Allow Members and Visitors to Subscribe to Your Events Feed
Members
and website visitors can subscribe to your event feed. In addition,
your members and website visitors can subscribe to just a single event
category or your entire calendar.
Event categories that are set to to
members only will not be available for subscription.
You are in
control which event categories website visitors can subscribe to. To
enable the event feed for an event category (note that feeds cannot be
enabled for member only event categories):
- Go to MembershipWorks > Event Calendar.
- Click Setup Event Categories at the top.
- Click on a category to edit it (or “Add Event Category” if you have not yet created any).
- Check the box next to Allow users to subscribe from feed.
- Click “Save”.
How Members and Website Visitors Subscribe
It’s
easy for your members and website visitors to subscribe to the events
feed from your website. They will see a Subscribe link at the top of
your calendar or event list. After clicking the Subscribe link, they can choose to add the feed to their
default calendar, Google calendar or copy the feed/URL to their clipboard.
RSS Feed for Events
RSS feeds are also available for your events, providing another method (in addition to iCalendar feed) for members to subscribe to your events. In addition you can utilize event RSS feeds to:
- Allow partner websites to automatically publish your upcoming events on their website.
- Create automated MailChimp RSS Feed campaigns to notify your members of new upcoming events.
RSS feeds can only be enabled for event categories that are public (ie. not restricted to be visible to members only). To enable feeds (both RSS and iCalendar) for your events:
- Navigate to Event List or Event Calendar
- Click “Setup Event Categories”
- Click on a event category
- Enable “Allow users to subscribe to feed”
- Click Save
- Repeat step 4-5 for all the event categories you wish to enable
- Close the Event Categories dialog
- Navigate to Organization Settings > Integration
- Make sure the “Event calendar URL” is correct under Website Integration – this should be the complete URL to the MembershipWorks event calendar/list page on your website.
Once the feeds are enabled, your users will be able to obtain the URL of the RSS feed from the event calendar/list page on your website under the “Subscribe” menu:
Setting up a MailChimp RSS Feed Campaign
To setup your MailChimp RSS feed campaign, first obtain the RSS feed URL – go to the event calendar on your website and click “Subscribe” and select “Copy RSS Feed/URL to your clipboard”.
Next setup your feed campaign according to the directions at this link:
Note that depending on when you joined MailChimp, Classic Automations may not be easily accessible. If you cannot access Classic Automations in your Mailchimp account, use this link to navigate to it:
Note that by default, MailChimp doesn’t include some of the RSS item data like the event image. To include this you will need to customize the MailChimp RSS template – please see the following page on using RSS merge tags:
The MailChimp merge tags for the RSS items corresponding to the event data:
Technical Notes for the RSS Feed
- The RSS feed provides the list of events for the next 31 days only.
- The event’s URL is based on the “Event Calendar URL” provided under your MembershipWorks Organization Settings, so it is important that this setting is correct in order for the event URLs in the feed to be correct.
The RSS tags corresponding to the event data: