Case Study: The West List. One Events Platform, Six Counties, and an AI Pipeline That Does the Typing
How we built The West List, a what's on guide for six South West counties, with an AI pipeline that turns emailed flyers and photographed chalkboards into published listings.
The West List (thewestlist.co.uk) is a what's on guide for the South West of England, covering Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Bristol & Bath. It lists events, places to eat and drink, places to stay and independent shops, town by town, with a weekly email for people who want the best of it chosen for them.
We built it. This case study explains how, and why the same approach works for anyone who needs to publish a lot of local information without a newsroom to run it.
The challenge
Local events coverage has a labour problem. The information exists, but it lives on chalkboards, posters in shop windows, PDF flyers and Facebook posts. Getting it onto a website normally means someone retyping every listing by hand. That is why so many town websites and council events pages go stale. Nobody has the hours.
We wanted a site that could cover a whole region, stay current, and be run in the gaps of a working week.
What we built
The West List runs on a structured content platform (Sanity) with a fast, modern front end (Next.js on Vercel). Every event, venue, town and business is a structured record, not a blob of text. That one decision unlocks everything else: county pages, town pages, category filters, a weekly email and clean data that search engines and AI assistants can actually read.
The breakthrough is in how listings get in. We built AI ingestion routes that meet the information where it already is.
Email a flyer. Anyone can email an event poster or flyer to a dedicated address. AI reads the image, extracts the title, date, time, venue and price, and creates a draft listing. A human approves it before anything goes live.
Photograph a chalkboard. During the build we tested this with a real one: a photo of a bookshop's handwritten events board in Shaftesbury became five complete, correctly dated listings, cross-checked against the shop's own website, published to two sites. Minutes, not hours.
Structured submissions. Organisers can add events and businesses through a simple form, which lands in the same moderation queue.
Every route ends at the same place: a review step. AI does the typing, a person does the judging. Listings the AI is unsure about are flagged for manual checking rather than guessed at.
The engagement layer
Getting events in is half the job. The other half is getting them back out.
- A weekly what's on email, one per county, every Thursday.
- Pages built for the way people actually search: "what's on in Devon", town by town.
- Free listings for everyone, with paid placement always labelled. Trust is the product.
- One content platform feeding multiple sites. The same event can appear on a town site and the regional guide without being entered twice.
What this means for you
If your organisation publishes local information, events, listings, notices, opening times, this pattern applies directly:
- Town and parish councils that cannot keep an events page current
- Event organisers and festivals drowning in listing admin
- BIDs, chambers and tourism groups promoting a whole place
- Any business with information arriving as paper, PDFs and photos
The tools have changed. A website can now read a poster. The admin that made these projects impossible on a small budget is mostly gone, and what is left is judgement, which stays with you.
Want a version of this for your town, your event or your organisation?
Let's talk. Twenty minutes, no pitch. Visit okapiandco.co.uk/contact to get started.
Okapi and Co is a digital marketing agency in Shaftesbury, Dorset. We help businesses get found by the right people, in the right places, through the right channels.
Social Sharing Copy
LinkedIn: A website that can read a poster. We built The West List, a what's on guide covering six South West counties, with an AI pipeline that turns emailed flyers and photographed chalkboards into published listings, all checked by a human. Here is how it works.
Facebook/Instagram: We photographed a bookshop's chalkboard in Shaftesbury and it became five published event listings in minutes. That is the idea behind The West List, our new what's on guide for the South West. Case study on the blog.