How Be There Local built a city-by-city nonprofit events calendar with GravityKit

Be There Local is a community events platform for Central Ohio. A visitor picks their city and gets that city’s own calendar, map, and list of upcoming nonprofit events. MaryAnn Davis, a volunteer who taught herself web design for the project, built it with Gravity Forms, GravityView, and GravityCalendar, and it now covers several communities.

Meet MaryAnn Davis

MaryAnn Davis built and runs Be There Local, which helps people find nonprofit events in their own town or a town nearby. She came to the project after a career in psychology and finance.

One of those groups is close to her heart. MaryAnn has volunteered for more than 30 years with the Women’s City Club in Delaware, Ohio, which provides housing for low-income women. The club is run entirely by volunteers and has no public funding, so it depends on fundraising to keep going.

To build something that could help groups like it, MaryAnn taught herself web design through reading, online classes, and tutorials, picking up HTML and CSS and a little PHP and JavaScript along the way. The “little project” grew into what she calls “a full-time, no-pay job.”

MaryAnn Davis, founder of Be There Local

Discovering GravityKit

Gravity Forms came first, and for a while it was all the site needed. Then, in MaryAnn’s words, she “started getting fancy” and knew she needed more help, so she Googled it.

What she needed was a calendar that would show her Gravity Forms entries and let visitors narrow them down by city and by type of event. GravityKit was the option that did both.

GravityKit was the only calendar that worked easily with Gravity Forms and allowed me to filter by city and types of events.

Building with GravityKit

A calendar for every city

The Be There Local homepage asks one question: which city and state? A visitor types their city, clicks Get My Calendar, and lands on a calendar of that community’s nonprofit events, built with GravityCalendar. The calendar switches between month, week, and day views, and each event links through to the organization running it.

The Delaware, Ohio calendar, with buttons for local sponsors above it. Each city gets its own version of this page.

Be There Local now covers Central Ohio communities, including Delaware, Powell, Dublin, Worthington, Westerville, Columbus, Bexley, and Canal Winchester. Growing that list is quick: MaryAnn says adding a new city “takes minutes, not a rebuild.”

Filters and a map of what’s nearby

Under each calendar, a GravityView search bar lets visitors filter events by type, from Art and Books to Kids, Music, and Theater. Below that, a map built with the Maps Layout shows where each event takes place, and local business sponsors appear on the map too. A list of ongoing events, such as children’s reading groups and free summer movies, rounds out the page.

Visitors can filter by type of event and see where everything is on a map of the area.

Nonprofits post their own events

MaryAnn doesn’t type in every event herself. Local nonprofits register as members, which is free, and submit their own events through a form. Each submission waits for her approval before it appears on a calendar.

I review and approve each one before it goes live, so the calendars stay accurate and trustworthy without me typing in every event.

The site also leans on GravityKit’s DataTables layout. When MaryAnn hit problems along the way, she worked through them with the GravityKit support team, and what she found helped other customers too.

When I ran into problems, GravityKit’s support team worked through them with me, and my reports led to fixes in DataTables and Maps that now help other users too.

The impact

Be There Local exists so that small nonprofits have somewhere to be seen. Groups that run on volunteers and fundraising rarely have money for advertising, and now they have one place where their whole community can find their events. As MaryAnn puts it, small, volunteer-run nonprofits like the Women’s City Club “now have a free place to be found.”

The project is still young. MaryAnn is listing events for multiple cities and getting ready to add more, with the goal of covering all of Central Ohio. Her next step is to bring in local businesses as sponsors on each calendar page to help pay for the site. Whatever comes next, she is clear about how it got this far.

The business is just starting, so we will have to wait and see, but the site would have been impossible without GravityKit.

Central Ohio residents can help the site grow too. Anyone can sign up as a friend of Be There Local and get an email when new events of the types they pick are added in the cities they follow. Nonprofits can join as members for free, and local businesses can sign up as sponsors, each through a form on the site.

Takeaways

MaryAnn built a platform that gives Central Ohio cities its own calendar, map, and list of ongoing events, all from one site. Nonprofits add their own events, she approves each one, and a new city takes minutes to set up, so Be There Local can keep growing toward all of Central Ohio without a rebuild.

The reusable lesson is to let the people with the information enter it. Member submissions plus an approval step keep the calendars full and accurate without one person typing in every event.