Hey all,

Sorry for not posting an update sooner, we’ve begun testing a lot of these new features which means I’ve been busy working with our QA team to track down bugs and getting feedback on how things work from members and staff.

I did have time during testing to grab a screen shot of the new EPK Viewer.  The EPK Viewer is designed to let promoters review an EPK alongside the aritst’s submission form.

Hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend.  I’ll check in again next week with more info on how the Submission Tracker is coming along.

Before I get into more Submission Tracker features, I’d like to welcome all of the new readers to the Builder’s Blog that are here as a result of reading Panos’ email.   If you want to get a little more background about me and the Submission Tracker project read this post.

The new Submission Tracker feature I want to talk about today will make it much easier for artists to get in touch with promoters that are interested in booking them.  (more…)

My previous posts have been mostly about the improvements to the submission review process from the artist’s perspective.  We’re making a number of improvements to the way promoters review submissions on Sonicbids as well.

Firstly, we’re giving our promoters more control over their listings.  Promoters will now have the ability to close their listing, and/or extend their notification deadline date right in their EPK Inbox.

In addition to more control, we’re also making the process of notifying artists much easier with automatic notifications.  With the Submission Tracker, promoters simply need to reach out to the artists they’re interested in working with and the rest of their submissions will take care of themselves.  This will give promoters more time to review submissions (since they won’t have to individually reach out to all of the artists they aren’t interested in working with), while still giving everyone that submits an update on time.

I know that artists who are turned down for gigs would like to get more feedback from promoters about why they weren’t interested.  Promoters using Submission Tracker still have the ability to provide personalized messages to all of their submissions, however it is not required.  We felt it was most important to first make sure that all submitting artists get an update on time, and once that is in place we can start building better tools to let promoters give personalized feedback to artists during their review process.

Earlier this week I posted a screen shot of a “Not Interested” update from the new Submission Tracker.  Since submission updates will now include review tracking, we thought it’d be a good time to give the EPK Visits Tracker a new look.  Check it out:

Next week I’ll share some of the cool stuff we’re doing for promoters to make their job of reviewing submissions a bit easier.

Hey all,

As promised in my last post, I put together a screen shot of what you’ll see when you check the status of a submission.

In addition to the new look, one change you might notice is that the date your submission was reviewed is now clearly noted.  That way you’ll be able to check your EPK Visits Tracker to see what kind of hits your EPK got on that day.  Speaking of the EPK Visits Tracker, we’ll be giving that section a bit of a facelift as well.  Stay tuned for some more screen shots.

Lou

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’m working on improving the submission process with a new tool called the Submission Tracker.

When the new Submission Tracker launches we’ll no longer be using Selected, Not Selected, and Standby as submission statuses. Selected and Not Selected in many cases are a bit too strong. For example, an artist can be “selected” for a gig, but might not be able to make the date they’re being offered. To set better expectations for both promoters and artists we will be renaming Selected and Not Selected submission statuses to Interested and Not Interested.

We will also be discontinuing the use of Standby as a submission status. We have heard from a lot of members who are unsure what Standby means (I’m not sure myself sometimes) and have also heard from artists who have submissions stuck in Standby with no resolution. Getting rid of Standby as a submission status will force promoters to make a clear decision for each one.

The submission status popup windows will look a bit different too (hurray for ajax!). I’ll see if I can track down a screen shot to post next week so you all can check it out.

Enjoy the weekend,

Lou

Update: After several feeback sessions with groups of artists and promoters we found that many artists prefered “Selected” to “Interested” and many promoters we concerned about losing the “Standby” middle ground.  So we went back to the drawing board and came up with a solution that should work even better.  The new statuses will be Selected, Interested, and Not Selected.  The new Interested status will work like Standby did with one exception.  Any time a promoter puts a submission to “Interested” they will be required to resolve it to either Selected or Not Selected by a specific date.  This way promoters can still have their middle status, but artists will always have closure to their submissions.