RSS Feed for Events

RSS feeds are now available for your events, providing another method (in addition to iCalendar feed) for members to subscribe to your events. In addition you can utilize event RSS feeds to:

• Allow partner websites to automatically publish your upcoming events on their website.
• Create automated MailChimp RSS Feed campaigns to notify your members of new upcoming events.

RSS feeds can only be enabled for event categories that are public (ie. not restricted to be visible to members only). To enable feeds (both RSS and iCalendar) for your events:

1. Navigate to Event List or Event Calendar
2. Click “Setup Event Categories”
3. Click on a event category
4. Enable “Allow users to subscribe to feed”
5. Click Save
6. Repeat step 4-5 for all the event categories you wish to enable
7. Close the Event Categories dialog
8. Navigate to Organization Settings > Integration
9. Make sure the “Event calendar URL” is correct under Website Integration – this should be the complete URL to the MembershipWorks event calendar/list page on your website.

Once the feeds are enabled, your users will be able to obtain the URL of the RSS feed from the event calendar/list page on your website under the “Subscribe” menu:

Setting up a MailChimp RSS Feed Campaign

To setup your MailChimp RSS feed campaign, first obtain the RSS feed URL – go to the event calendar on your website and click “Subscribe” and select “Copy RSS Feed/URL to your clipboard”.

Next setup your feed campaign according to the directions at this link:

https://mailchimp.com/features/rss-to-email/

Note that depending on when you joined MailChimp, Classic Automations may not be easily accessible. If you cannot access Classic Automations in your Mailchimp account, use this link to navigate to it:

http://spr.ly/61691OZ4oS

Note that by default, MailChimp doesn’t include some of the RSS item data like the event image. To include this you will need to customize the MailChimp RSS template – please see the following page on using RSS merge tags:

https://mailchimp.com/help/rss-merge-tags/

The MailChimp merge tags for the RSS items corresponding to the event data:

As an example, a very basic MailChimp template that shows a list of events with the title, date, description and image (without any formatting) would look something like this:

*|RSSITEMS:|*
*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|*
*|RSSITEM:IMAGE|*
*|END:RSSITEMS|*

Please note that we are not able to provide support for setting up or customizing MailChimp campaigns.

Technical Notes for the RSS Feed

• The RSS feed provides the list of events for the next 31 days only.
• The event’s URL is based on the “Event Calendar URL” provided under your MembershipWorks Organization Settings, so it is important that this setting is correct in order for the event URLs in the feed to be correct.

The RSS tags corresponding to the event data:

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