Background
Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, or PÖFF, debuted in 1997. Since 2014, PÖFF has been one of the 15 A-list film festivals accredited by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) alongside Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Tokyo, among others. PÖFF’s aim is to cater to both the local and international audience, with a wide selection of films that one might really not get to see in a regular cinema.
The Challenge
PÖFF’s Development Specialist Ingel walked us through the challenge: “Each year, we're adding more films, more screenings. We have more visitors, more film guests, more locations that we showed the films at. It's just more, more, more. Previously we had used Excel sheets. And if you can imagine all the departments making their schedules in spreadsheets, it's a lot of manual labour.”
Ingel also highlighted the challenge of keeping everyone on the same page: “We just let people take a look at their spreadsheets and maybe delete some cells where they're not going to be available to work. But we, the department coordinators, might not have noticed those changes at all.”
The Solution
With Parim in place, Ingel told us how it helps streamline the workflows for everyone involved: “Now that we have Parim, it's just so much easier for everyone involved, both the volunteers and the coordinators making the schedules. We send out invitations to new people and sort them into departments, giving them positions and the locations that they prefer to work at.”
We were also glad to hear how well Parim ties into the growth of Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Ingel walked us through this: “We have everyone tagged in the system. It's really easy to make schedules afterwards. And then since we're constantly expanding, we're also adding new locations every year. I think now we have 26 main locations. It's really important to have an unlimited amount of people that you can add, because we don't know how far it's going to grow. Every year the volunteer numbers are going up.”
“We send out invitations to new people and sort them into departments, giving them positions and the locations that they prefer to work at.”
As for the staff’s side of the story, we were delighted to hear how well Parim has been received: “Every year we collect feedback from both volunteers and the people who are supervising them. And the response has been overwhelmingly positive so far.”
“You don't have to search through thousands of rows in spreadsheets to find where you're scheduled. Instead, you can just get an email notification or open the app. And you see what event you're working at and for how many hours. It's just really simple.”
