How PianoFight Leveraged Event Technology to Become SF’s Landmark Entertainment Venue
Duncan Wold and Rob Ready are no strangers to live events. The duo has been hosting everything from improv shows and intimate concerts, to film screenings and sold-out plays in San Francisco for over a decade. So when the opportunity came to open up a brand new venue in the heart of San Francisco, Duncan, Rob, and their fellow founding partners, Kevin Fink and Dan Williams, set some lofty goals that they wanted to achieve. They planned to host nearly 30 shows per week — starting their opening week — so they knew they needed to step up their technology to take on the challenge and delight their attendees.
“As we were opening the venue, we needed something that would scale to a large number of events per week. So that was a new challenge — and an important one."
– Duncan Wold, Director of Operations
Duncan and Rob are part of a team who run PianoFight, a community-driven indy arts venue that takes pride in partnering with local artists to make great shows, mouth watering eats, and delicious cocktails — adding up to a uniquely San Francisco experience. Their stages host a wide variety of entertainment: music, comedy, magic, plays, dances, drag, film screenings, variety shows, and more.
The challenge:
When it came time to evaluate a ticketing partner, they were looking for someone who could help them make PianoFight San Francisco’s next landmark entertainment venue. This meant an intuitive, tech-forward platform that their lean team of seven could use to get PianoFight ramped up and pack the house.
PianoFight turned to Eventbrite to:
– Impress attendees with a 100% mobile optimized experience
– Save time with integrations — and access to an open API
(Application Program Interface)
– Make check-in seamless and cost-effective
“When we were running through options, we knew we wanted something super user-friendly, and we found that most other ticketing platforms are counter-intuitive.”
– Rob Ready, Artistic Director
By the numbers:
-
30
Shows per week
-
+60%
Revenue growth from 2015-2016
-
20-40
Hours saved per week
Impress attendees with a 100% mobile optimized experience
Having been in the entertainment industry for over a decade, Duncan and Rob knew a few key insights about their audience that would help PianoFight succeed. They knew the types of shows that would draw in the crowds, that a full-service bar and restaurant were must-haves to keep their fans happy, and that their audience wanted to do everything — including buying tickets — on their phones.
When looking at ticketing systems, “the first question that we asked was: ‘Does it work on mobile?’” Rob says. “We knew our crowd is young and that an insane number of purchases happen on phones, so mobile experience was our biggest priority.”
They turned to Eventbrite for a seamless, 100% mobile-optimized purchase experience. Fans could easily buy tickets without needing to pinch-to-zoom, log in, or be redirected to another page. “We wanted a straightforward platform and a simple purchase experience for our attendees. The other platforms were way behind on that,” says Rob.
“We rarely, if ever, get any support calls from attendees about their purchase – and never any complaints. It just works. And that’s what we count on.”
– Rob Ready, Artistic Director
Save time with integrations — and access to an open API
Once PianoFight was up and running, Duncan and Rob began to focus on making their team more efficient. Eventbrite’s intuitive UI (user interface) was key in getting staff quickly trained on the platform, but it was the cutting-edge features, best-in-class partnerships and integrations, and open API (which empowers you to access and link programs with your ticketing back end) that really made the difference for their team.
“We love how tech-forward and innovative Eventbrite is. The product is constantly evolving and improving with new and better features.”
– Duncan Wold, Director of Operations
Setting up an event takes only seconds — a metric that matters to a venue hosting multiple events every day of the week. “I don’t even want to imagine how long it would take us to set up our shows on another platform,” says Duncan. And because most of their shows are ongoing, the repeating events feature is a huge time saver.
Duncan’s team also uses Eventbrite’s marketing tools and integrations, like Mailchimp and Facebook, to promote their shows. “The new Facebook integration is super helpful,” Duncan says. “This has made our Facebook feed blow up! And it saves our team so much time because they don’t have to create two events. Plus, the automated Facebook friend notifications helps us get the word out and expand our reach to friends of fans.”
When he saw an inefficiency at PianoFight that an existing integration couldn’t solve for, Duncan used Eventbrite’s open API — and his background in engineering — to build his own solutions and, in his own words, “streamline some extremely clumsy processes.”
Duncan built two programs: first, “The Ticket Wizard,” which helps the venue appropriately staff and stock the restaurant and bar for busy nights. By tapping Eventbrite’s API, Duncan is able to empower his team with data that saves them money on wasted food and bored bartenders.
Second, he built the “The Reconciliation Wizard” — a tool that automatically creates show reports by pulling in data from Eventbrite’s API and their internal system. “We have to do reconciliations for every performance,” explains Duncan, “so the solution that we built automatically fills out 90% of the show report, allowing us to pull reports in less than half the time and pay out our performers faster.”
The automation of these integrations reduces the need for more staff and allows the team to focus on more important tasks. “The time saved using Eventbrite’s integrations and API is huge — I'd say 20-40 human hours per week,” says Duncan. “Not only have the company directors been able to buy back a lot of our own personal time, but with these tools directly in the hands of our staff, we’ve seen efficiency increase across the board. It gives our staff the power to answer their own questions — and we’ve been able to produce bigger events and manage more shows and artists.”
Make check-in seamless so their shows run smoothly
As they prepared for opening week, Duncan and Rob thought through all of the logistics that would make — or break — the experience for their fans. Booking great artists was one thing, but the duo knew that the moments before the show actually starts are just as important as a top-notch performance.
When the doors to PianoFight open and attendees arrive for the shows, Eventbrite continues to help streamline the venue’s operations. A seamless check-in experience is crucial for their onsite operations, so Duncan uses Eventbrite’s onsite gear, including scanners, credit card readers, iPads, and the Organizer App to make sure things run smoothly.
“It’s really important for us to be at maximum speed to check in and sell tickets at the door,” says Duncan. “We run back to back shows that start 30 minutes apart. If one show starts late that throws off the whole night, so that process needs to be lightning fast. With Eventbrite’s box office equipment, it’s never a problem. We can get 90 people checked into a house in 15 minutes.”
Conclusion
When the team opened PianoFight, they chose Eventbrite as their ticketing partner for the seamless mobile user experience, but “the API and integrations were a huge reason why we have stayed on for so long,” Duncan says. “We didn't know how important this would be when we decided to go with Eventbrite.”
From a seamless purchase experience, to streamlined operations online and onsite, PianoFight has relied on Eventbrite to scale to become San Francisco’s premier landmark entertainment venue.
“Eventbrite is the machine that makes us operate efficiently.”
– Duncan Wold, Director of Operations
Interested in learning how innovative event technology can help you scale your business? Get in touch with us here or call 1-877-620-9578.