Want to use PlaceCal in your community?

PlaceCal is our international award-winning software and community development approach that lets you curate a list of groups and events for any combination of place and interest.

Other people are using it to make listings of age friendly groups in Hulme & Moss Side in Manchester, parent and child groups in Torbay, transgender groups in London, and climate and migrant justice groups in the North East.

Some of the things people have told us they want to use it to list are: listing home education networks, a health and wellbeing directory or asset map, cycling groups, independent music venues, reading clubs, gardening groups, and protest and abolition initiatives.

Some of the benefits of making a centralised community calendar and group listing are:

• Reducing social isolation and loneliness, increasing community cohesion, and improving health outcomes
• Assisting with local strategies like community wealth building, asset-based community development, doughnut economics, and transition towns
• Creating the conditions and networks we need to resist the current “polycrisis” by building a culture of mutual aid and resistance as government, charity and NHS support erodes
• Fulfilling statutory obligations to create asset maps or community directories for institutions, community forums, social care providers, etc.

We know there’s loads of things out there like this — and that none of them are working very well for the people on the ground actually doing the work. People don’t want to go and sign up for one more service, or list their thing on one more website. We agree, and have designed our approach accordingly.

PlaceCal has been developed alongside an engaged community development approach that works by training up existing community organisers (like yourself!) to first go and support all the groups in your partnership to list their events using software they already have, such as Google Calendar, Outlook 365, Eventbrite, and SquareSpace (there’s a full list of supported sources in the PlaceCal documentation). PlaceCal then automatically aggregates this information, requiring almost no effort once set up. This takes all the pressure off the groups to get it set up, but then lets them take it over once it’s running.

Even better, once groups are in the system, they can be added to multiple partnership sites. This way, we are creating a digital commons owned by our dedicated nonprofit, building something like “Wikipedia for community events”, that can be sustained past the end of any one project or volunteers’ input.

After 8 years of hard work making sure it does what community groups need, we are now ready to open it to the public. To celebrate, we are offering training on a pay-what-you-can basis for the first 10 community groups to sign up.

• Would you like to curate a PlaceCal website for your community partnership?
• Do you want to get trained up to be a community technology organiser and be able to support your network to promote their activities?
• Do you want to learn how to connect it all up and make a sustainable, self-maintaining listing of activity?
• Do you want to join our groundbreaking and innovative program to change how people access community information, forever?

We’re ready to onboard PlaceCal Organisers!

We’re happy to say we’re ready to welcome a new cohort of PlaceCal organisers to use our PlaceCal platform! We’re offering a three part course to get you set up with PlaceCal and ready to start using it in your community. It’s offered on a sliding scale, depending on your organisation and community context.

Who is this course for?

This course is for people who are interested in becoming PlaceCal Organisers. PlaceCal Organisers are members of a community who actively work with and engage their local community to connect to PlaceCal and build a community calendar. This course is designed for people who are ready to press ‘go’ and start building a site—attendees should already have some idea of who they want to reach, as well as how they will support their own time as a PlaceCal Organiser. This might be someone embedded in an organisation who wants to undertake this training to carry out the work of a PlaceCal Organiser as part of their role, or a dedicated volunteer who wants to connect their community.

What’s in the course?

This course includes three one-hour sessions to set up a PlaceCal site for your community.

Session 1: Identifying your partnership focuses on building your contextual understanding of PlaceCal, how it works and refining the boundaries of the community who you aim to engage in your PlaceCal site.

Session 2: Getting started with PlaceCal gets hands on with how PlaceCal works and into the details of adding and updating community information.

Session 3: Calendar deep dive offers more in-depth detail about calendars and structured data, as well as identifying community needs and working with the tools already in place when onboarding community Partners.

At the end of the course you’ll have a fully-functional PlaceCal site and the tools you need to use it in your community. At the moment, this is the only way to get a PlaceCal site up and running in your community. The software is in a closed beta, a period of testing with select users, and undertaking this training means you can be part of that!

You may be able to skip session 1 if you already have a partnership up and running – feel free to get in touch to discuss this further.

How will it be delivered?

This course will be delivered in three one-hour sessions over Zoom. Full access to the training materials will be provided to allow for independent study and revision. Some parts of the course are interactive, and some require assistance from the PlaceCal team (e.g. setting up accounts). These tasks will form ‘homework’ to be completed between the sessions so that everyone is on the same page and making progress together. The sessions are formed of a mix of hands-on activities and taught sections.

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Course details

Dates

This training will run three times, each course consisting of three one-hour sessions delivered a week apart. This is to allow you to do work on the ground and come back for support and feedback.

• Option 1 - Wednesdays at 10am, July 17th, 24th and 31st
• Option 2 - Mondays at 1pm, July 29th, August 5th and 12th
• Option 3 - Tuesdays at 6pm, July 30th, August 6th and 13th

Pricing

This training is offered on a Pay What You Can (PWYC) basis as we know that some organisers do not have any funding or institutional support. The below pricing brackets can be used as a guide for what we need to make delivering this sustainable long-term:

• Unfunded, entirely volunteer groups: £0-£50
• Groups with project funding and budget for marketing: £200-£500
• Groups with core funding and paid staff: £500-£1,000
• Institutions and statutory bodies: £2,000-£5,000

Ongoing support

The course will provide an overview and everything you need to get started as a PlaceCal Organiser in your community. All participants will be provided with the supporting material including slides and written course content for reference. Following the course, Organisers will be encouraged to join the Organisers mailing list and/or the Geeks for Social Change Discord server, where you can post queries, raise issues and access peer support.

Who is carrying out the training?

This training will be led by the Geeks for Social Change team.

How do I sign up?

Fill out this form to express interest in the course. There are limited spaces available, so please book soon to avoid disappointment!

If you have any questions please book in a 20 minute consultation or drop us an email.