GREAT FALLS, Mont.—On November 1, 2023 members of the Great Falls Area Chamber of Commerce and representatives from KGPR Great Falls Public Radio conducted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for “The Electron,” a new one-stop source of locations, dates, and times of events and activities occurring in the Great Falls area.
The free online service can be found hosted on the local Great Falls public radio station’s website at https://kgpr.org/electron.
According to the service’s creator, David Saslav, “The Electron” fills an information void left by the loss of the Great Falls Tribune’s “Hot Ticket” feature.
“What people were missing was the convenience of having all the interesting events aggregated into a single, convenient place that didn’t require them to join an organization or sign on to social media to be able to find,” said Saslav. “Within one month, “The Electron” was the most visited page on the kgpr.org website, so I figured it had been time well spent.”
There are 24 online event and activity categories available to view including arts and crafts, education, fundraisers, community service, live music, films, and the performing arts. Users can also view the events and activities occurring at 28 locations found in the area.
Saslav created a self-service event entry form for users to post their specific event information. Once a user uploads their information to https://kgpr.org/submit-event, the post is placed into a “pending approval” status. Saslav says he can usually get the event approved and added to the service on the same day, sometimes within a few minutes of submission. There have already been more than 450 events listed during the past nine months since it first went live.
Great Falls Public Radio Association President Richard Liebert considers the new service as helping to fulfill the Great Falls non-commercial public radio station’s mission of keeping the local audience informed and inspired.
“We want to show that Great Falls is a thriving place,” said Liebert. “This is just our public service to show that we can put out lots of information that people can access easily on our community events platform.”
For more information on “The Electron,” contact David Saslav at dsaslav@gmail.com.
