FaveQuest <3 Bluesfest

There we said it. We <3 Bluesfest. We actually loved Bluesfest before they became a customer. Mark Monahan, Executive director of the Ottawa Bluesfest and Allan Isfan, CEO of FaveQuest met accidentally at the launch of Virgin Radio in Ottawa with Sir Richard Branson in the crowd.

Elevator Pitch

A quick elevator pitch followed by a meeting a couple of weeks later and some late night phone calls and a deal was done. FaveQuest launched a beta version of the Social Video Calendar in 2009 as a drop in widget in the existing site. Tens of thousands of music fans used the advanced tools to watch over 226,000 videos and build and share their calendar with friends. We knew we were onto something.

Success Breeds Success

Bluesfest brought on FaveQuest on to design and rebuild their entire website, a Facebook app and an iPhone app. Traffic on the site grew by 30%, time on site went from a minute to over five minutes and with that also came a new sponsorship from the National Gallery of Canada (yes, a website can be a revenue generator instead of a cost center).

The Relationship Continues

We have also developed some very specialized tools for Bluesfest to help them manage their operations. For example, the FAB (FaveQuest Artist Booking) tool. With a multi-million dollar budget and hundreds of artists, tracking offers, contract details, contract status, riders, budget and so on can be very tricky to do with a spreadsheet. Ottawa Bluesfest now uses our FAB product to perform all artist bookings.

Another big nightmare for festival organizers is trying to track, keep up to date and allow necessary staff to access key contacts for all bands. Some bands have 8 or more people that need to be reached for various types of reasons. We built a specialized tool call FACT (FaveQuest Artist Contact Tracker) to solve this problem.

FUN FUN FUN!

During the festival, the two co-founders of FaveQuest, Allan Isfan & Bill Love, in addition to several others, become roving reporters interviewing fans, staff and even musicians. It comes with an access pass! A dream come true.

We truly <3 Bluesfest and will be forever grateful to Mark, Mike, AJ, Sarah, Tammy, Nathalie, Allison and the whole team for believing in us and giving us a shot that changed the entire course of our company.