PlaceCal is community calendar that is updated by the local organisations themselves instead of centrally managed. It’s a self-sustaining initiative that’s exactly what communities have been waiting for.
Using PlaceCal, communities can improve their social connection by getting people out of their homes, and tackles the wider health that result from isolation.
PlaceCal has a broad range of specific benefits:
PlaceCal is both service and software but it requires nothing new. It works by helping organisations create and publish their own content promoting their events and services using software they already have.
This could be Google Calendar, Outlook and Facebook, or existing organisation websites. PlaceCal then aggregates this data for you, resulting in citizen-curated, reliable, up-to-date listings of neighbourhood events in ways that can be accessed by everyone.
Our people will work with you to ensure your listings are being included in PlaceCal as part of the service.
PlaceCal massively reduces the overhead of organisations and individuals who are currently keeping track of events (“asset mapping”) in old school formats like Word or Excel.
PlaceCal has been enabling people to work together better by making it easy to see at a glance what’s going on. It eliminates the need to double up on effort because the listings are continuously synchronised in one place.
Our website PlaceCal.org shows events from our pilot area Hulme and Moss Side in Manchester, UK. It was launched in December 2017, and we’re currently expanding to Moston and Mossley.
As a hub for event information, it is frequently used for print-outs and adapted for posters, flyers, brochures and community radio broadcasts which can reach people who may not be as digitally connected.
The pilot has had an enormously positive response from both residents and institutional stakeholders. There is clear demand for a roll-out from both individual neighbourhoods and institutional partners, as well as a number of neighbourhood and larger area commissions in negotiation.
The bigger PlaceCal grows, the better our service gets.
PlaceCal delivers a community development program that connects people and organisations with culture, health and social housing institutions in neighbourhood communities.
It tackles social isolation and promotes wellbeing by enabling community partnerships to create and share joined-up information about services and events in their area.