.

Customizing with The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar plugins suite was the only event management solution that allowed St. Olaf the extensibility to share their events across multiple departments, all while maintaining their distinct individuality in how their events are displayed. Check out their unique customization in the screencast below!