Have you used our events calendar? Do you find it useful? What about the featured events in the Route 40 Roundup newsletter?
We started the events calendar on our site because, as residents, we found it hard to find event listings locally online. We hoped we could create a comprehensive-enough calendar that would provide a useful service. But some recent changes have made it no longer feasible to continue in its current form. So we need you to get in touch with us by email, Twitter, Instagram or on Facebook and tell us whether you want us to continue running an events calendar. If you do, we also want to hear your thoughts on how to continue to pay for this service.
Here’s the thing: we were using a WordPress tool that helped us add to our site events that had already been posted on Facebook. But since Facebook made some recent changes, that system no longer works. To continue with the calendar, we would need to spend a lot more time typing in each entry. Elinor’s estimate is that it would be at least five hours a week.
We don’t have that time right now. Both of us have regular jobs that take up most of our time. We have a little bit of income from some of the wonderful readers and supporters of Route 40, but it barely covers our costs. We wish it weren’t the case, but we’re pretty tapped out right now with the Route 40 Roundup and the odd bit of original reporting here. If we had a bit more revenue, we could pay someone else to do this, or take on a bit less freelancing work.
If you think you could help and if you want to see our events calendar continue, get in touch. Here are some possible solutions that we’ve thought of:
- A company sponsors the calendar and it carries their branding on our page and when we mention events on our social media feeds.
- More readers chip in and become members.
- We launch a crowdfunding page specifically for the events calendar.
- Someone out there knows someone who would do this job on a voluntary basis.