Mike Couch is a self-identified introvert who is part of a mixed marriage — his wife is an extrovert. And they have two children. Although he doesn’t mind staying at home, his wife likes to go out on date nights and he believes his kids should be exposed to events and activities around them.
A summer 2024 transplant to Mankato from Austin, his objectives for creating a comprehensive online events calendar were simple: “My goal was to try to make it super easy for people to find the information, easy for me to load it (or whoever else wants to load it, if we get to that point), as well as make it easy for people to add it to their calendar.”
To facilitate the last goal, and to keep it simpler for him, he created it using the ubiquitous Google calendar format. It can be found at MankatoAreaEvents.com.
But as others before him have found out, it’s not that simple.
Couch is an engineer who works from home, and with his two kids he didn’t want to create a project that would soon monopolize his time, he said. So he checked with his friend, Leon, who claimed to spend only one hour a week updating the calendar he created for Austin events.
With Leon’s advice in mind, and a collection of saved bookmarks he had started, he set to work with his engineer’s mindset.
“I started with subscribing to as many calendars as I could find into a new Google account, documenting the sites as well as in a page for the website,” he said. “And I manually copied events for March into the (newly created) MankatoAreaEvents.com calendar.”
Wanting to determine if his efforts were being seen and appreciated, he posted a beta version online. On March 9, he had 836 views from 658 visitors and, importantly, comments from visitors reinforcing his idea that such a calendar was needed here.
He fully acknowledges similar calendars already exist — GreaterMankatoEvents.com and MankatoLife.com among them — but said he found each seemed to have a specific niche for content. As such, none could effectively serve the variety of events residents and visitors might be seeking, he said.
“I also purposely decided to leave off certain events such as the ones that are only targeted to students or things like MSU sporting events due to how many can be on a given day.”
The site itself is clean and easy to use. Click on an event, as with your personal Google calendar, and the event pops up in a different window. You can choose to add it to your own Google calendar. When available, there’s a link to the organization sponsor’s Facebook event posting or a button for “More details.”
If this prompts users to submit their own event, the mankatoareaevents@gmail.com address is available or a link to a contact form where information can be included. The form prompts users to provide complete information in the format used on the calendar page, making it easy for everyone, he said.
Yvonne Cariveau, president/owner at Internet Connections, knows a thing or two about maintaining a Mankato events calendar. She oversaw GreaterMankatoEvents.com for The Free Press, Greater Mankato Growth, city of Mankato, city of North Mankato and Lime Valley Marketing for more than 10 years.
While the collaboration that grew from the Envision 2020 plan worked well for years, it could not be easily sustained without consistent funding, someone to maintain it and, to be most effective, lots of buy-in from organizations that benefit from having their events on it. It is now maintained by GMG.
“Venue operators (bars, etc.) don’t want to pay someone to do this, musicians and performers don’t have the time/funds,” she wrote in an email. “Having GMG do it ties in well with promoting people coming to town to have a good place for them to find things to do (while they’re visiting).”
But to make it attractive and easy for one-time visitors to use, there must be a consistency to the items posted there, she said. Photos and video also are key. And that comes back to having someone regularly curating information that is included — or removed because it doesn’t fit criteria.
“Having variety is great, but not too much of the obscure things up front at once or you turn off folks looking for music, plays, etc.,” Cariveau said.
Couch is still in the “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes” phase of the calendar. While he is buoyed by responses he has seen so far, it’s still a building concern and one he hopes will be able to take on a life of its own.
“If people find benefit from this site, then the best thing that can be done at this time is to use it, send me missing events (especially the recurring ones) and, most importantly, share it with others,” he said.