Shutterfly–Organizing a Successful St. Patrick’s Day Week

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This past week was a very intense week as it was not only March Break, it was also St. Patrick’s Day week.  This seemingly trivial holiday (I mean really, for some, it pales in comparison to Halloween, Christmas & Easter)… is a very big deal in this household because my daughter is an Irish Dancer. That means that she performs an awful lot during March Break because everyone just wants to get into the spirit!
Her dance school, The Corrigan School of Irish Dance, was very busy last week as they performed everywhere from senior’s homes to retirement communities to shopping malls to restaurants to private parties and even to a wedding.
It takes no small task to organize dancers, parents, teachers for multiple days, at multiple times a day, in multiple locations. I used a fantastic tool that I adopted from my other daughters’ passion – soccer: I used Shutterfly Sports Team Share website to organize the events.
This is how Shutterfly explains what its websites do:

“Shutterfly Sports Team Share sites make it easy to communicate, organize and share photos privately with other team members. You can also manage event schedules, snack duties and player availability all in one place.”

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First, I set up the shared website in no time. Remember this is not an open website for just anyone, you have to be invited to be a member to see and contribute to the website. So it is ideal if you want to keep player names, phone numbers & email addresses private.  When setting it up, you want to place some pictures in the “home” page to customize the website.

I then added all of the dancers and the contact names (not an illustration that I am gong to show you for privacy reasons). 
Secondly, I added the events to the calendar. 

This then added the rosters of available dancers players.  Since I added the ‘players’ when I set up the site, as I added an event it automatically assumes every ‘player’ is playing so every box is check. That can be a hassle if you have 58 ‘players’ (or dancers as we did).  I can see for a sports team that this makes sense but I was adapting it for dance performances.
Thirdly, I wrote detailed notes on the event, the location, contact name, the lead parent, the agreed upon payment for each event, list of dancers etc. If you look below, you see it is very easy to schedule an event with all the details that the parents may need. It gives you the arrival time in addition to the performance time.

Lastly, I was able to send out mass emails asking parents to sign up their children for available dates as well as to communicate dance-out instructions.  Sending emails from the site saved me having to create additional email lists (and making the mistake of forgetting someone).
If you look at the event details above, you see that Shutterfly sent out reminders to the parents a day in advance, it also sent updates (dancer availability, time change, or invites to contribute photos or videos) to the whole group.  I only have two issues that I would like to see changed: (1) the ability to send the reminder email exclusively to the people that are participating in the event. Not everyone needs to get those updates, only the families that are affected; (2) I would prefer to see a list of dancers that are available and not those that are unavailable. With a dancer roster of almost 60 dancers, there were many that were not involved at all and seeing all those names was just a bit confusing.  It would just be easier to see the ones that are participating.  That just makes more sense to me.

The site also features sport-specific details like a snack schedule, map links to the locations of the ‘field’, parent volunteer sign up sections.  It is a scheduling wonderful and it made my job A LOT EASIER!

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