When you run gatherings for a community that comes back again and again — a weekly kirtan circle, a monthly sound bath, a retreat that repeats each season — people want your events sitting in their own calendar app, not buried in an inbox somewhere. BrightStar handles this in two different ways, and knowing which one to point someone toward saves a lot of confusion at the door. An iCal feed is something a person subscribes to once, and it keeps updating on its own as you add new events. Adding a single event to a calendar is a one-time action someone takes from an event page or a confirmation email, and it only ever covers that one gathering. The rest of this article walks through both.
What are the three iCal feeds BrightStar publishes?
BrightStar gives you three separate feed URLs, each meant for a different reader:
- 1Organizer event feed (https://brightstarevents.com/ical/{org_slug}/events.ics) — every event you run, in one feed. Hand this to someone who follows your whole schedule, not just a single date.
- 2Single event feed (https://brightstarevents.com/ical/event/{event_id}.ics) — just one gathering. Use this when you're promoting one retreat or ceremony and don't want to pull someone into everything else you run.
- 3Attendee's purchased events feed (https://brightstarevents.com/ical/my-events/{user_token}.ics) — a personal feed tied to one person's account, showing only the events they've actually bought a ticket to.
How often do Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook refresh the feed?
Once someone subscribes to a BrightStar feed, the syncing is handled by their calendar app, not by BrightStar. Google Calendar checks the feed roughly every 24 hours, and that interval is set by Google rather than something you or the subscriber can change. Apple Calendar lets the subscriber pick a sync frequency when they set up the subscription, defaulting to daily if they leave it alone. Outlook checks the feed about every 24 hours as well. The practical effect is the same across all three: if you add a new event or change a start time, it can take the better part of a day to show up on someone's synced calendar. For anything time-sensitive close to the day of a gathering, an email to attendees is a better way to reach them than waiting on the feed to refresh.
What happens when you click 'Add to Calendar'?
The Add to Calendar button appears on your event pages and inside confirmation emails, with options for Google, Apple, Outlook, Yahoo, and a plain ICS download. Clicking it builds a calendar entry from what BrightStar knows about the event: the title and description, the start and end time with timezone, the venue address with a map link, and your contact information as the organizer. This is a one-time download rather than a subscription — once it's sitting in someone's calendar, it's a copy, so if you later move the start time or change the venue, that existing entry doesn't update itself. It's worth telling attendees to check their confirmation email or your event page again if something changes close to the date, rather than assuming their calendar caught the update.
Feed subscription or single-event add — which one should you point people to?
The two options solve different problems. A feed subscription is for someone who wants to follow everything you do without thinking about it again — good for a regular at your weekly meditation circle, or a follower who wants to see every retreat you announce. Send them the organizer feed link. A single-event add is for someone who just needs one gathering locked into their calendar and isn't necessarily coming back for the rest of your schedule — that's what the Add to Calendar button on the event page and confirmation email is for. The trade-off is that the feed stays current on its own but only refreshes on the calendar app's schedule, while the single add is instant but frozen the moment it's created. Neither is better; they answer different questions about how someone plans to keep coming back.