Introducing Manta Events Online Calendar

Have you ever found out about a fun event the next day? Pretty frustrating right!

Say hello to our Online Manta Events Calendar.

What is the calendar?

A centralized repository of events in Manta. Any event is welcome to be posted, so long as it’s:

• A genuine event (ie live music is great, but a weekly sale from Megamaxi is not)
• Relatively close to Manta (ie within 1 hour drive)

Oh, and posting is free for everybody 🙂 It’s our way of supporting the local Manta arts and culture community.

Why we built the calendar

We love the beach. Jason grew up on a beach in Australia. But, every time we visit Manta and the surrounding beaches like Santa Marianita, we have a tough time finding stuff to do.

And, it turns out we aren’t alone.

The poll we ran in a popular local Manta Facebook group revealed a strong underlying need from the community for a well-managed online events calendar.

So, we built it.

We’d already built a similar events calendar for Cuenca that has turned out to be quite popular, so we had a hunch that the Manta expat community would appreciate one too.

We need community support to keep events updated

However, we don’t have a strong commercial presence in Manta to justify continued resources to keep this calendar updated. We will be doing our best to add events, but there is a risk the calendar will just die if the community does not support it.

You can support the calendar by:

• Adding events (‘how to’ video below)
• Subscribing via the Manta Events page – this ensures you’ll receive a weekly email every Thursday with the Manta events. You can also sign up for Cuenca Events if this is of interest.
• Let us know if you have a favorite venue or other event provider that we can approach so we can include their events too.

How to add Manta events

The following video shows the process. If you’ve ever uploaded an event to Facebook or a similar online platform, then you’ll find it a breeze.

Some key points:

• Event Type: Manta
• The Experience: Describe your event and try make it appealing for others to turn up
• Address: Copying the address from Google Maps is the easiest approach. Then zoom in on the map to place the marker directly on the event location.
• Image: Include at least one image for the event. Best dimensions are 780 x 439 pixels. These are the same dimemsions Facebook likes for their events, so we’ve used the same size to make it easy for you to re-use your image.
• Optional contact fields: Whilst these are optional, we highly recommend providing these links to allow potential guests to find out more or ask you questions. Fill in these fields to get the best response to your event.

If you ever run into trouble uploading an event, please contact us and we’ll help you upload it. This is especially true for 1st-time users. We like to think that we’re friendly and approachable.

Progress uploading events to date

We’ve been able to establish relationships with Manta Tourism and Cinext. This will allow us to get easy access to their events.

We haven’t approached any other organizations in Manta, but we certainly can if the demand is there.

What’s Next?

GringoTree has BIG plans for 2022. We’re super excited. But, this means we have to be realistic with our limited resources.

We’ll be providing some resources to support the Manta events calendar until the end of 2021. Hopefully, by then, enough community members are adding events to keep the calendar updated. If it doesn’t obtain community support, we’ll need to consider the viability of continuing it in 2022.

Please do reach out to us with any questions or feedback.