Create a URL link for guests to add your event to Google Calendar

With the huge increase in webinar’s that this pandemic has brought, I thought I’d share this handy tip to make it easy for your audience to easily add a google calendar appointment to their calendar from any web page. You can then easily place the link on your intranet or internet page to help encourage your audience to attend your online or offline events.

Just generate and add the web link – it uses a URL query string to pass on the event information to your guest’s Google Calendar when clicked. The benefit of using a URL link to add events to Google Calendar is that you don’t have to send out invites to everyone that wants to attend.

Note – this is a ‘fire and forget’ solution e.g. once the event has been added to a calendar it cannot be updated, nor can you manage the event from your calendar. You will not see a guest list of who is coming. All things that you would be able to do if you had sent the event invite to a defined audience from within Google calendar.

Clicking the google calendar link will take you to a profiled event page on Google Calendar which your audience can edit, or simply save to their calendar with one click:

Useful resources – link to add events to Google Calendar:

• This stack exchange post that provides a bit more context
• The unofficial documentation on GitHub
• This URL decoder / encoder tool
• Update: This web page will encode your event information in to the web link

To create a URL link to add to Google Calendar you need to produce a link that looks like this:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/r/eventedit?text=Garden+Waste+Collection&dates=20210621T063000Z/20210621T073000Z&location=Online&trp=true&sprop=http://www.me.org&details=Event+information+can+be%0Amultiline+details

Building your calendar event link requires the following components:

First, the base URL with the required query string parameter (Field / Value pair) of action=TEMPLATE

https://www.google.com/calendar/render?action=TEMPLATE

A string for the event name field / value pair:

text=Garden+Waste+Collection

A string for the event date field / value pair:

dates=20210621T063000Z/20210621T073000Z

To convert normal text into a text string use the encoder tool linked above. You can include other field/value text strings to define additional event details such as a location and notes (along with a URL to visit a webinar or live stream, if required). Put that all together by using an ampersand (i.e. ‘&’) to connect each field/value pair and you have a string like that looks like this:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0/r/eventedit?text=Garden+Waste+Collection&dates=20210621T063000Z/20210621T073000Z&location=Online&trp=true&sprop=http://www.me.org&details=Event+information+can+be%0Amultiline+details

If you put this all together into a hyperlink then you get the following, which you can try:

Click to to test

It wouldn’t be too difficult to create a form to enter your event details and which would output a correctly formatted link that you can copy and paste into your web page or email invite.

Actually, scrap that, because someone has already built one here!