You Make This Spreadsheet Every May. By July, It's Already Lying to You.

You Make This Spreadsheet Every May. By July, It's Already Lying to You.

Every tourist board has this document. It's called something like Summer 2027 – events – NEW (2). It gets put together in May, with a lot of phone calls and messages along the lines of "let us know the exact date as soon as you know." From it comes a nice PDF with logos, sent out to everyone and posted on the website.

Then summer arrives. The fishermen's night moves to Saturday because of the bura wind. The concert starts at 9pm, not 8. The a cappella group cancelled, another one's coming instead. The PDF still says what it said in May, because nobody's going to redo the whole document over one changed time slot.

"A PDF is like a postcard: it looks nice, but it shows how things were on the day it was made."

One Event, the Same Work Six Times Over

The spreadsheet, unfortunately, is only the beginning. For every event in it, someone in the office has to:

• write a caption for Facebook, then a different one for Instagram, then a third for the website,
• find a photo and crop it into three different formats,
• make a poster, or beg someone else to make one,
• open a Facebook event and type all of it in again,
• remember where else it still needs to be posted — the part that most often falls through.

Multiply that by forty events. In July. While the phone keeps ringing and someone at the desk is asking where the nearest pharmacy is.

What If the Spreadsheet Returned the Favor?

You have to fill in the spreadsheet either way. The only difference is where you fill it in. Imagine it's one place with a handful of required fields: name, date, time, location, event type, a couple of sentences, and a photo.

From those few pieces of information, every event can generate all of the above:

• Post copy: a draft for the Facebook event, a shorter one for Instagram, and one for the website, each ready to copy.
• Images in the right formats: square, vertical and horizontal, downloadable with a single click.
• A poster: laid out to a design agreed on once, at the start. Export it to PDF whenever you need it.
• An icon that picks itself: if the event type is a fishermen's night, the poster gets a fish. If it's a harvest, a bunch of grapes.

"Nobody should be searching the internet for a picture of a fish at half past ten at night."

It Doesn't Post for You — On Purpose

This isn't a robot that posts to social media on its own. Those tend to post the wrong thing at the wrong time, and you're the one who knows that the fishermen's night needs a mention of old Ivo and his brudet.

The idea is more modest than that. Each event comes with a list of places it needs to go: Facebook event, Instagram, website, Google. Next to each one are two buttons: Copy text and a link that takes you straight to your Facebook page's new-event window. Paste the text, add the image you just downloaded, and move on to the next one.

Once you've handled one place, check it off. The list remembers it, along with who checked it.

"Did we post this on Instagram?" — a question the office no longer has to ask out loud.

When the Schedule Changes

Change it in one place. The poster, the post copy and the event page instantly show the new time. Next to the places where you've already posted, a warning shows up that they need updating, so you know the Facebook event is still showing the old one.

Next May, You're Not Starting From a Blank Page

Everything you enter stays in the archive. Is the fishermen's night happening again next year? Open last year's entry, change the date, and you've got a finished poster and copy that just need a touch-up. When the council asks for a season overview, the list of events with dates and locations already exists.

What About the Video From the Festival?

DataLytics has already built a setup like this: the tourist board's YouTube channel connects to the tool, and a video placed on the agreed playlist shows up on its own wherever it needs to, for example next to that event on the website. You film it, upload it, add it to the playlist. Nobody copies a single link.

What This Isn't

It's not a system that takes a week to learn. If you know how to fill in a spreadsheet, you already know how to use this.

It's not an off-the-shelf product with a price list either. Every office works a little differently, so the tool should be built around how you prepare your season, not the other way around.