Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: On-line community Calendar: please send info re: the one you use.

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2026, 9:15 PM Ruth Hirsch <heidinys [at] earthlink.net> wrote:

> We are looking for a Calendar to post Activities, etc.  for our
> CoHousing Community.
> 
> Please let us know if/which one you use.
> ?Would you choose it again?
> ?What are features?
> What are answers to questions we do not know enough to ask!

After 30 years of searching for the best calendar, my answer is still 
CalendarWiz. It can’t be beat. It does everything.

Yes, it costs money if a community wants to use it fully but I think it is 
worth every penny. It fixes so many problems. A one-stop solution.

If nothing else you can study it to learn how to program other calendars to do 
what it does. The calendar on Mosaic, and I believe the one on Gather, will do 
the same things once you learn whot they could be doing. They just require a 
bit more setting up.

When I set up the calendar at Takoma Village many people were still enthralled 
with free Google services and thought it dumb to pay for a calendar. I have the 
kind of brain, however, that sees how much a calendar can do. Detail is 
important if you want to keep people, reservations, events, etc. coordinated. I 
convinced people to let me set it up by saying I would pay for it myself just 
for the convenience of being able to enter all the information in one program 
and find all the information in one place.

Alica George has kept the calendar for Takoma Village for years now and knows 
most about the current features. She is too busy to post right now but will 
post later.

In the meantime, a list of the features, some at different price points:
Unlimited number of viewers and information posters
Unlimited amount of calendars
View calendars one at a time, all at once, or a particular group
Notifications Lists (everyone on a team, people who want a notice of membership 
meetings, etc.)
Can be viewed on the CalendarWiz website or embedded in the community website
Individual sign-ins with passwords for each resident.
Color coding so it is easy to see all the calendars on one page and tell which 
ones are meetings, meals, etc.
Free trials and scheduled demonstration.
Good support for questions
99% uptime.
Approved people can make entries — no bottle neck of one or two people.

Takoma Village has calendars to reserve: 
2 guestrooms
At least 8 common house spaces plus 2 outdoor spaces
Online meetings
Membership and Team Meetings, online or in reserved spaces
Meals and Meal prep
Kitchen use for canning tomatoes in the summer, etc.
Workdays and gardening days
Repeating as well as one time events & reservations

Teams use room reservations to close a room in advance for cleaning, painting, 
repairs, etc.
Vacations — who is away this week? When will they be back?
Each event or reservation has a number of things that can be filled out like 
addresses/locations, repeating event details, who to contact, description, 
instructions, etc.

I’m sure there are more things. The only thing it wasn’t able to do was have a 
queue for the Guest Rooms so if the first person cancels, the next one is 
automatically scheduled and notified. We use the notes section so when a person 
cancels they notify the next person. Cancellations are sometimes frequent.

One thing I used it for was to learn what a calendar could do and was then able 
to set up Wordpress calendars and others to do the same thing. Unless I had 
learned CalendarWiz I wouldn’t have known a calendar could do those things.

Definitely check it out if only to learn what is possible:
https://www.calendarwiz.com/

Pricing — the categories listed for each level are hard to apply to cohousing, 
but even at the top rate of $50 a month, this would be one of your most useful 
expenditures. Most communities, I estimate would be happy with the $20-$30 a 
month levels (less if you pay annually). Or start with the $15 a month / $144 
annually.
https://www.calendarwizplus.com/pricing

(This is all from memory so it may not be correct in each detail.)

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines
Riderwood Village, Silver Spring MD
Founding member and 25 year resident in Takoma Village, Washington DC