Fringe Festival Performer Management

The Toronto Fringe Festival attracts over 60,000 attendees each year to 150 productions at approximately 30 venues over 12 days each summer. The event is non-juried to provide equal opportunity for artists and community members from all walks of life to present their work to an enthusiastic and supportive audience. The Fringe's hard-working handful of employees need to process a huge influx of applicants each year via a lottery in order to choose the productions, and then needs to herd the artists through a series of communications before the production can reach the public. For the 2011 season, Blackfly implemented a Drupal/CiviCRM solution for these processes, helping to streamline and simplify the communications for both the participants and the Fringe staff. The solution made use of CiviEvents to allow potential performers to provide their essential information about their performance, choose their category, and pay their admission fee, all in a nice webform that allowed them to choose their method of payment and provided feedback and notifications appropriately. They also had a requirement that was implemented via a custom Drupal module - the perfomers had to provide a means to pay the performer fees in the event that they succeeded in the lottery (why? in the Fringe model, performers pay to participate, and then get 100% of their box office - a kind of radical socialist/free market hybrid). The custom module enabled them to choose to pay this potential supplementary fee with the same card they used for the application, or to tell the Fringe that they would send in a post-dated cheque. After the lottery had narrowed down the field from approx. 600 applicants to 150 participants, Civimail was a key tool in the series of communications with the performers.