I’ve hitched on with two new start-ups: uoEvents and Toori.st.  uoEvents (a public events calendar for the University of Ottawa) has launched and Toori.st (a crowd-sourcing tourism initiative) is just starting.

uoEvents has gained a lot of traction very quickly.  Launch at the end of July, it has received 2300 unique hits in its first month alone.  A large portion of this success is due to the launch timing.  The beginning of September marks the start of the new academic year for the University of Ottawa, and of course – frosh week! Using uoEvents as a source of events, activities, and information for the incoming students has proved highly beneficial to both the students and our promotion plan.

Social media has helped tremendously.  We’ve mostly been using Facebook, and although we do have a Twitter account, it hasn’t been used much.  We have both a “page” and a “person”, but the uoEvents person is what is showing the best success.  Students are “friending” the account to get updates through their Facebook news feed (when we set a new status).  With over 350 friends, it shows that we have 15% rate of students friending us on Facebook after visiting the website – that’s incredible!

uoEvents actually started off as my “PubCal” plugin for WordPress.  I took the Events-Calendar open source plugin and modified it to fit our needs. Taking someone else’s plugin and redoing it actually opened my eyes to the danger of using open source software blindly, especially WP plugins.  The plugin was riddled with security holes, mostly SQL injection vulnerabilities.  I fixed up the security holes, added it tons of functionality (including event tagging), made it publicly modifiable with security levels, connected to Facebook, and we were off to the races!

I think what made uoEvents so popular versus other calendars is the simplicity. To have an event posted, all you have to do is invite the uoEvents Facebook account, and it will appear on the calendar within 15 minutes (the script to check for new event invites runs every 15 minutes).

All in all, a pretty great success.