At BLUF we're always happy to list relevant community events in our calendar, and to promote them on our various social media channels, as we believe it's a great way to use our name to help promote some of the wonderful events organised by other people. In another blog post you can read about the details of what you need to send us. Here, we're going to remind people of the deadlines. Essentially, the earlier you send us information, the more people can be reached.

Please remember the team here are volunteers, so although we can in theory accept information right up until a deadline, in practisce a volunteer may be busy with work, or family - so get us information as soon as you possibly can, even if it needs to be updated later.

The information below is from the current edition of the BLUF Event Handbook, which we hope contains useful information for all organisers, as well as rules for BLUF events.

Deadlines and timings

When promoting your event, there are a few deadlines that it’s helpful to bear in mind, so that you can take advantage of the automated promotions on the website. Times are all in UTC

• 1st of the month, 0200. The Leather Forecast email is sent out to subscribers, including non-members. This features full details of events three months ahead, and summaries of events this month. Eg, the May issue will list August events in full, and a summary for May.
• 1st of the month, 1200. @BLUFevents tweets a “Welcome to February, there are X events in the calendar this month” message, with a link to bluf.com/e/thismonth
• 15th of the month, 1200. @BLUFevents tweets a message reminding people to make plans for next month, with a link to bluf.com/e/nextmonth
• Every Monday, 0800. This Week on BLUF is emailed to subscribing members, listing the events coming up in the next seven days
• Every Tuesday, 1200. @BLUFevents tweets a message “What’s in the BLUF calendar this week” followed by an individual tweet for each event, with a link to the event details
• Every Thursday or Friday. A weekly event roundup is posted to the official BLUF Facebook page, summarising what’s coming up at the weekend
• Every Sunday, 1200. @BLUFevents tweets a link to bluf.com/e/latest which is a list of all the events that are new or have been updated in the calendar in the last 7 days
• On the day of an event at 1200, @BLUFevents tweets a link to the event

If you have direct access to the BLUF Calendar, you should ensure that your event is added at the very latest before 1200 UTC on the Sunday before it takes place. This will ensure it appears in the Sunday summary, Monday’s This Week email, and Tuesday’s Twitter summary.

If you are relying on the Calendar Editor to add the event to the calendar for you, please try to make sure information is sent to events@bluf.com no later than the Friday before the event.

Ideally, of course, events should be added to the calendar weeks or months before they take place, to ensure that members have plenty of time to discover them, and to allow you to send event emails with decent intervals between them.

The Leather Forecast is our newest newsletter, available to both BLUF members and non-members. The intent is to provide people with information about forthcoming events with enough advance information to allow them to book travel and hotels. To ensure your event features in this newsletter, which will be sent on the first of the month, you will need to make sure details are in the calendar four months before the date of the event.