Set up Calendar
Calendar is where you'll manage your church's events, facilities, and booking requests. By the end of this guide, you'll have your rooms and resources created, approval groups set up, and your first set of events ready to go!
Add people to Calendar
Before getting started, decide who should have Calendar access at your church. Calendar is primarily for internal use, not general congregational use, so not everyone needs access to Calendar. Examples of people who need Calendar access are church administrators, ministry leaders, and facility managers. Only people with Calendar access can create and approve events, so make sure to add anyone who's in charge of managing your church's events.
Head to the Add people to Calendar article to get started! Once you've added people to your account, check out the Permissions in Calendar article to learn about the different permissions and roles people can have in Calendar.
Important
Resolving booking conflicts is an important part of managing Calendar events, so make sure at least one administrator is a conflict resolver.
Add rooms and resources
Next, add rooms and resources to avoid double-bookings. Setting up rooms and resources helps ensure that every space or item that's needed for your events is accounted for!
In Calendar, rooms represent any space in your church that can be booked for an event, such as the sanctuary, the gym, or a classroom. Resources can be any item or service that you need to make an event happen. Common examples of resources include tables, chairs, or church vans, but you can also add services such as childcare or A/V support as resources.
Follow along with these articles to learn how you can Add rooms and Add resources.
Set up approval groups
Set up approval groups to designate who should approve or reject room and resource requests! You can create different approval groups and assign them to specific rooms and resources. For example, you can set up a "Tech" approval group to manage A/V requests and a "Facilities" approval group to manage building requests.
See the Create approval groups article to get started. To learn more about how the request and approval process works, see Request rooms and resources for an event.
Create or import events
It's time to start adding events! You can create your first event from scratch by following the steps in the Create an event article.
If you're coming from another system, you can also import your existing events using an iCal file. Here are a couple of important things to keep in mind about importing events:
Depending on which system you're coming from, event details such as the recurrence pattern may not transfer over.
If your recurring events end up as separate events after importing them, you can undo the iCal import and start over. From there, try importing only the first instance of each event and adding the recurrence pattern later when editing the event.
Rooms and resources from other systems do not automatically transfer over in Calendar, so you'll need to manually add rooms and resources by editing your events.
What's next
Now that you've set up Calendar, check out the following articles to keep improving your event management workflow!