Seattle Bach Festival
My experience with Drew McManus and Upstage has been uniformly delightful. The Seattle Bach Festival is a brand new organization which incorporated in 2024, and we spent most of last year building out the systems before launching our first events. The most attractive aspect of the Upstage suite is the integration between the website, email, crm, ticketing. With robust systems in place and Drew and his team of seasoned professionals on call, I felt confident launching a new organization where the back end systems supporting the organization would be as beautiful as the music on stage.
Upstage’s focus on the customer and user experience supports our vision for how to care for our patrons. During the onboarding process, Upstage provided an extremely detailed timeline for launch which broke the on-boarding into manageable steps. The implementation phase was a great education for me in how an elegantly designed system can help an organization run with more ease. Drew is a consummate professional and is responsive, helpful, and generous with his time when our team has questions. Because of my excellent experience, I have enthusiastically recommended Upstage to a number of other organizations.
Long Beach Opera
In a constantly modernizing world, it is imperative for performing arts companies to keep pace with our entertainment ecosystem. Our patrons expect more of us now than ever before: more convenience, more integration, and more personalized attention. Upstage allows us to provide all of these things to our patrons, while upholding all of these standards themselves. Our project manager and the Upstage team are constantly keeping up to date with the latest trends, research, and laws, even predicting future legislation and how we can all stay ethical with our use of data.
In our time working with Upstage, we have truly taken our company into the new age. Through their flexible custom development program, we have developed a number of features that allow our small team to maximize efficiency and customer service. Recently, our project manager worked with us to develop a customized automatic donation acknowledgement letter that allows us to send personalized Thank Yous through the integration with Mailchimp, saving our development department quite a bit of time and allowing them to focus on learning more about and creating relationships with our donors.
In our Box Office, we are able to provide an experience just like one you’d find at Sofi Stadium or the Regency Village Theatre. The customized seating maps let us give our patrons more information when making their seating choices. With Upstage, we’ve gained the confidence to move away from the antiquated subscription model, which research shows is becoming less and less popular with contemporary audiences, and into the world of customized ticket packages. Our Opera patrons are now afforded the flexibility to create custom ticket packages, mixing and matching shows that fit their schedule and interests.
Cantata Singers
Things went super swimmingly from our vantage point on opening night. The box office operations were smooth, and we got a nice comment from a patron who said they loved the ease of the interface. Any anxiety we had was quickly put to rest, due in no small part to the pre-event training. Thanks for a great first event!
