Eric Singer
Last year, when visiting my brother in Chicago, I found out about an incredible printmaking workshop at a community studio about fifteen minutes from his place. Found out about it three days after it happened.
I would've gone. I'd been wanting to learn screen printing for like two years at that point. The timing would've worked perfectly. The space is exactly the kind of place I want to support - volunteer-run, sliding scale, focused on making creative practice accessible.
I just... didn't know it was happening.
And here's the thing that's been bothering me: I wasn't even trying that hard to find stuff to do. I actively want to discover local creative events. I follow probably 40 local venues on Instagram. I'm in three different neighborhood Facebook groups where I pretend to care about parking disputes just to stay in the loop. I'm exactly the kind of person community art spaces are trying to reach.
I am, in marketing speak, a "warm lead." I am "high intent." I am "ready to convert." And I still completely missed a free printmaking workshop fifteen minutes away.
If I can't find it, what chance does anyone else have?
That's when I started paying attention to a pattern I'd been seeing for a while but hadn't really named: incredible creative spaces doing important community work, struggling to reach the community they exist for.
Here's what keeps happening.
Community art spaces exist to solve a real problem: creative people need space to make work, show work, teach, learn, and gather. Neighborhoods need places where culture happens outside of commercial venues.
But here's the thing - most of these spaces are solving the space problem while quietly struggling with a different problem: nobody knows what's happening.
Not because they're not trying. Most spaces are posting constantly. Instagram, Facebook, maybe a newsletter if they've got the bandwidth to maintain one. They're doing the work they've been told to do.
But it's not sticking. Events come and go. The same 15-20 regulars show up. New people trickle in occasionally, usually by word of mouth. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of people in a two-mile radius who'd love to know this space exists and have no idea.
What's missing is something simple: an open calendar.
Not a social media content calendar. Not a private spreadsheet. An actual public, accessible, persistent place where your events live and people can find them.
I'm not going to tell you to post more or use better hashtags or figure out Reels. You've heard that already, and if it was going to work, it would've worked by now.
(Also, if I hear one more person say "just be authentic on TikTok" or "leverage user-generated content," I'm throwing a ceramic mug at them.)
The problem isn't effort. It's that social media is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job.
When you post "Workshop this Saturday: Intro to Relief Printing, 2-4pm, all materials provided, free!" on Tuesday afternoon, you're essentially hoping for a miracle:
You need someone to be:
That's not a strategy to get folks together. That's a séance.
And even if everything works perfectly and someone sees your post on Tuesday, they're not planning their weekend on Tuesday. They're planning it Thursday evening or Friday morning. By then, your post is buried under hundreds of other things.
When I want to find something to do on the weekend, I don't scroll Instagram hoping an event appears. That would be insane. I search for it (and it's annoying).
I Google "things to do in [neighborhood]" or "art events this weekend" or "creative workshops near me."
Or I check a few specific places I already know about - I go to their websites, look at their calendars, see what's coming up.
Or I ask friends "know any good spots?" and they send me links to actual pages with information on them.
Notice what all of these have in common? They require information to be somewhere persistent that I can go find it when I'm actually planning. Like a grown-up who has a calendar and tries to maintain the illusion of having their life together.
Social media posts aren't persistent. They're ephemeral by design. They show up in a feed and disappear.
You might already have a public calendar - a Google Calendar embed on your site, an events page you update, maybe even a list in your Instagram bio.
That's great. That's the first step.
But here's the difference between a public calendar and an open calendar:
A public calendar lives on your website. People who already know about you can find it.
An open calendar travels. It shows up in search results, you know... findable. It can be subscribed to. It reaches people who don't know about you yet.
Think of it like this: a public calendar is a bulletin board inside your space. An open calendar is that same information, but posted at every coffee shop, library, and community board in your neighborhood.
Here's what happens when your calendar becomes truly open:
People looking for things to do can find your events. People can subscribe to them. Your regulars never miss anything. And most importantly: people who've never heard of you can discover you when they're actively looking for something to do.
That last part is why Daisy exists.
We built Daisy specifically for this problem - not the "how do we get more followers" problem, but the "how do people actually find out what's happening" problem.
If you have a public calendar anywhere - your website, Google Calendar, wherever - we can automatically pull those events and circulate them across our platform. They show up when people search your neighborhood, when they're looking for workshops or creative events, when they're planning their week. People can subscribe to your calendar and never miss an event.
If you don't have a calendar yet, you can spin one up in Daisy in about five minutes.
Either way, it's free. We're not trying to extract rent from community spaces. The platform is ad supported. Your events stay yours, we just help them travel.
Here's what I think matters most about open calendars:
When one venue has a public calendar, it helps them. When many venues have public calendars, it helps the whole scene.
The ecosystem becomes more vibrant and accessible. Not because any individual space got better at marketing, but because information became findable.
Right now, every community art space is fighting the same lonely battle: trying to reach people through platforms designed to keep information flowing past, not help people find it when they need it.
What if instead, you all just made your events findable? One calendar each, all open and public, all available for people to search and subscribe to?
That's what we're trying to build.
You don't need permission or a perfect system. You need a place where your events live.
If you've got a website, add a calendar page and we can help get it into Daisy.
If you don't have a website, create a calendar in Daisy. It's public by default, subscribable, and we'll make sure it shows up when people search.
Update it once a week. Add events as you book them. Keep it current.
That's it.
If you want help getting set up or just want someone to look at what you've got and tell you if it's working, email us: hello@meetdaisy.co
That missed workshop is why Daisy exists. Not just for me - I eventually found that studio and I go to their open hours now - but for everyone else who's looking and not finding.
There are hundreds of community art spaces doing this work. Thousands of people in each neighborhood who'd love to know they exist. And right now, the infrastructure for connecting them just... doesn't exist in a way that actually works.
You shouldn't have to be good at Instagram to build a community space. You should just need to be good at creating things that people care about and making it possible for them to find out about it.
A public calendar is that infrastructure. It's not the whole answer, but it's the foundation everything else builds on.
Your community is looking for you. Make it easier for them to find you.
Daisy is trying to make local culture more discoverable. If that sounds useful, check out meetdaisy.co.
