Remember When Planning Your Festival
Was Still FUN?!

Dear Festival Planner:

I bet there was a time when planning your Festival was nothing but a good time.  However, if you’re like my friend Mike, I’ll wager that managing your festival has become more like work and less like play.

Mike (yes, names have been changed to protect the innocent) had a passion for fine spirits, and so he started a small Wine Festival in his back yard.  It quickly grew from a neighborhood fiesta into a nationally known event.  And along with that growth, his fun little festival became a world class headache.

One year, there was an enormous line at the festival entrance because the entry tickets were being printed just minutes before the gates opened.

There was the time that his headline entertainer arrived at 11AM instead of 11PM due to some communication snafu.

I remember the distraught look on his face when, just days before the festival, he told me that he’d received 100 promo banners from the printer…all WITHOUT the premier sponsor’s logo!

And of course there were plenty of tales of volunteers losing purchase orders, showing up on the wrong day of the festival, ordering 10 port o’ potties instead of 100, mailing out expensive invites a week after the event, and so forth. 

Does any of this sound familiar?

I own a software company and at the time was consulting for my friend Mike’s “real” employer.  At this point, Mike was still just managing his festival as a hobby.  However, much to his wife’s displeasure, the event planning was now occupying most of his free time.  He asked me if I could use my expertise to design a software management system that would help him with three things:

1. Make planning his festival fun again
2. Increase the satisfaction of his sponsors
3. Improve the overall quality of his event

Mike’s a good friend, so I decided to give it a shot.  After many long ours of programming and testing, I completed the Festival Management System we now call “FestiveWare”.  We implemented the software hoping to improve the efficiency of planning Mike's festival.  FestiveWare had an immediate and dramatic effect on my friend’s life, his festival, and if you listen to his wife...his marriage. 

Convinced that he couldn’t be the only festival organizer with these challenges, Mike talked me into offering FestiveWare to other beleaguered festival organizers.  So that’s how you've found me here, amigo..

How Will FestiveWare
Improve Your Festival Planning? 

My friend and his volunteer staff weren’t the most computer literate bunch, so I created a system that would be extremely easy to use.  FestiveWare is a web-based system that looks and feels like a simple website.  Log in from any computer with an Internet connection to access your essential festival planning info.  Assign tasks to volunteers.  Quickly check the status of crucial to-do items.  Manage your promotions, vendor contracts, sponsorship agreements and all from one screen.

FestiveWare will remind you of the exact details of your sponsorship obligations, arrival times of entertainment, vendors and volunteers.  They can log into the system themselves and see information about their own assignments.  You’ll be assured that “the left hand knows what the right hand is doing”.  You can even lay out the logistics of what equipment and structures are to go where in a simple visual display.  FestiveWare does to many things to list here, but in a nutshell, here are the key benefits:

• Centralized Data – with all of your information in ONE place, you won’t have to worry about any key data being lost, misunderstood or only in “one person’s head”
   
• Anywhere Access – because the system is completely web-based, you and your staff can login and plan your festival anywhere in the world, at any time.
   
• Management Reports – quickly check the status of any assignment, print post-event reports and present meaningful data to your sponsors.
   
• Sponsor Proposals – create professional, attractive sponsorship proposals that clearly details what they receive.  When they accept, the same items in the proposal become action-items so there’s no chance a promise will be forgotten.
   
• Helpful Reminders – with so many little tasks to complete, it’s easy to forget a few.  FestiveWare will be your Personal Assistant. You can trick your friends into thinking you have a photographic memory!
   
• Eliminate Confusion – An internal communications area forces staffers to create a record of electronic conversations on key.  You and anyone involved can read through to be sure that everything is clear and the job is getting done as planned.  As a result, you’ll lower the risk of miscues, snafus and oversights that can keep you up at night.

I truly believe that FestiveWare will help improve the efficiency, accuracy and FUN of planning your festival.  And best of all, it doesn’t cost much to find out for yourself.  There is nothing to buy.  Simply “lease” the software as needed.  The subscription fee starts at just $58 per user, per month.

Call us today for a free demonstration. I’m confident that like my buddy the festival organizer, you’ll be spending more time playing golf with your sponsors instead of laboring over your festival planning in no time.

Sincerely,

David Bryant
President
Oak Tree Systems, Inc.