How to subscribe to your church calendar

Your church calendar can appear in the calendar apps people already use, on their phone, in Google Calendar or in Outlook, and stay up to date automatically. Hubb publishes the calendar as an iCal feed that any modern calendar app can subscribe to.

Getting your calendar feed

1. Go to the monthly calendar page on your website. It’s usually a button or menu item; if you can’t find it, add /Calendar/Month.aspx to the end of your site’s address.
2. Decide which feed you want. Logged in, you get your personal feed, which includes the events relevant to you as a member. Logged out, you get the public feed, which anyone can use.
3. Click the ‘Export’ dropdown at the top right of the monthly calendar and choose ‘ICAL’. A ‘Calendar Address’ dialog opens showing the feed address; copy it.
4. In your calendar app, look for the option to add a calendar by URL or subscribe to a calendar, and paste the address in. In Google Calendar it’s under ‘Other calendars’; in Outlook it’s an internet calendar subscription; on a phone it’s usually under calendar accounts. Each app’s help covers the exact clicks.
5. Give the subscribed calendar a sensible name, and you’re done: changes to your church calendar now flow through automatically.

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Good to know

• The same ‘Export’ dropdown also offers XML, PDF and CSV, handy for a printable calendar or a spreadsheet snapshot.
• You can control how far ahead the feed reaches by adding a days value to the address: add ?days=365 to the public feed for a year of events (or &days=365 on a personal feed, which already contains a question mark).
• Subscribing is better than importing: a subscription keeps itself up to date, while an import is a one-off snapshot that goes stale.
• A short page on your site telling members how to subscribe is a lovely touch, and you only have to write it once.