Enhancing Festival Management with 123FormBuilder
Background
Winter Film Festival brings together emerging filmmakers from all over the world, showcasing a mix of creative voices across genres like feature films, shorts, documentaries, animation, horror, web series, and music videos. The festival’s all about promoting diversity, giving a chance to underrepresented artists, and creating a space for different viewpoints.
Every year, they handle around 3,000 submissions via 123FormBuilder, with the busiest time being December and January. It takes about nine months to pull everything together for the Festival, which means they need a solid system to manage everything— submission judging, volunteer sign-ups, event attendance, Press accreditation, awards jury, newsletters, and contact forms.
Getting Started with 123FormBuilder
To make festival operations smoother and more efficient, Winter Film Festival brought in 123FormBuilder to help manage various tasks, such as:
- Festival Accepted Film Management: Accepted Filmmakers use custom forms to fill in legal agreements, desired screening times, expected attendance and to provide all details for their films, like film genre, length, synopsis, cast and contact information. This information is used to build out the website, program and manage all communications
- Judging Submissions: The Festival receives roughly 700 film submissions each year, which are judged by a team of ~50 judges. Each film must be viewed by at least 4 judges. Judges access their weekly viewing assignments through secure forms to view the films and efficiently share their feedback and technical scores via a user-friendly system.
- Volunteer, Judge and Writer Sign-Ups: The festival recruits volunteers by collecting their personal information and shift availability through forms.
- Special Invitations: The team sends out special event invitations and attendance RSVP forms to VIPs, sponsors, filmmakers and Press using customized forms.
- Awards Jury: A team of ~35 awards jurors view details for all selected films in each category and choose their top 4 winners
- Newsletter Subscription: Attendees subscribe (and unsubscribe) to newsletters via sign-up forms to stay updated on festival news.
- Contact Forms: The festival team facilitates easy communication for inquiries and feedback through a dedicated contact form.
Features Utilized
Here’s how 123FormBuilder’s awesome features help make the festival run like a charm:
- Conditional Logic: Adjusts questions based on previous answers, ensuring the Festival is able to get the correct information for each scenario.
- Various Field Types: Uses various field types like text boxes, dropdowns, and checkboxes to collect all kinds of information more smoothly even from people who are not tech-savvy.
- Extensive Salesforce Integration: Serves as the backbone for managing data, tracking entries, and keeping up with participant interactions. 123FormBuilder information populates tens of thousands of Salesforce records with an average of 200K field responses per year.
Benefits Achieved
Using 123FormBuilder made a significant impact on the Winter Film Awards in the following ways:
- Enhanced Efficiency: By automating all external information gathering, including film details, judging, attendance, written articles, scheduling and volunteer recruitment, the festival team dramatically reduced the manual workload, allowing them to focus more on producing the Festival instead of the hassles of gathering, relating and loading the data.
- Data Security: Implementing features like two-factor authentication and customizable user roles ensured that sensitive data remained secure and protected from unauthorized access.
- Scalability: The platform effectively handled the surge in activity during peak months without any performance issues.
- Improved Communication: The newsletter and contact forms facilitated better engagement with participants, volunteers, and attendees.
- Comprehensive Tracking: Audit trails offered insights into form activity, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations and maintaining an organized workflow.
By leveraging 123FormBuilder’s features, Winter Film Festival successfully manages its festival operations while ensuring a secure environment for sensitive data handling.
Testimonial
Winter Film Festival is a tiny non-profit with a very limited staff and just a handful of Salesforce licenses. Prior to our incorporation of 123FormBuilder, the Festival team spent hundreds of hours each year simply asking for, gathering, manipulating, cleaning and uploading data into Salesforce. Each accepted Festival film and each Festival screening/party/event can have 100+ related Salesforce records, and each record type had to be loaded separately or typed directly into the system.
The Festival originally managed this via constantly changing spreadsheets and convoluted extensive data uploads or manual entry. However, users provided incorrect or bad data in the spreadsheet with no means for us to enforce rules or formats, just one mis-sorted spreadsheet or bad data load would set us back for days, tons of typos would be pushed to our website and printed program and the workload to stay on top of this was simply crushing.
With our FormBuilder build-out, all of that is automated and problem-free. Filmmakers, volunteers, jurors, writers, sponsors and staff fill in what looks like simple forms and FormBuilder takes care of the rest – creating or updating all of the records and relationships like magic!
This allows us to use Salesforce for virtually everything for the Festival and do not have to license everyone who simply needs to provide data nor figure out how to build ExperienceCloud or other Salesforce web applications. The 123FormBuilder forms are easy to build and embed on our website and do not require an expensive Salesforce developer to get everything working.
123FormBuilder support has also been amazing! Any time we’ve hit a wall trying to build out something super-complicated, the support team has been right there helping us out and coming up with a cool solution.
We are able to extract, report upon and view from on-site easily with all of our information in one place. Without having to worry about data integrity or entry, the team can concentrate on the actual production of our event. 123FormBuilder has been an enormous help to us and we are absolutely delighted!
Steffanie Finn, Film Festival Executive Director
