This article is about the Proxi admin app at app.proxi.co.
A community event calendar — the "what's happening downtown" page — is the asset people come back to every single week, which makes it the best traffic engine a main street or chamber owns. Proxi's calendar gives you one public page with list, calendar, and map views, community event submissions with a review queue, and an embed for your website. Here's the whole operation, in detail.
How the Calendar Is Organized
Three ideas, and everything else follows:
Your workspace has one calendar, managed under Calendar in the sidebar and published at its own public page. No setup step — it's already there.
Groups are series within it: "Summer Concert Series," "Farmers Market," "Downtown Events." They give events a color, shared settings, and their own submission rules — and visitors can filter by them.
Venues are your reusable locations: save "Riverwalk Park" once and every future event there is two clicks.
1. Set Up Groups and Venues First
On the Calendar page, open the Groups tab and click to create your first group. In the New event group dialog: a Name ("Downtown Events"), a Description, a Color (this color-codes its events everywhere), and a Default venue if the series always happens in one place — it prefills the venue picker on every new event.
Add Suggested tags to the group — "Live Music, Family Friendly, Free, Food" — these become the suggestions everyone (including public submitters) picks from, which keeps your tag vocabulary tidy.
Publish the group (Create and publish), and repeat for each series. Two to five groups is the sweet spot; more than that and filtering stops helping.
Venues build themselves as you go — when you type an address on an event, you'll get a "Reuse this location for future events?" prompt with a Save as venue button. Say yes for anywhere you'll use twice.
2. Add Events — the Fast Way First
Click New event. Before you type anything, look at the top of the form: "Is your event already online or written down somewhere?" Paste a link to the event's web page (From a link) or paste the text of a flyer or email (From text) and click Extract — we'll read it and fill in the name, dates, description, and location for you. A banner tells you how confident to be ("Looks good" vs "Review the details"). For a community calendar fed by other people's flyers, this is the feature that turns a 5-minute entry into a 30-second one.
3. The Event, Field by Field
The event editor has five tabs; Basics and Location are the daily drivers:
Name, a Short summary (the one-liner shown on cards and social previews), and the full Description.
Group — file it into a series.
Start / End time, an All day switch, and the Timezone. We'll gently flag dates that look off ("These dates are in the past — double-check the year.").
Repeat — weekly on a day, every N weeks, monthly by date or by weekday ("Second Saturday"), yearly, or a custom rule for power users, with an optional end date and a plain-language preview ("Every Tuesday and Thursday."). This is how the farmers market becomes one entry instead of twenty-six.
Tags — type and press Enter; suggestions come from the group's vocabulary and tags already in use, so "family friendly" doesn't fragment into four spellings.
Cover image — a wide landscape image around 1200×600 looks best; it's the card art and the social preview.
External link and Contact email for the "more info" trail.
On the Location tab, pick the type: At a venue (choose from your saved venues), At an address (autocomplete), Virtual (meeting link), Hybrid, or TBD when the flyer says "location announced soon." Only located events appear on the Map view, so venue-or-address is worth the ten extra seconds.
The People tab connects host businesses from your listings; Sponsors can attach your sponsorship programs' sponsors automatically. For ticketing, put the ticket page in the External registration URL — built-in RSVP is on its way but not live yet.
4. Publishing: Two Switches, Four States
An event appears publicly when both are true: its status is Published (use Create and publish / Save and publish — drafts stay private), and the Show on public calendar switch is on. Day to day you'll also use:
Featured (pin to top) — for the headliner events that should lead the page.
Cancel event — rained out? Cancelling keeps the event visible with a clear "Cancelled" badge, which is what stops the phone calls. Archive is the one that hides it entirely.
Duplicate — next month's version of a one-off is two clicks.
Deleting one date of a recurring series asks whether you mean only this occurrence or the entire series — so skipping the holiday-week market doesn't erase the year.
5. Let the Community Fill the Calendar
The best community calendars aren't typed by one admin — they're submitted by the community and approved by one admin:
Edit a group and switch on Accept public submissions, adding Submission instructions ("Community events only — sales and promotions will be declined").
Anyone can now submit at your public submission link (the calendar's Share popover lists a form link per group), and the public calendar itself grows an Add Event button. The public form mirrors your editor — including the paste-a-link Extract shortcut and recurrence under "Advanced" — plus the submitter's name and email so you can follow up.
Submissions land in the Submissions tab, and a banner ("3 submissions waiting for review") appears on the other tabs so nothing sits. Each card shows the full event and who sent it: Approve publishes it; Reject lets you record a reason. One honest note: rejection reasons aren't emailed to submitters automatically yet, so a quick personal email is good manners for now.
6. Publish It Everywhere
The Share button on the Calendar page covers every channel:
The public page — one link with everything visitors need: search, series and venue filters, a "when" filter (Today / This week / This month), a List | Calendar | Map view toggle (Map shows every located event as a pin), favorites, and per-event pages with add-to-calendar buttons.
Embed it on your website — the Embed tab builds the snippet with your choices: limit to certain Groups, a single Venue, Default view (List or Month), and whether to show the Add Event button. Two classic setups: the full calendar in Month view on your "Events" page, and a single group in List view embedded on a program's own page. Works on Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, WordPress — anywhere custom HTML goes.
iCal subscription — a feed URL people paste into their personal calendar app, so your events show up next to their dentist appointments. Offer it to your board and your superfans.
Per-event links — every published event has its own shareable page (the Copy public link button in the event editor) for social posts about one big night.
7. The Weekly Rhythm
A community calendar is an operation, not a project. The routine that keeps it alive in under an hour a week:
Monday — clear the Submissions queue; approve, reject with a kind note, and fix the inevitable missing end time.
Wednesday — share the "This week" view link on social with two sentences about the headliner. Feature that headliner so it leads the page.
Monthly — skim the Drafts filter for stragglers, and check that recurring series haven't quietly ended (open-ended repeats run forever; series with end dates need renewing).
Promote the submission link relentlessly — in your newsletter, at business association meetings, on the library's counter. Every organization that self-submits is an hour you don't spend typing flyers.
One plan note: free workspaces can create and share up to a handful of events to try it out — a real community calendar will want the upgraded limit.
Worth a read on the Proxi blog: what a community event calendar should actually look like, the community calendar webinar recap, and pairing a calendar with an itinerary map.