WHAT'S NEW?
SITE OF THE WEEK
There's just too darn much to do around here. Every summer and fall weekend is
crammed with festivals, concerts, road races, street fairs, boating events, garden
tours, lectures, gallery shows, live theater and sporting events.
VISIT the NH HAPPENINGS web site
It wasn't always like this. Only a few decades ago New Hampshire tourists had
to root around for a good yard sale, church social or ham and bean supper. People
were satisfied with the beaches, lakes and mountains, mixed in with the occasional
state fair. Now the state's cultural resources have become as appealing as its
natural resources – and part of the state’s largest income source.
So you'd think some clever entrepreneur could pull together a one-stop events
calendar listing everything going on in the state. The Web is the ideal spot for
such a tool. Groups with events could submit them to a massive database that we
could all access online for free, searching by town, by date or by topic. How
hard could that be?
Very hard, it turns out, very hard indeed.
THE WEB SITE MAKERS
The best online, statewide event calendar I’ve seen to date is the independent
site NHHappenings.com. NHevents.com, part of NH.com which is owned by the Nashua Telegraph is my runner up.
NH Happenings wins because it has the most data in the best database. Click on
the binoculars on the homepage and see. Visitors have a world of choices. You
can search the whole state or any of the color-coded regions. You can search by
date from one week to six months in advance (all the old data disappears as it
should). Finally, and this is the brilliant part, you can narrow your search further
from among two dozen subcategories, picking as many subs as you wish, combining
them with your date and geographical focus. So, for example, I can look for golf
tournaments, museums and auctions in just the Monadnock Region in the first two
weeks of September – and it works! Now that’s a muscular database and it makes
the competition look flabby by comparison.
Creating the site was just one of those spontaneous things, according to NH Happenings
owner Brian Lombard.
"I woke up one morning a few years ago," Lombard explains, "and said it would
be nice to do something on the web. I looked around for events online and said
-- there has to be a better way of doing this."
At the time Lombard was working in construction management and he had as many
as eight employees working on the NH Happenings concept, the navigation and the
graphics. Leading Edge Media, Inc. (www.lemi.com) of Manchester created the back end that is fully "customer-controlled" according
to the latest Web jargon.
"Our goal was to provide the best information on NH recreation, events and hospitality
without overloading the viewer with tons of advertising. We all hate it on the
radio, in magazines, and on TV. The trick is to find that balance between ads
and content," he says.
Today Lombard has a new job marketing the up-and-coming railroad systems for
the state of NH, but he keeps his hand in on evenings and weekends, updating NH
Happenings. One full time staff member works from a Manchester office, gathering
content and selling advertising. Finding the right kind of advertising that appeals
to buyers and does not overtax readers is endlessly tricky. Part of the answer,
many sites have discovered, is to offer basic listings free, then offer paid upgrades
– photos, more detail, clickable links, higher placement on searches.
THE UP SHOT
Here's why it's so hard to do. First, despite what you might think, small organizations
are not very good at public relations – even when it’s free. There are zillions
of NH social clubs, churches, historic groups and sports teams whose combined
event listings would make a superb database. But getting them all to report their
data, even using the miracle of email, is like pulling teeth. Believe me, I’ve
tried. Most event vendors list their own activities on their own sites – very
handy – but very time consuming for the visitor looking for lots of choices fast.
Second, the audience is too diverse. Not everybody goes to the same sources for
info. I hate to use this word, but there are a "plethora" of freebie print calendars
across the state that list events. There are the regional newspapers that do it
best on a day-to-day basis. There’s radio and TV, direct mail and more. Unlike
Canada, that has its centralized government-sponsored tourism act together, no
statewide agency commands control here. Our state tourism site, VisitNH.gov, has
a databased events calendar, but currently one can search either by region or
date or by keyword. But we need to search ALL those categories simultaneously.
A day search works great, but when I searched there for Seacoast events, I got
events from last January at the top of the list.
Third is the money problem, which is the basic problem of the Web itself. Who
pays? Not the viewer certainly, And it’s not easy to charge the lister. Banner
and tile advertising is still a hard sell; despite the proven sales performance
of the Web, advertisers remain cautious. Another income source, for the winner
of the best database, is to resell the data to other sites in NH that could offer
their own events listings using data from NH Happenings, for example. But that
means keeping the data stream flowing.
Forth, tracking every event, even in a state the size of NH, is a task of Herculean
dimensions. There is no way to avoid shoveling tons of content in and out daily,
since a good events calendar is nothing but content. My guess is that two or three
people, keyboarding data at 40 hours a week, could barely keep up even with what's
happening in the Granite State. And each day, as the calendar advances, all the
previous day’s work is deleted.
Even in the Seacoast, where there are arguably more cultural events than any
other region of the state, no one has solved the Events Calendar problem. The
dominant local newspapers publish truly superb weekly calendars, but online the
info isn’t databased. The chambers list their own member events to the exclusion
of others. The towns are totally territorial. The most successful events page
I’ve ever seen are the Movie Listings on PortsmouthNH.com. It’s a miracle of diverse
accurate info for people who want to see films within a short drive of the Seacoast.
But it’s just one small part of the huge EVENTS category.
On the Web, I like to support the guy who does the job best. There’s no need
for all of us to duplicate each other’s efforts, and right now my money is on
NHHappenings.com. It’s the most carefully thought out events engine so far. I’ve
just added their link to my site. What if everyone did the same?
Please visit these SeacoastNH.com ad partners.