Breaking news: Running a tour is a lot of work.
It’s no secret that when communicating complex information, less is more. Streamlined, personalized flows of information will reduce stress, boost efficiency, and increase the overall quality of someones experience across many verticals.
When on tour, the schedule of a Tour Manager or member quickly becomes hectic. That hectic feeling is multiplied when a flow of information is noisy, and fragmented. Looking at the schedule and seeing all the schedule items related to other members, digging through emails to find rider PDFs, navigating blocks of text to find venue or rooming info…the list goes on.
This experience will not only increase stress for a member, but is also one of the reasons Tour Managers receive the same questions over and over. If a member of your tour can get a more direct answer by asking the Tour Manager, they will do so.
Luckily, there is a better much way to handle these issues with Faro.
Personalized schedules
We see case studies everywhere where personalization engages users and improves their overall experience. For example, Netflix and Spotify regularly recommend content based on your engagement. Imagine if every time you used one of those services that you needed to comb through content that was relevant to others as well as your own. It wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable, and you probably wouldn’t be looking to use those services nearly as often.
Creating a personalized schedule
Visibility controls are a keystone feature in Faro, and are available on just about everything you manage. From Events and Information Blocks, to Bulletins, Guest Lists, and File Management - tour managers should always have this kind of finite control on the content they create. While this is incredibly important for information privacy, it’s also a very powerful way to curate schedules for your members. This ensures they will see only what is needed, enhance clarity, and ultimately reduce stress.
“But that sounds time consuming and hard”
Fret not, my overburdened friend. Allow me to demonstrate how easy this is.
Assignments in Faro
Wether you are creating an Event, Information Block, Bulletin, or one of many of the other features Faro provides visibility controls for, the flow is the same.
In this demonstration I will take a complex schedule and reorganize it using Faros visibility controls on Events and Information Blocks.
A common example
Yowza, that’s a lot of stuff and we haven’t reached doors! But this is a pretty run of the mill example of a bands schedule. If anything, it may be a bit less chaotic than usual. That said, there are a number of ways we can improve the cognitive load for both admins, and members.
Creating groups
Firstly, if you haven’t already, you should create groups for all the designations on your tour. You can create Groups in the members section of your tour. Creating a Group will also create a new Chat Channel for you to communicate with the members in. Slick, amirite?
The above schedule highlights several basic Group options.
- Skeleton Keys (headlining band)
- Neon Vibes (support band)
- Crew (LX, FOH, monitors, etc)
- Drivers
- Admins (TMs, PMs, managers whom may be on or off the physical tour, etc)
Assigning users
Depending on how curated you’re making your schedules, you can choose from your list of Groups, or individual users to assign. For this schedule, we will do a mix of both.
When creating, for example, an event, you can choose whether to assign the event to an individual, a group, or both, simply by selecting the Group or user. You can choose a mix of multiple users and Groups. Assignees will then be notified of the action. Users and admins will now visually see the assignees on the resource they have created. You can update these assignments at anytime.
To further restrict visibility and access, you can toggle the Private option. This will ensure that only Admins and assigned users see the resources you have marked as Private.
Simplified views
By assigning the relevant items to the users who need it, everyone now has a streamlined view of their schedules without the clutter.
New and improved views for you members
While the experience for an admin has been significantly increased with the addition of these assignments, the biggest enhancement comes to your members whom a tour manager is ultimately responsible to set up for success.
Here is an example of what two of those users now see.
By personalizing their schedules, both Andrew and Isabella have a curated flow of information which clearly defines what their schedule looks like, and where they can find the relevant information pertaining to that day.
What an Admin sees
An admin will always see every item in the schedule, private or not, since they’re the creators and maintainers of schedules in Faro. But by assigning groups and users, colour coordination will reduce the cognitive load by allowing your eyes to quickly ingest the content at a glance.
Summary
Leveraging Faros assignments and visibility controls can be used to greatly enhance the flow of information for any member of your tour. A better flow of information leads to less questions, which leads to less stress. And that’s just simple math (without the math).