Events in this calendar are:
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hosted by, or affiliated with, the University of Waterloo
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events people can attend online or in person. For instance, an on campus event or a live webcast. A call for nominations or application deadline are important dates rather than events, and can be shared elsewhere.
If you are looking to share events that aren't affiliated with Waterloo — such as an academic conference or call for papers — please contact the relevant department or academic unit.
Best practices for creating event posts
Craft a title that describes your event
- Readers should be able to tell at a glance what your event is about. If all they see is your event title, is there enough information to guide them to learn more?
- Avoid generic titles such as "Guest lecture at the library" that don't give readers enough information. Think about what words people would use to search for your event, and how it would appear in a Tweet or social media post.
- Recommended length: 60 characters including spaces (your title can be longer, but only this much will show in search engine results)
- Mind your keywords. If someone was searching for the event, what word or words might they use?
Include a summary
The summary appears on event listing pages and in search engine results. When you're creating an event, click on Event Summary next to the Description heading to expand the summary field.
Tips:
- Include a concise description of the event. Consider: how would you describe the event in a sentence or two?
- Recommended length: 150 characters (including spaces). Your summary can be longer, but will likely be cut off in search engine results.
If you leave this area blank, the WCMS will automatically pull the first part of your event content as the summary (including images). You can also use a teaser break to indicate how much content should be included.
Use images for visual interest
When creating other marketing assets for your event, consider having a web banner and listing page image created too.
Tips:
- Listing page images and full-width images should be minimum of 750 pixels wide, landscape orientation. Images such as speaker photos can be a smaller size and any orientation.
- Images should be optimized for web ("save for web" or use an online compressor such as Compressor.io) to keep the file size down. Smaller images take less time to load, and won't eat up people's data plans.
- Avoid using text — it can appear blurry on retina screens, may be too small to read on mobile devices and may cause web accessibility issues.
- Avoid using event posters — the text will be too small to read and may cause other accessibility issues. Consider designing web assets as part of your event marketing materials.
- Examples of images to include could be an event logo, speaker headshots, event artwork that is created for web use.
- Logos can be used within the body content of an event.
View our image style and photography guidelines for inspiration.
Tag strategically
Tags aggregate events into listing pages that users can browse.
Consider:
- Use the audience taxonomy. People may use filters (the drop down menus) to select events that are relevant to them.
- If you don't see your event type listed in the "types" list, include that information in the free tagging (event tags) field.
- Use the event tags sparingly. These tags are for your audience, not a search engine, so choose your tags carefully and avoid redundancy.
Submitting your event
You can use our event submission form to share your event to our calendar. We welcome and appreciate contributions from the Waterloo community!
If your event has already been posted to a Waterloo website (for instance, a department website), you can submit the link and some basic information through the form and we'll take care of the rest.