Located in the middle of the bustling area of Camden, iconic music and arts venue The Roundhouse provides a creative space for both established and upcoming artists. With Yesplan to power their event planning, they hold a unique and valuable position in London's vibrant music and performing arts scene. Discover how our event planning software provided the complete package they were looking for.
The Roundhouse is one of London’s longstanding cultural spaces, dating all the way back to 1964. Not only do they host hundreds of concerts, conferences, and private events a year, they also have a large number of studio spaces available for young and upcoming artists.
The main room holds a capacity of up to 3200 people and offers concerts and performances of both contemporary and well known artists. Among the laureates of the past you can find some truly legendary names like David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin.
Joshua Chandler, Senior Systems and Technology Business Partner at The Roundhouse, explains to us how the venue came to use Yesplan for their event planning. They started with asking similar venues about their experiences with event planning software.
Yesplan quickly came forward from this conversation. ‘We immediately saw that Yesplan was a complete package. It’s flexible and easy to use, and honestly just great value for money’ Joshua says.
After seeing the capabilities of Yesplan, The Roundhouse decided to leave their previous system in the past and start from scratch with Yesplan. ‘The previous system was more or less just used as a place to store information, without any dynamic depth to it, a sort of Google Drive you could say’ continues Joshua.
Adopting a new event planning system also gives you the opportunity to rethink the way your organisation works. This was also the case with The Roundhouse tells Joshua. ‘It really allowed us to start from scratch, without any preconceived notions of how it should work. Considering we did this during the lockdowns, we had a lot of time to think about every stage of the event planning process’ he says.
To this day, The Roundhouse keeps an open eye to continuously improving their work processes through regular meetings with different department heads.
‘My colleagues quickly started to pick up on how to work with Yesplan’ Joshua says excitedly. ‘Key to this success was that we showed them how to work with Yesplan step by step, making it easy for them to transition. We gradually added more custom data fields. At first we only showed three custom data fields they needed to fill in, so they thought “Hey, this is really easy to work with”, after that step we added more, until the whole system was in place’ Joshua explains.
Another reason Yesplan was quickly adopted by the staff of The Roundhouse was the retention of the same colour scheme of their previous system. ‘The flexibility of Yesplan gave us the opportunity to reuse the same colours that we had in place, so that people were already partly familiar with the look of Yesplan. The same can be said about the layout in terms of where the different rooms are located in the planning system’ Joshua recalls about the early days of starting to use Yesplan.
This copying of layout and colours is extremely helpful when working with a huge number of rooms, as The Roundhouse does. The venue not only has different spaces for concerts, performances and private events, it’s also a breeding ground for the next generation of artists thanks to the large number of studio spaces they rent out.
‘Access to the studio’s is reserved for those who are in our membership program. It’s fantastic for musicians who usually can’t afford renting a studio’ Joshua says. The Roundhouse has around 30 of these studio spaces available, enough for over 8000 young people to learn the ropes. In 2030 The Roundhouse would like to have 15000 members. A great asset to facilitate the growth of London’s young artists scene, powered by Yesplan’s flexible flexibel event planning. Cheers!
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