ISO software to organize vendor registration for street festivals
June 30, 2015 8:58 PM Subscribe
The organization I work for puts on a couple of large-scale events every year that involve a lot of moving parts. I’m looking for some kind of software/web-based solution to help us manage some of those moving parts, particularly the registration process for vendors (merchandise & food) and possibly also volunteers. Specifics within!
I’m looking to retain a lot of control and have a lot of customization options, but having a central location where all this information can live is really important to me, and also being able to generate reports and stuff like that would be really nice. Currently we do a lot of the organizational work on paper and in Excel spreadsheets, but we end up with bits and pieces of information in multiple locations with a lot of potential for introducing errors and/or losing things and just general confusion.
Here’s the scenario I’m envisioning. A vendor or volunteer comes to our website and wants to apply to be a booth or whatever at our event. They fill out an application with the contact and other info we’ve previously set up for the type of vendor they are (merch, food, artist), and perhaps create an account. Then we can approve them to be in the event, and at that point, the system will tell them whatever other stuff we need (booth fee which they can hopefully pay through this system if we can integrate it with Paypal or whatever; insurance documents or food handler’s certificates that they can upload to the system OR if they email/fax it to us, we can upload it to the system; parking fees; whatever else). With the documents, once the vendor submits them, we have to look at them and approve them before the submission is considered a done deal. Once they’ve done everything they need to do, they can easily see that they don’t owe us anything, and maybe they can even download stuff we need to give them, like maps or printable parking passes or whatever.
On our end, we can go into the system at any time and see what we still need from each vendor. We can generate attractive, easy-to-read reports and lists such as a list of everyone from whom we need an insurance document or everyone who paid for parking. We can assign booth numbers and other types of classifications and also there’s room for notes for special circumstances or any other information we need.
It would also be nice if the system allowed the vendors to give us assets like images of their products, their website or etsy store address, etc., that our web developer could use to automatically pull into a vendor page for our website. If it matters, our site uses Drupal as the CMS.
I feel like a really flexible system would also enable me to coordinate all my volunteers (the system collects contact info, availability, job preferences, and then I can assign them stuff) as well as maybe even some of the other things we typically have like bands/live performances, entrants for contests, service providers like the people we rent tables & chairs from, etc. But at this point, organizing the vendor registration is my primary goal.
So, if something like this exists, I’d love to see it! I did try researching customer management software, but it’s such a broad category that I’m finding things that are complete overkill. Ditto fair management software -- the only things I can find are for state fairs that have contests for livestock and pies and stuff like that and it’s way more than we need, as well as probably way more than we can pay. We’re a small non-profit organization. We do work with a web developer, and I can definitely discuss the possibility of having him build something like this for us, but a turnkey program would probably be my first choice. Or if something kind of similar but not quite right exists, it would help a lot for me to be able to show that to him so he knows what I’m trying to create. Thanks, everyone!
I’m looking to retain a lot of control and have a lot of customization options, but having a central location where all this information can live is really important to me, and also being able to generate reports and stuff like that would be really nice. Currently we do a lot of the organizational work on paper and in Excel spreadsheets, but we end up with bits and pieces of information in multiple locations with a lot of potential for introducing errors and/or losing things and just general confusion.
Here’s the scenario I’m envisioning. A vendor or volunteer comes to our website and wants to apply to be a booth or whatever at our event. They fill out an application with the contact and other info we’ve previously set up for the type of vendor they are (merch, food, artist), and perhaps create an account. Then we can approve them to be in the event, and at that point, the system will tell them whatever other stuff we need (booth fee which they can hopefully pay through this system if we can integrate it with Paypal or whatever; insurance documents or food handler’s certificates that they can upload to the system OR if they email/fax it to us, we can upload it to the system; parking fees; whatever else). With the documents, once the vendor submits them, we have to look at them and approve them before the submission is considered a done deal. Once they’ve done everything they need to do, they can easily see that they don’t owe us anything, and maybe they can even download stuff we need to give them, like maps or printable parking passes or whatever.
On our end, we can go into the system at any time and see what we still need from each vendor. We can generate attractive, easy-to-read reports and lists such as a list of everyone from whom we need an insurance document or everyone who paid for parking. We can assign booth numbers and other types of classifications and also there’s room for notes for special circumstances or any other information we need.
It would also be nice if the system allowed the vendors to give us assets like images of their products, their website or etsy store address, etc., that our web developer could use to automatically pull into a vendor page for our website. If it matters, our site uses Drupal as the CMS.
I feel like a really flexible system would also enable me to coordinate all my volunteers (the system collects contact info, availability, job preferences, and then I can assign them stuff) as well as maybe even some of the other things we typically have like bands/live performances, entrants for contests, service providers like the people we rent tables & chairs from, etc. But at this point, organizing the vendor registration is my primary goal.
So, if something like this exists, I’d love to see it! I did try researching customer management software, but it’s such a broad category that I’m finding things that are complete overkill. Ditto fair management software -- the only things I can find are for state fairs that have contests for livestock and pies and stuff like that and it’s way more than we need, as well as probably way more than we can pay. We’re a small non-profit organization. We do work with a web developer, and I can definitely discuss the possibility of having him build something like this for us, but a turnkey program would probably be my first choice. Or if something kind of similar but not quite right exists, it would help a lot for me to be able to show that to him so he knows what I’m trying to create. Thanks, everyone!
How big is this event? My nonprofit puts on a conference every few years with ~500 attendees and 100 or so presenters and we used Cvent for the most recent one. I believe they charge by the number of registrants, although I am not sure exactly what we paid for it.
We haven't made full use of all the features but it seems to have modules for managing speakers and vendors, the option to upload documents and hold registrations for approval, and I imagine you could wrangle volunteers with a variation on a regular attendee registration. I think it will even automatically generate staff/attendee/vendor/etc listing pages for the event website. I'm new to working on the conference so I can't tell you how it looks from the registrants' end of things but it looks simple enough to use and flexible enough to do most of what you want.
posted by yeahlikethat at 11:52 AM on July 1, 2015
We haven't made full use of all the features but it seems to have modules for managing speakers and vendors, the option to upload documents and hold registrations for approval, and I imagine you could wrangle volunteers with a variation on a regular attendee registration. I think it will even automatically generate staff/attendee/vendor/etc listing pages for the event website. I'm new to working on the conference so I can't tell you how it looks from the registrants' end of things but it looks simple enough to use and flexible enough to do most of what you want.
posted by yeahlikethat at 11:52 AM on July 1, 2015
Response by poster: It's a one-day outdoor festival with around 250-300 vendors. Attendance is upwards of 70,000 but it's a free event with no ticketing. There's probably another dozen or so service providers who don't have booths but do behind-the-scenes stuff like trash, setup, cleanup, sound, security, etc., and around 30-40 entertainment acts. For the most recent one, we had around 200 volunteers, plus a planning committee of around 30 people. There are also 3-4 contests/competitions during the day with 10-20 entrants each.
I'll definitely check out the options you both suggested. Thank you!
posted by hansbrough at 9:28 PM on July 1, 2015
I'll definitely check out the options you both suggested. Thank you!
posted by hansbrough at 9:28 PM on July 1, 2015
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Nationbuilder.com - It's kinda intended to be a hub for promoting a venture or cause, collecting memberships or volunteers, taking money, and keeping it all tidy on the backend. I think they have a nonprofit tier.
It's been a looong time since I worked my way through the backend customization options, but it *might* be able to handle some of your more particular feature requests. If not, you might be able to use its mailing list functionality to send out a webform of some sort (Drupal native, google, wufoo, etc.)
posted by Jack Karaoke at 12:41 AM on July 1, 2015