How to Submit a Community Event to Mercia Pulse: A Step-by-Step Guide

Good listings do not write themselves, but they should not swallow an afternoon either. Every week Mercia Pulse publishes community events from across the region: village hall quizzes, charity runs, school summer fairs, choral concerts, repair cafés, local history talks, fundraising suppers and the occasional scarecrow trail. Most of them reach us in the same shape — the details we need, in one message, sent early enough to clear our deadlines.

Here is the whole process, from working out whether your event qualifies to getting a correction published if the date moves. Read it once and your next submission should take ten minutes.

What counts as a community event

If local people organise it and local people can turn up to it, we are interested. Free events, ticketed events, one-offs, annual fixtures and regular sessions all qualify. Our diary regularly carries church fetes, coffee mornings, jumble sales, open gardens, guided walks, junior sports tournaments, craft workshops, volunteer recruitment days, civic meetings and election hustings.

We are more cautious with a few categories. We do not list private celebrations such as weddings, birthdays or christenings, second-hand ticket sales, or promotions that exist mainly to sell a product or a franchise. Regular weekly worship services stay out of the diary, though the fete, the open day and the choir concert that come with them are very welcome. If your event sits somewhere in between, send it anyway and say so in the message. A human reads every submission.

The details we need every time

Nine times out of ten, a listing is delayed because one of these is missing. Include all of them in your first message, even if it feels like overkill.

• Event name as you want it printed — the one you use on posters, not a working title.
• Date and start time, plus a finish time if people need to plan around it.
• Venue with a full postcode. "The community centre" is not enough; there are four of them in some of our towns.
• What it is, in two or three sentences of plain English.
• Admission — free, or the ticket price, and where tickets come from.
• Organiser name and the group or charity behind it.
• A contact we can reach quickly on the day, not just a general inbox.

The extras that save everyone a follow-up email

Tell us about step-free access, parking, whether dogs are welcome, whether children under five will be bored, and whether refreshments are available. If booking is essential, say so clearly and give the booking deadline. If the event is outdoors, tell us the wet-weather plan. If it is likely to sell out, we can mention that too. These details are what turn a name in a diary into an actual turnout.

Deadlines: when to send what

Our community roundup is compiled on Thursdays and published on Fridays. To be considered for that edition, get your submission to us by Wednesday at 5pm. Standalone listings on the events pages need at least ten days of notice; that gives us time to write, to check a detail with you and to place the item in the right section.

Some events need longer. Anything involving road closures, large crowds, a ticketed launch or a named guest should come to us three to four weeks ahead. If your event is happening tomorrow, do not send a diary request — ring the newsdesk instead and it may still make our daily notices if it is genuinely newsworthy.

How to submit, step by step

1. Write it out once, in full. A blank email or document with every field above filled in. Do not send a poster and expect us to extract the facts.
2. Draft the description. Two or three sentences: what happens, who it is for, why someone should come. A quiz night with a licensed bar and a raffle beats "fun for all the family".
3. Check the practical details twice. Read your own postcode and start time aloud. Retyping a wrong date is the single most common error we correct.
4. Attach one good photograph. Not a poster, not a screenshot of a social media post.
5. Use the Submit an Event form on the community page. It keeps everything in one place and reaches the right desk.
6. Add your mobile number. If something is unclear, one phone call usually settles it in a minute.
7. Wait three working days. If you have heard nothing by then, email the events inbox listed on our Contact page with the event name in the subject line.

Photographs, and why one of them gets used

Send a landscape image, at least 1,200 pixels wide, as a JPEG. Pictures of people doing something — a stall being set up, a choir mid-song, last year's runners crossing the line — always outperform a logo. If the event has no photograph, that is fine; we will run text only rather than a stock image that misleads readers.

Two rules. First, tell us who took the picture, so we can credit it. Second, if children are recognisable, confirm that a parent or guardian has agreed to the image being published by us. Do not send anything you found online.

Changes, cancellations and corrections

Events move. Venues flood. Headliners drop out. Tell us as soon as you know, using the same inbox, with the event name and original date in the subject line. We will update the listing and, where the change is significant, add a short note so anyone who read the earlier version is not left standing in the wrong car park.

If an event is cancelled, we mark it cancelled rather than deleting it. Readers who saw the listing need to know, and a vanished page looks like an error on our part.

Three habits that make the difference

Send early, even if the details are not final. A date and a venue now, with the times to follow, beats a complete submission the day before publication. Keep one master document for your event, so the next submission is a copy-and-paste job. And after it is over, drop us a line with a photograph and a rough attendance figure — those follow-ups are what keep local events on our pages week after week.

Photo: geralt / Pixabay