The goal throughout all of our activities this season was to create beauty in the world, and to encourage all of our girls to see the beauty within themselves.  As the text in Letter from a Girl to the World states, “In my heart, there are hopes and dreams, and all different beautiful things…are you listening with you heart when we’re sharing ours… have you given us a chance to make you proud?” I know I speak not only for myself and the rest of the staff, but for all of our parents and families, when I say that our girls most definitely made us proud.  I can’t imagine a more beautiful group of girls and young women-they all have a light that they generously shared with each other and our community each and every week, and I am honored to be their director.  Happy summer, and we’ll see you in August!

Click here to watch the video.

Thank you to all girls who participated in this project.

But reference material is different. It doesn’t change very often, tends to be related to a lot of other static content, and needs to be easy to search and navigate. A chorister handbook and a corporate intranet portal are good examples.One of the best ways to organize and present static content is with a wiki. A wiki lets you create pages of content, then create meaningful hyperlinks between the pages. Wikis are modern versions of the old Apple HyperCard app, and you’ve probably used the most prominent example -- Wikipedia.

One of the best wiki apps is the open source MediaWiki platform, on which Wikipedia is built. Many others are also in use, and the best ones have these features:

• Simple markup language -- easier to write than HTML
• Revision history -- see what changed, when it changed, and who changed it
• Search -- lets you find what you need quickly without having to remember how to navigate
• Access control -- limits who can change your content

Here at the Girl Choir of South Florida, we use MediaWiki for our Membership Handbook. We found that most people never bothered to read the printed copy of the handbook, so we moved it online. That way, people can focus on the sections of interest, and it’s easier for us to maintain and distribute.

We also use Microsoft SharePoint for our intranet portal. (SharePoint comes with Microsoft Small Business Server, which I’ll cover in a subsequent post.) It’s the ideal way to write down the ways we do common tasks so that future staff and volunteers can repeat them.

If you’re just starting a choir and you haven’t considered using a finance app, you might be tempted to try tracking the state of your finances in a spreadsheet. But finance apps these days are so inexpensive and easy-to-use that they are well worth the investment, both in software and training.

There used to be a great variety of options in the world of accounting software for small businesses. (Does anyone remember the epic battle between Microsoft and Intuit?) But the choices in financial applications have take a similar path as office apps - there are fewer choices, but the ones that remain are exceptionally good.

These days, the leading options in small business finance software are QuickBooks, Sage Peachtree, and AccountEdge. Any of them will provide a perfectly serviceable solution for your choir. A complete review of any one package is outside the scope of this blog post, but there are many reviews available online.

Here at the Girl Choir, we use QuickBooks Online. Although it has somewhat fewer features that the desktop app, it has everything we need to run our choir. Plus, it gives access to everyone who needs it wherever the happen to be: from any of the computers in the office, from the laptop of our treasurer, or even from the office of our accountant at tax-time.

Subscriptions for our 2011-2012 concert series are also available. Go to girlchoir.org/subscribe to take advantage of all of the great benefits included in your subscription.

Our December performances include:

• Friday, December 9 * at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale featuring our Concert Choir and Chamber Singers ensembles
• Monday, December 12, at Broward Center for the Performing Arts with the Symphony of the Americas
• Thursday, December 15 *, at Broward Center for the Performing Arts with all of our performing ensembles

One of the easiest ways to spread the word is to use someone else’s contact list, especially if they are local to your area and specialize in reaching your target audience. For instance, two services in South Florida (Organiste and Florida Concert Flyers) offer inexpensive ways to distribute our audition and concert announcements directly to a broad audience interested in the performing arts.

Even if you use someone else’s list for public announcements, you will also need to manage your own contact list. Maintaining your own list allows you to communicate directly with the people that know you best and upon which you rely the most -- the singers, audience members, and donors.

A good email marketing service generally offers these features:

• Ease of use
• Excellent form design
• Mobile device support
• Bounce handling and anti-spam control
• Support for subscriber opt-out (see the requirements of the U.S. CAN-SPAM law)
• Integration with other apps (Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Google Analytics, etc)
• Translation services
• And lots more

Here are some other systems that we have either investigated ourselves or have seen other performing arts organizations use. A detailed comparison would be too long to post here, but other comparisons and reviews are online.

• MailChimp
• iContact
• Constant Contact
• PatronMail

• singers (and, if you’re a children’s choir, their parents),
• staff,
• audience members,
• donors,
• volunteers,
• suppliers,

and lots more.

It’s fairly straightforward to keep a list of these people and how to contact them. Most office automation systems make these incredibly easy.

But a single contact may be connected to other contacts in multiple ways. For instance, a singer may also be a staff member and a volunteer and a donor and a parent. It’s difficult to capture those relationships with a spreadsheet in a way that lets you easily make use of that knowledge.

This is what a contact (or “customer” or “constituent”) relationship management (CRM) system does for you: it allows you to build a model of your world -- your contacts, their relationships, and their activities -- then use that model to further the goals of your choir.

A CRM system automatically classifies people by their activities. For instance, anyone who has made a donation is a donor, and anyone who has logged a volunteer hour is a volunteer. You don’t mark them manually as such; you just record the donation or the volunteerism, and the system takes care of the rest.

A good CRM should support:

• logging volunteer hours
• tracking memberships and subscriptions (and renewals),
• registration for events,
• donations
• email open/click-through tracking

For instance, we enter each of our singers as individual contacts. We create one group for each of our ensembles, and put each singer in their ensemble’s group. We then enter each singer’s parent, and create a parent-of/child-of relationship between the parent and singer. (One contact may be the parent of multiple singers, which can be in different ensembles.)

Each week, we email a memo to our singers and their parents. The CRM sends the memo to all contacts who are either current singers or have a parent-of relationship to a current singer, and weeds out duplicates so that a parent of multiple choristers gets only one memo.

We use CiviCRM, running on Drupal. It’s open source (free), full-featured, web-based, and customizeable, plus it was designed for non-profits -- its user base includes Amnesty International, Wikimedia Foundation, TechSoup, and the Linux Foundation.

Other free and not-quite-so-free CRM systems are available.

If you’re performing at a venue large enough to have a dedicated box office, their services are often included as part of the facility lease. But what if you’re performing at a church, school, or other venue without a box office? Managing all of this by hand is a lot of effort and is highly prone to mistakes.

Fortunately, there are a variety of online services that can do it without busting your budget. Here at the Girl Choir, we use Brown Paper Tickets for managing subscription sales and ticket sales at self-produced events. They deliver every possible service you’d expect, from online sales, box office sales, sales reports, ticket printing, ticket delivery, will-call list generation, a variety of pricing options, discount codes, and more.

And best of all -- it’s free for event producers. The BPT service fees are either paid by the ticket buyer at purchase time or can be deducted from your overall ticket revenue during reconciliation.

BPT isn’t the only game in town -- there are many other vendors that provide these services as well as other features (such as integration with your web site’s look-and-feel), although most charge a fee to the event producer. One such service that another local choir uses is OvationTix.com.

If you have used or are using another such service, please post a comment and let us know the name of the service and what you think of it.