Event Categories | Adding Ministries & Departments to Events – eSPACE Support Center

Event Categories

These are often defined as areas or departments within your organization, such as Staff Meeting, Community Outreach, Student Ministries, Space Rental, etc. In eSPACE you can add event categories to your organizations account so then 1 or multiple event categories can be added to events.
Adding event categories to events is recommended for enhancing the reporting, filtering on the internal calendar, filtering on the public calendar, and search features.
Learn more: Event Categories | Creating & Managing Sub-Categories

Requiring Event Categories on Event Requests:

If you want to make Categories a required field, you can do so by going to Settings > Advanced > General > Event Creation and enable the setting, as shown below.

Adding Event Categories

Go to Settings > Advanced > Event Categories and click "Add New Category".

Add Category Name, choose a category color code and text color (optional). Each event category will have a unique Category ID associated to it.
- "Is Public": If you would like your category to be included and filterable on your Public Calendar, place a check in the box, and Save.
- Learn more about our Public Calendar Setting: Public Calendar Feature | Embed Your eSPACE Calendar on your Website

Repeat this process to continue adding categories.

Deleting & Editing

Delete a Category by clicking the red button associated with the Category and process accordingly.
- Deleting an event category will remove it from any and all past, present, and future events.
Edit a Category by clicking the green button associated with the Category.
You will be able to see how many events have been assigned to each category, as events are created.

On Events

Users, sub-admins and admins will be able to add one or multiple event categories to their event on the main Details tab under the section called "Other". All schedules and occurrences will have the same event categories as the event, in other words, you can't assign different event categories to different occurrences or schedules on an event.

If an admin has made this required, then at least one must be added before the event will be allowed to be submitted for approval.
If the event is marked public, then only event categories that are marked as public will appear as options to be added to the event.

Multiple Categories on an Event

If you add more than one event category, you can set one as the primary so that it appears first on the event on the internal calendar views. Sometimes an event overlaps between different ministries and when this happens people usually add more than one event category to the event. All schedules and occurrences will have the same event category as the event.

On External Event Request Forms

Admins can either allow external (non-eSPACE users) to select an event category when they fill out the request form by enabling the feature on the form settings OR the managers of the form can add one after the request is submitted.

If the event is marked public, then only event categories that are marked as public will appear as options to be added to the event.

Learn more about external forms: External Event Request Forms: Allow Non-eSPACE People to Request an Event

Internal Calendar Filtering

Once you have events with event categories added, you can begin to filter by those event categories on the internal calendars views in eSPACE.

You can filter by or multiple event categories.

Public Calendar Feature

When setting up a public calendar to put on your website, you can choose if you want to filter it by event categories (as well as locations).

You can also enable the setting on the public calendar so that people viewing the events on your website can filter the events by your event categories.

Setting