As we start to near the end of summer, you might be thinking there's no more time to accomplish anything before the start of the season. But there's plenty you can do in just a few short weeks! Where should you focus your remaining time? Streamlining your choral operations.
Streamlining choral operations means anything that eliminates manual work and frees up your time to focus on more vital tasks for the organization. This could be anything from automating your online ticket sales, donor management, member management, or cleaning up other general operational procedures.
Why is it so important to streamline your operations prior to the start of the season? Read on, friends!
Avoid Volunteer Burnout
Volunteers already have enough to do next season without wasting time on manual efforts. By streamlining your choral operations and automating their manual tasks, you can help make sure your volunteers don't burn out from doing meaningless work. Give them the opportunity to shine - free up their time!
Keep Your Staff Motivated
No one likes doing boring administrative work. If you can streamline processes and save your staff time, then they can focus their efforts on something that is more meaningful for them and for beneficial for the chorus. They'll feel supported by the organization, and, in return, they'll do more important work for the chorus.
Look Professional AF
When a chorus has their sh*t together, people notice. Streamlining your donor management procedures, your box office procedures, and your member management procedures, for example, will show your patrons that your organization knows what it is doing. You'll look professional AF and your patrons will feel even more inclined to invest in you.
Boost Your Ticket Sales & Donations
What would you do if you had more time? My guess is you'd probably focus on bringing in money for the chorus. Since streamlining your choral operations will free up your time, you'll be able to focus on selling more tickets, engaging your audience, building donor relations, experimenting with new fundraising campaigns, and increasing your donations.
Keep Building Your Singing Community
It's really hard to focus on building your choral community when you're stuck doing manual operations! If you had more time on your hands, wouldn't it be great to invest it back into your members? You could spend that time finding ways to recruit singers, onboard new members, engage existing members, and keep everyone happy in the long-haul.
Now is the time to streamline your choral operations! Want to get started? Use your final weeks of summer to research and implement better systems for member management, ticket sales, and/or donor management.
Tori Cook is the former Director of Sales & Marketing at Chorus Connection, an active board member of the Greater Boston Choral Consortium, and a soprano with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. In a past life, she was the Music Director of the Harborlight Show Chorus and President of Chorus pro-Musica. When not making music, she daydreams about adopting a golden retriever puppy and scuba diving to exotic locations around the world.