ECAL, the world’s leading calendar marketing platform, has extended its enterprise product for the ‘payments’ space, to set about solving serious issues affecting business today.

Right now there is a widening cash flow gap, which is negatively impacting small and large businesses alike, and their ability to make ends meet. In fact, a 2017 study reported that “62 percent of businesses would not survive more than three months if all invoices went unpaid”. Further, “at least half say being paid on time would reduce stress, avoid unnecessary debt and drive business growth”.

To address this issue, ECAL has launched a payment reminders service direct to calendar, designed to help customers better manage their payments, so business is paid on time.

In a recent trial project with National Australia Bank, banking customers received personalised ‘payment reminders’ for their specific credit card account, to see how calendar reminders performed against traditional SMS reminders in helping customers pay on-time.

The limited trial proved that calendar reminders by ECAL were the most effective communications method for customers, with ‘on-time’ payments increasing by 12%. This included a 37% ‘spike’ in payments made when an advanced reminder was served to calendar.

Whilst the report suggests that “reminder apps” will help with this growing problem, ECAL’s ‘calendar reminders’ technology appears to provide a much more sophisticated and effective billing reminder solution, as it is totally personalised to the user, and integrates directly with their native calendar!

The calendar entries include handy alerts (at the right time), specific amount due, and a direct link to ‘Pay Now’, amongst other features to inform and assist customers.

ECAL CEO, Patrick Barrett says “as a team we’re excited to uncover new and valuable use cases for our advanced calendar communications technology. As a business, we’re committed to helping solve real problems, with highly valuable, tangible benefits. With over 70% of adults relying on their digital calendar to manage life, and with the cost of collections and support such a major burden on business, we feel ECAL delivers a better performing and ultimately more cost effective solution for payment-related communications.”

If you would like to know more about ECAL’s billing reminder software, please contact us.

Premier League, the world’s most popular football league, has just released its 2018/2019 Fixture!

With the help of ECAL, the official ‘digital calendar’ service provider for the Premier League, football fans around the world receive a live and dynamic feed of game details, delivered straight to their personal calendar.

Over the last week, the Premier League fixture release campaign has been enormous!

Premier League have created splash pages, website banners, a dedicated email launch and Twitter and Facebook takeovers surrounding ECAL’s calendar syncing the fixture to fans calendars through ECAL’s service.

Our team has also been busy managing and supporting any queries with the calendar service, through online support and social media.

Fans can choose to receive fixtures of their favourite team(s), the complete season fixture, and even the Fantasy Premier League schedule of weekly trade deadlines.

The Premier League Digital Calendar is a truly global service, with displays in 30+ languages, and serves localised TV broadcast information to fans across 200+ countries, so fans never miss a moment of the action.

Match entries also include handy reminders, official game hashtags and direct access to Buy Tickets, Livestream, Match Centre, Online Shop and more.

Three new teams, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Cardiff City and Fulham, enter the Premier League competition for the 2018/19 season.

Follow your team throughout the 18/19 season and join the hundreds of thousands of football fans who rely on ECAL to stay up to date and connected to Premier League via their calendar!

ECAL has partnered with eSports giant Riot Games, to provide the official ‘sync to calendar’ service for the global phenomenon that is the ‘League of Legends’.

Gaming fans can sync their favourite League of Legends teams and tournament schedules straight to their personal digital calendar, so they can tune-in to live games and events from anywhere. Currently, League of Legends Championship series across Europe, North America, Korea, Taiwan, and China are available, with more leagues being added.

League of Legends events dynamically update in the calendar, and include handy alerts, broadcast information, and direct access to watch live, latest video, news and results.

League of Legends is the most played and watched video game in the world, with a reported 100m monthly players. It also has around 11m followers on Twitch, 15m Facebook fans, and over 9m YouTube subscribers. The 2017 World Championship final in China attracted 60 million viewers, up from 43 million in 2016.

Don’t miss a moment of League of Legends in your region. Don’t have a team yet? It’s time to choose, and sync to calendar here!

ECAL congratulates NHL client Washington Capitals on winning the Stanley Cup last week!

The Capitals are champions of The National Hockey League for the first time since their debut in 1974. The Capitals recorded a 4-3 victory over the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 5 of the finals series.

After a 44-year wait, the Washington Capitals will be celebrating a well-deserved win!

ECAL has released a new ‘Sync Detection’ feature on its widget, which detects and informs users when the live sync connection has been successfully created.

‘Sync Detection’ is a great way for users to be more confident than ever they are ‘in sync’, and if not, the ECAL widget provides immediate assistance to help troubleshoot.

With the increasing number of calendar programs and versions in use, we’re confident that this feature will successfully connect more users, across more platforms, to the content they love.

ECAL has updated its privacy policy to address the new standards introduced by the European data protection law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

We have included changes to our Privacy Policy, as well as the ECAL system and our internal business processes, to strengthen customers’ privacy and data security.

At ECAL, we take the privacy of users very seriously. We don’t use your personal information for any other purpose than to send requested schedules and events to your calendar.

When subscribing to an ECAL service, you can be confident that we only ever access your calendar to deliver event information that you have requested from our publishers.

We never read, change, update, remove or store your personal Calendar events. Additionally, our publishers must also agree to our very own, strict, Calendar Contact Standards, to ensure the information they deliver to you is exactly what you want.

If necessary at any time, you may unsubscribe and revoke ECAL’s access to your calendar. For more information on how to do this, simply go to our Support Centre at https://support.ecal.com.

Here are some of the main changes to our Privacy Policy and business practice, with regard to EU GDPR:

• Roles: ECAL is known as the ‘data processor’ and the Publisher client is the ‘data controller’;
• Affirmative Consent: A user is required to consent to the service by affirmative action. For instance, you will be required to check any consent boxes on the ECAL widget;
• Explicitly Clear: A Publisher client needs to be explicitly clear about the service being delivered via ECAL;
• Age Consent: Users in the EU under the age of 16 (or under 13 in the UK) require consent from a parent / guardian. So you may see this question asked before you sync to calendar;
• Withdraw Consent: A link has been included in each calendar entry to ‘Manage my ECAL’. This will take you to the ECAL Support Portal for clear instructions on how to manage your ECAL service across various calendars;
• Data Minimisation: A publisher is now only allowed to capture and store data that is essential to the service being provided. So you shouldn’t see any requests for name, date of birth, gender or anything like that;
• Encryption: As an extra level of security, we’re encrypting all user data we store;
• Right to Access: At any time, you may request what personal information is being stored, how it’s being processed, and you may request an electronic copy;
• Right to be Forgotten: At any time, you may request us to delete any data we store about you.

If at anytime you have any questions about our service, or suggestions or feedback, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Read our Privacy Policy.

Read the full EU GDPR.

Get excited! The FIFA World Cup is near and thanks to ECAL, you can sync the schedule straight to calendar!

Choose to follow the complete tournament schedule, or just your favourite teams! So you don’t miss a moment, wherever you are.

Game entries feature a handy alert (15 mins prior for your favourite team only), plus match details, and direct access to the Match Centre, Standings, and Latest Videos via FIFA.com.

Held in Russia for the first time in history, the highly anticipated event kicks off on Thursday 14th June with the World Cup Final set for Friday 15th July.

The FIFA World Cup will feature thirty-two of the best football teams in the world, including Australia for the fifth time.

Australia will be up against France, Peru and Denmark in the highly competitive Group C, with their first match against France on June 16th at 8pm AEST.

Don’t miss any of the action of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, sync the schedule to calendar now!

Leading calendar communications platform, ECAL, has released results from its annual survey to find out what people rely on most to manage their daily schedule. One thousand (1000) people were surveyed and were randomly presented four options: “Mobile Calendar (Apple, Android etc.)”, “Desktop Calendar (Apple Calendar, Outlook etc.)”, “Paper (Diary, Journal, Planner etc.)”, and “Other (please specify)” with the ability to add a custom response.

The survey targeted both males and females, aged between 18-64 years from all geographical locations across Australia in a representative sample, to hinder any bias.

Overall, 70% rely on a digital calendar most to manage their life, with 46.7% of respondents (470) relying most on their mobile calendar, and 23.3% of respondents (234) relying on a desktop calendar. Paper calendars such as a diary, journal or planner are preferred by 28.3% of respondents (278), whilst other scheduling tools, representing just 1.8% of the response, include “brain”, “none”, “wife”, “head”, and “memory”, to name just a few!

The same survey was delivered in 2016, with very similar results! In 2016, it was found that 48.2% of respondents (489) relied most on their mobile calendar, 21.7% relied on their desktop calendar (221), and 26.9% on a paper version (263).

Reliance on a digital calendar across the various age groups is relatively consistent, ranging from 70% to 75%, with the exception of 55-64 year-olds (62.8%). The age groups with the highest percentage using digital calendars is 35-44 years and 24-34 years, with a median average of 75% and 74% respectively.

In Deloitte’s 2017 Mobile Consumer Survey, it was found that “smartphone penetration continues to rise, but it’s no longer all about the younger generations”. It is interesting to consider, that in both the 2016 and 2018 ECAL surveys, the age groups with the highest reliance on their mobile calendar are 35-44 year-olds followed by 25-34 year-olds.

There are slight differences amongst genders too, with males (73%) relying on digital calendars more than females (67%). Whilst reliance on a mobile calendar is virtually the same across genders, 32.1% of females rely most on a paper diary, compared with just 24.6% of males. Conversely, males (25.2%) rely on their desktop calendar more than females (21.3%).

ECAL’s own user statistics can reveal that the most popular mobile calendars used over the past 12 months are Apple (25.38% of all users), Google (25.11%) and Windows Live (4.52%). The most popular desktop calendar programs in use are Google (15.44% of all users), Apple (7.77%), Outlook (5.15%) and Windows Live (4.76%).

According to Deloitte, “Australia remains one of the leading global adopters of the smartphone and 88% of Australians now own one”. This report also found that ‘calendar management’ is the third most popular activity on a smartphone, reinforcing the growing reliance on mobile technology in effectively managing your life schedule.

Digital v Paper: Age Group

Mobile v Desktop v Paper: Gender

ECAL has released ‘Personal Events’, an exciting new feature that delivers totally personalised events to the calendar of a user.

Facilitated by ECAL’s enterprise API, Personal Events allows a ‘one-to-one’ connection with the user’s personal calendar, to deliver ‘rich’ and sophisticated information, such as membership renewals, bill payment reminders, travel bookings, itineraries, appointments, and more.

Personal Events have the power to solve some pretty major issues right now.

For banking and payments, there is a widening cash flow gap. ECAL personalised payment reminders can help a user better manage payments, so suppliers are paid on-time. In fact, in a recent project with National Australia Bank (see Case Study), ECAL payment reminders worked to increase ‘on-time’ payments by up to 12% over SMS!

According to Xero it is reported that “62 percent of businesses would not survive more than three months if all invoices went unpaid”. Further, “at least half say being paid on time would reduce stress, avoid unnecessary debt and drive business growth”.

Xero also suggests that “reminder apps” will help with this growing problem. ECAL’s calendar reminders provide an even better solution, as the service integrates directly with the user’s personal calendar!

With ECAL’s ‘Personal Events’ feature, you can also change the status of a calendar entry. So, if a user’s payment schedule should change, or the amount owing change, or a payment has been received, or becomes overdue, these changes will update in the calendar. Pretty cool, hey.

For sport, the arts and other member-based organisations, renewals are a lifeblood. ‘Personal Events’ can reduce ‘churn’ by delivering specific and timely information about an upcoming membership renewal. Perfect for annual memberships, flexi packages or monthly direct debit notices.

Personal Events is limited only by the information you have, and with the support of the ECAL integration team, almost anything is possible.

If you’d like to find out more about ECAL’s ‘Personal Events’ feature, please contact us via email, or use the Live Chat feature on our website.

South Africa, India and Sri Lanka are coming to Australian shores, with Cricket Australia releasing its 2018/19 Summer of Cricket schedule this week.

Cricket fans across the Country will enjoy more matches, new venues and a restructured international season.

For the first time, international cricket will be played on the Gold Coast; Metricon Stadium playing host to Australia’s T20 clash with South Africa. The state-of-the-art Perth Stadium and Canberra’s Manuka Oval will both host Test cricket for the first time.

The summer opens with a one-day clash between Australia and the Proteas in Perth on November 4. Perth Stadium will then host its maiden Test from December 14 when India visit. The first Test against India begins in Adelaide on December 6.

According to Cricket Australia Chief James Sunderland, “It’s a summer which will contain plenty of high-quality cricket, and some exciting new additions to the Australian cricket calendar. Overall, there are more international matches being played across more locations around the country than in previous years, and we believe this program has something for all cricket fans.”

The broadcasting of Cricket will also undergo a major change, with Channel Seven assuming control of Test and International limited overs cricket from Channel Nine. The Big Bash will also be hosted by Channel Seven in conjunction with Foxtel, replacing Channel 10.

ECAL continues to serve Cricket Australia’s vast connected calendar audience, and fans will automatically receive updates to their preferred cricket schedules straight to their personal calendar, complete with latest TV broadcast information, official game hashtags and direct access to Buy Tickets, Memberships, Online Shop and much more.

Not connected to the Cricket Australia calendar with ECAL? Don’t miss a minute of the action, sync the Australian Men’s and Women’s cricket fixtures to your calendar here