What’s Happening In Chatham?

Chatham is a busy place, and a lot of work often is required to maintain an accurate household schedule for the ever-growing list of local activities that interest parents and children. A recently introduced electronic tool, though, has made Chatham life easier to manage.

Burbio is a digitized calendar platform that helps people organize their local schedules. It delivers school, library, government and community nonprofit events. By streaming hyper local calendars into one easy-to-manage schedule, the online tool permits families to follow the flow of important daily activities, sync events to a digital calendar and ensure that households never miss a school event or an important community meeting.

“When you think about all the things you can do digitally—booking flights, tables at restaurants, managing music—we found that managing local events was really behind the times,” said Julie Roche.

Julie and her husband, Dennis, developed the digitized scheduling idea when they realized that they needed a better way to manage the schedules of their four sons. The family lives in Pelham, New York.

“Recalling the times and places of events was difficult, because every organization established a different calendar on separate websites and in various formats,” said Dennis. “We decided to look for a digital solution that worked for us.”

Burbio now is in its third year with daily expansion to new markets and the inclusion of additional calendars. Burbio is active in more than 200 communities in 15 states.

Connecting With Burbio

Engaging with Chatham’s community calendars is easy with Burbio. To get started, a person creates an account with a Chatham zip code. The next step is to select the household’s important local calendars that create a personalized event feed. Events also can be added to Apple, Google, Outlook and other personal digitized schedules, and users even will receive notifications about changes and cancellations. Local nonprofits also are able to post events on Burbio at no charge.

Chatham residents already can tap into more than 50 calendars. These include Chatham High School and other schools, the library, recycling schedules and town information.

The site offers desktop and mobile web service along with an IOS application and an Android app. All events on Burbio also are structured for discovery in Google Search. Burbio recently ventured into the increasingly popular voice technology sector. With more people speaking to their devices, such as Amazon Echo, Burbio created a coded “skill” (the voice equivalent of an app). Users now receive immediate feedback about events and other activities.

"Out of necessity, we figured a way to create this digital personal calendar concept,” said Dennis, “and we are glad that the residents of Chatham now are able to tap into this great organizer tool."