How to Use the Big Nest Calendar

As parents, the sheer amount of time we spend managing or following calendars is staggering. It’s the only way to ensure our kids get to all the dentist appointments, soccer practices, and clarinet lessons they need to.

Everyone’s so busy these days. None of it would happen without a calendar.

To make life easy for your parent-teacher group, your Big Nest website includes a built-in calendar. It provides families with an easy overview of all that you’re doing, and it’s easy to manage.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• add and manage events
• import a school or district calendar
• organize multiple calendars
• help families stay automatically in sync

If you want to go deeper on specific topics:

• How to Import a School Calendar into Big Nest
• How Families Subscribe to Your Calendar
• How to Organize Multiple Calendars for Your PTG

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Where to Find the Calendar in Big Nest

From the Admin Dashboard, find the Calendar card in the Main Pages section.

All calendar management happens in the Events tab of the calendar dashboard.

From here you can:

• add new events
• import events from a PDF or image
• manage your calendars
• view upcoming events

Most groups will spend the majority of their time on this page.

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Adding a Calendar Event

Your calendar will automatically generate an event for anything already on your website. That means any fundraisers, spirit wear sales, or after-school programs will show up on your calendar by default. You don’t have to add them.

And what’s more, they’ll show up with a link to their corresponding webpage. So a parent can see when your fundraiser is, click the link, and make a donation.

For events that aren’t automatically covered on your website, you can manually add them.

If you’re planning a meeting, volunteer event, or fundraiser activity, it only takes a few seconds to create a new event.

Click New Event from the events dashboard.

When creating an event, you can add:

• event title
• start and end date
• start and end time (optional)
• repeating schedule
• location (optional)
• description (optional)

Once saved, the event appears immediately on your calendar.

Events are visible by default, but you can mark them as private when needed (for example, executive board meetings).

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How to Import School District Events to the Calendar

Most school districts already publish a calendar of events that lists things like winter break, weather make-up days, and other key dates. Instead of re-entering everything manually, you can upload that calendar to Big Nest and it will extract the events for you.

From the Events dashboard, click Import Events.

You’ll see the document upload screen.

Upload:

• a PDF calendar
• or an image file

Big Nest will analyze the document and extract events automatically.

After processing, you’ll see a review screen.

From there you can:

• review detected events
• correct dates if needed
• remove anything irrelevant

When everything looks right, you can add the events to:

• a new calendar (for example: School District Calendar)
• or an existing calendar

This saves hours of manual entry and helps keep your calendar aligned with the school.

Families will love you for this because you can make that calendar available to be automatically added to their phone calendars. We’ll tackle this next.

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How Families Subscribe to Your Calendar

Families can add your calendar to their personal calendar apps (like Google Calendar or Apple Calendar).

They can either:

• download events manually
• or subscribe to the calendar

When families subscribe, new events and updates automatically appear on their phone or computer.

That means:

• fewer missed events
• fewer reminder emails
• less manual coordination for everyone

Most of us spend the half hour each August loading all the school district events onto our phones. Now your site can save parents from that hassle.

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Managing Multiple Calendars

Big Nest allows you to maintain more than one calendar.

For example:

• PTG events
• district calendar
• volunteer events
• executive board calendar (private)

Click Manage Calendars from the events dashboard to create or edit calendars.

You can also link calendars from other PTGs using Big Nest.

This is especially helpful for avoiding conflicts across schools. For example, you probably don’t want to schedule a large elementary event on the same night as a high school homecoming game.

Linked calendars give your team better visibility when planning events and help prevent conflicts that reduce turnout.

They are visible to you but never appear on your group’s public calendar page.

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Summary

The Big Nest calendar gives your group a single place to manage events and keep your community informed.

You can:

• add events directly
• import school calendars
• organize multiple calendars
• avoid scheduling conflicts
• help families stay automatically up to date

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