Bellevue Youth Choirs
comprises six choir levels and serves over one hundred youth, ages 4-18, from the Bellevue area of Washington State. Choristers learn musicianship, vocal technique and performance skills, and participate in mainstage concerts, outreach and community events, as well as regional choral festivals and tours.
Madeleine’s story
When Madeleine Stephens stepped into her new role as Managing Director of Bellevue Youth Choirs, she realized she had a lot of organizational work to do. There was no centralized system for managing choir operations, leading to inefficient workflow, poor communication, and hours of wasted staff time. Worse yet, the choir was struggling to hold on to members as staff, choristers and their families contended with ongoing organization and communication issues.
Implementing Choir Genius allowed Madeleine to streamline Bellevue Choir’s operational processes, managing membership, attendance, payments and more all in one place. By using Choir Genius, Madeleine has saved time and money, boosted staff productivity, and built Bellevue Youth Choir into an even stronger community. And the best part? The choristers and their parents are having fun.
Do you recognize these challenges?
When Madeleine started, she discovered an incomplete, outdated membership database that was missing important information. Members were frustrated with what they saw as poor communication and disorganization.
Madeleine needed a system that would allow her to easily customize and maintain the database, communicate with her members, and create lists to fit BYC's specific needs, without a webmaster, and with such ease of access that any volunteer could help as needed.
Bellevue Youth Choirs was using too many separate tools for different tasks, leading to a confusing, inefficient workflow that got in the way of daily operations. Madeleine was left scrambling to find the information she needed to do her job.
Madeleine’s Solution
Madeleine discovered Choir Genius, a tool built specifically for the organization and management of choirs. She was able to integrate Bellevue Youth Choir’s public website and private member database into one system and customize it to their unique needs as a Youth Choir.
User-managed membership database
Parents update their family accounts themselves, saving Madeleine hours of administrative labour.
Customizable account fields
Within each family account, there are fields to request crucial information like allergies and emergency contact numbers. Madeleine also has a number of custom fields for the specific additional info she wants to collect
Quick, direct communication
Features like email lists are built into the platform, ensuring Madeleine can get important information to the people who need it, when they need it, without the need to manually keep an external list up to date
Online membership store
With options to purchase new memberships and automatically invoice returning members, seasonal renewal went from a big, time-consuming job to being almost completely automated.
Results
By implementing Choir Genius, Madeleine created an efficient, organized workflow that made her job easier, kept members happy, and realized the following positive outcomes:
Parents quickly adapted to the membership site and shared resoundingly positive feedback. Since introducing the new system, one or both parents of all choir members have used the website at least once a month.
All invoices were paid online, with 80% paid on time, and all choir members submitted their attendance online.
Almost 200 people have signed up for Bellevue Choir’s list.
Because all the information she needs is available in one easily accessible place, Madeleine has been able to stay on top of a very big job without adding staff.
Madeleine can quickly and easily update the website herself, or delegate simpler tasks to a volunteer.
The choir has retained its members and kept them engaged - even through the challenges of the pandemic!
