How Event Automation Helps This Company Behind the Scenes

Avalanche is on a mission to create cutting-edge concerts and conferences. As live shows heat the atmosphere and let people soak up live music once again, the company knows that every aspect of the event has to be well synchronized.

But as soon as reality strikes, the artist selection takes time, managing volunteers turns out to be mixed up and the manpower is limited.

To stay on top of the to-do list, Avalanche had to go beyond traditional event management and automate time-intensive tasks.

Read on and learn how automation technology paved their way to better event organization, saving them 40 hours of manual labor monthly.

A launchpad for up-and-coming Canadian talent

Avalanche is a company specialized in the creation and production of high-level festivals and conferences. In the words of founder Sebastian Nasra, the company is all about “creating opportunities to showcase and export Canadian talent to the world”.

This includes the programming, production, and promotion of events like HUB Montreal, M for Montreal, and Mundial Montreal, which have been recognized as stepping stones for Canadian artists, performers, and digital entrepreneurs.

Some of the artists featured in Avalanche festivals include The Franklin Electric, Kiwi Jr., (http://Mac DeMarco), and Bokanté, among thousands of others.

But for all the artistry that happens onstage, there are other lesser-known aspects that take place behind the scenes, such as:

• Calling and selecting artists and projects

• Managing invitations, travel, and lodgings

• Programming line ups and content

• Managing employees, volunteers, and partnerships

As you can imagine, producing events is a fast-paced, demanding activity that happens to involve lots of data.

This meant trouble for Avalanche, as the responsibility of handling all the data fell on one single person within the organization.

Eventually, the situation created several bottlenecks, which led the company to incorporate new apps and automate a number of key processes.

Let’s take a look at some of the problems they faced, and the solutions they managed to create using tools like Make, Typeform, and Mailchimp.

Event automation: From lengthy tasks to automated workflows

On top of having limited manpower, some of the platforms used by Avalanche were not fit for automation, as their integration capabilities were very limited.

Recurring tasks like sending receipts to merchants, managing forms, or importing records into a spreadsheet required lots of manual work, which in turn resulted in time losses and clunky processes.

After careful consideration, the managing team at Avalanche decided to onboard new tools to manage its processes, and to automate workflows for faster, better results.

For example, one of the most time-consuming processes in festival production is going through thousands of artist applications that need to be approved or rejected.

To simplify this process, Avalanche started by establishing a single point of contact for applications: a form built with Typeform.

Any artist wishing to play at one of the M for Montreal stages now applies through this form, after which the integrations start working their magic.

First of all, form answers get automatically sent and structured in Airtable.

This means that after an artist applies, the application data gets instantly sent to Airtable, and also structured in a user-friendly way that allows for a faster evaluation.

At the same time, the applicant’s contact details get stored in Mailchimp. After this, emails are sent automatically depending on the application’s status.

Finally, Make is used to automatically update the payment status of applications with Stripe data, and also to send receipts after payments have been made.

Human involvement is no longer needed for these subtasks, as app integrations take care of it all.

Conclusion and results

According to Avalanche’s founder, the app integrations made it very easy to go through the process of listening to artists and seeing their work.

So far, automation has allowed the company to save 40 hours worth of manual labor per month.

If we take the average hourly salary of a data analyst in Canada as a reference, the amount of saved money adds up to a whopping $16,464 a year.

“Processing data became a joyride. Automation saves two hours per day, and it’s a beauty”, said Nasra. “Like that bit in Fantasia where the brooms start cleaning up on their own”.

A proper ending for a story of transformation and triumph - just like a fairy tale.

If you want to read more about Avalanche’s automation journey, we highly recommend Typeform’s coverage of it.

Happy automating!