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Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Product Update: New Show Email Alerts Fixed, Links to Google Maps, and more

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 3:30 PM
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Our Product team has been over here knocking. shit. out. Check out the latest below!


New Show Email Alerts Fixed

Some of you may have noticed that you’ve been receiving a lot more new show alerts in your Inbox over the past week.


Automatically alerting users when a band they follow adds a show has always been a feature, but it had been working sporadically -- if at all. The Product team recently revamped the script that powers this feature and fixed all the old bugs that were breaking it.

Now, the script runs every three hours to check if a show has been added, leading to near-instant email alerts.

Getting this right has been a priority as we’re getting close to launch Mandrill as our transactional email provider. Mandrill will give us the power to customize the layout and content of our automated emails, but we needed to make sure they were actually sending first.

Venue Icon Links to Google Maps

We rolled out a little add-on to Event cards this week. Clicking on the little icon to the left of the Venue name will now open up a Google Map in a new window pointing to the Venue address.

Clicking on the name will still send you to the Venue page where you can find the address, phone number, social profiles, etc., but this will be a quicker way for users to find directions to the show.


The Other Bits

Here are the other important updates to note this week:

  • Free Filter Added - You can now filter out shows that have the “Free?” box checked in the Approved Events queue in Radmin. This is useful when looking for the best free Events to to add to your Free list.
  • Ability to Delete Event Photos in Radmin - If you add a cover photo or a poster image that you don’t want anymore, you can now remove it by clicking a handy little “x” in Radmin.
  • Artist Tags Are Gone From Radmin - You’ll remember that this fall we removed tags entirely from the front-end. We didn’t like how they looked and a lot of them were pretty useless. Well, we finally removed them from Radmin, too, so there’s no longer a field filled with random, pointless tags.
  • Media Search Update - The YouTube tab in the Media Search widget now shows you how old a video is so you can find the most relevant music videos for an Artist.
  • Show In Footer? Bug Fixed - The “Show In Footer?” box that shows up when adding/editing /p/ Pages had a bug that caused it to disappear at certain times. This has been fixed.
  • Renamed Ads in Radmin - We renamed the types of ads in Radmin to make it easier to figure out where you’re placing a new ad. Your options when creating a new ad now read:
    • Featured Event
    • Featured Venue/User
    • Top Right Brand Ad
    • Listings Middle Brand Ad
    • Leaderboard Brand Ad


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Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Product Update: Changes to “TODAY” Drop-down, Improved Artist Creation, and Sorting Pending Queue by Date

1 comment: Posted by Anonymous at 3:28 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

There are a wide range of changes and improvements across Radmin and the front-end this week, so listen up!

TODAY Drop-down Getting Some Changes


As with any change to the front-end functionality of your sites, we wanted to give you a heads up on this one before it goes live.

Sometime in the next week, we will be removing “WEEKEND”, “WEEK”, and “MONTH” from the TODAY drop-down on your front page. “TODAY” and “TOMORROW” will remain, as will the calendar widget.

The problem is that WEEKEND, WEEK, and MONTH display a very limited number of Events without a lot of explanation for how these Events are picked. To a new user, it could appear that these are the only Event options on the site for the entire weekend -- undercutting your brand as the most comprehensive Events guide in the entire city.

These display options may return in the future with a more intuitive UI, but for now your Top Picks and other editorialized pages should suffice as “best of” lists of Events.

Improved Artist Creation Across Front-end and Radmin

The Dev team has been working on a number of tickets over the past week to improve the process of adding new Artists.

Create Artists From Pending/Dupes Queues

Until recently, you could only add existing artists to an Event from the Pending and Dupes queue. If the show featured an Artist that wasn’t in our database, you would have to leave the queue to create the Artist and then come back to update the show.

Now you have the option to add a band that isn’t in the drop-down, and an Artist page will automatically be created for this new band. This is especially helpful when adding shows for small venues that host lots of local bands.

But be careful not to create duplicate pages for Artists that already exist!

Improved Front-end UI For Adding Artists

This one came to us from Courtney at Do512 via the DSD Queue. Do512 is organizing happy hours with local Austin bands to show them how to take advantage of their site, but wanted to make sure the front-end tools were as intuitive as possible.

We updated the New Artist form on the front-end (New Event > Add a New Artist) to hide fields for Flickr, Instagram, Myspace, and Tumblr, and add fields for the hometown, description, and Twitter handle.

This is more consistent with the info that gets displayed on the front-end, so bands know that what they enter here will have a direct effect on their Artist page.


Photo Bug Fixed For New Artists

There was a bug that wouldn’t save the attached photo for a new Artist. After pressing “Save” to create the new Artist page, you would inevitably find that the photo was missing and would have to be attached again. The same bug was affecting new Venue pages, as well.

Now when you attach a photo to a new Artist or Venue page the photo will save as expected -- across both Radmin and the front-end.

The Other Bits

Here are the other important updates to note this week:
  • No more auto-voting for "Free" user: This shouldn't be new to anyone here, but we mention it since we removed the last remnant of Free user auto-voting from old Admin. Just to recap the new system, checking "Free?" on an Event in Radmin will add the "FREE" banner but you will still need to manually vote to add it to your Free list. This is so you have more editorial control over what Events show up in this list.
  • Fixed HTML for repeating Events: There was a bug where repeating Events with different start/end dates would look completely crazy on the front-end. This is because the date abbreviations (e.g. 12/10) were screwing up the HTML. This is fixed so Events like happy hours that extend past midnight won't go haywire.
  • Pending queue now sortable by start date: This was a much-requested feature since the launch of Radmin. Now, when working in the Pending queue you have the option to sort by date or by Popularity ranking.



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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/8/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 9:29 AM Labels:
Evening all,

We know you guys are all busy churning out and promoting your End of Year content, but when you get tired of sitting back and looking at how dang pretty everyone's best 2014 shows look, give a read through this edition of the Winner of the Week and then check out your stats for the first week of December at the end of the email.

Indy realizes it takes weeks of planning to get drunk. Early last week, we noticed that over 3,000 people in November were visiting Do317 after searching for what to do in Indy on NYE. Thanks to Do317's strong position on search results pages for queries involving "Indianapolis/Indy" and "New Years Eve," we knew this could potentially be a huge source of great traffic for Do317.

In response, the team in Indy spent some time sprucing up the page, getting good events listed, and generally making it a visually appealing and helpful landing page for users coming in through search.  

The result? On the NYE page alone, bounce rate dropped 40%. This is crucial, since traffic to that page is blowing up. The page is the most popular page on Do317 after the homepage, has received 74% more traffic than last year, and is continuing to grow its pageviews daily.

This NYE content win (in addition to a Lana Del Rey giveaway, a couple successful nightclub RSVPs, and their always popular First Friday list) helped to give Do317 its highest week of traffic and email clicks since we've been doing the Weekly KPI Report.

A couple lessons from this:
  1. NYE parties are huge. If you haven't built out a great list for this, you're already behind.
  2. Even more important than NYE (blasphemy, I know) is monitoring your organic traffic for peaks in people coming to your site. This will let you see what content people are searching for, so that you can make sure you provide them with content that's relevant.

    One great way to do this is via the Organic Traffic dashboard (download here) for Google Analytics. Also, if you want, I can enable search query data in your GA account. Just respond to this email, and I'll give you instructions on how to see that data.
That's all for this week! Updated Weekly KPI Report below:
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How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/1/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 9:24 AM Labels:
Happy December everybody!

It's Monday, which means it's time for a piping fresh delivery of your Weekly KPI Report. And although the weather might be getting colder for the most of us, this particular edition of the Winner of the Week comes from sunny Los Angeles:


DoLA gets EMOuntains of traffic. The 8th most popular landing page on DoLA for all of 2014 was this retrospective covering the LA emo scene and its relevance today. Some takeaways on why it was successful:
--It's an easily digestible list: 12 bands; one paragraph each. A few good quality images. There are links out to more information, so that readers can go further in depth if they wish, but everything on the page itself is concise enough to digest quickly.

--It has a well-informed local voice: The piece makes it immediately obvious to the reader that this is from someone knowledgeable about LA emo; it's not just an intern that had to do an artist interview and slapped 5 questions together.

--It uses event cards to keep the piece tied into events: DoLA is still about what to do tonight, not what you should've done 10 years ago. This piece reflects that by focusing on what the bands are up to now and by embedding in event cards for any upcoming shows. In the future, DoLA can keep content like this even more integrated into their site by making sure all of the related artist pages are up to snuff and linking in to them. 

DoLA showcased the content piece in their newsletter, which ended up being a complete hit with their audience. 1,369 people clicked the link in the newsletter, accounting for half of the traffic to the page on site. With all of the traffic taken together, the Emo List was the most popular page on DoLA for the previous week (400 more pageviews than the homepage) and drove DoLA to more than double their YoY traffic. 

Hopefully all of that is just going to be a taste of the kind of traffic all metros will see once the end of year content/lists debut, but until then, check out the updated KPI's and see how you can make next week even better:
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How You (and the network did last week) - 11/24/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 9:22 AM Labels:
Holiday greetings (for those of you in the US; normal greetings to HazDF and Do416)!

We've got a lot to be thankful for network-wide this week, as Do214, Do617, and HazDF all had their highest weeks of traffic since we started the Weekly KPI reports. Do617 got bazonkers traffic to their Foo at Fenway giveaway, and HazDF got 3K+ pageviews (over a third of their total site traffic) from people checking out their Foodtruck festival event pages. Nice work guys!

However, for this week's Winner of the Week, we'll be honing in on Do214's novel, successful, and super-replicable content feature:

Dallas Arrives Fashionably Great. Sponsored content hits the sweet spot when it wins for the advertiser, wins for your metro, and wins for your audience. Do214 nailed this trifecta when they partnered with a local boutique owner and Tastemaker/aspiring blogger to produce a piece of content that tied together fashion with music events. The details:

--Win for advertiser: Dainty Lion (the boutique featured) got exposure to Do214's audience via Do214's social and email, plus they have a special coupon code for people referred from Do214, allowing them to track the efficacy of this sponsored content. Plus, they get to tie their brand, whose slogan is "Where Rock'n Roll inspires style," to Do214's brand of being the authority on Dallas music and nightlife. 

--Win for metro: Do214 was able to keep the content squarely on brand by relating each fashion piece to a related outfit-appropriate event, complete with embedded event cards. Plus, Do214 got exposure to an audience they otherwise wouldn't reach. Friends of Dainty Lion that engaged with and shared the post on Facebook helped drive it to an organic reach of over 5k, accounting for over half of the traffic to the Do214 page itself. 

--Win for audience: This piece of content was the #1 page on Do214 over the last week, accounting for 16% of their total site traffic. The event cards and special Do214 discount helped to keep people engaged once they got to the page, as the average time spent on the page was almost 4 minutes. 

Of course the stat that matters the most is $500, which is the amount of money Do214 received simply by connecting the blogger and boutique owner, hosting the content on their site, and then throwing an email mention and some social its way.

Odds are that there are some small boutiques in your city looking for innovative ways to push their products during the holidays. Consider taking their money by taking a page from Do214's book. 

Check out that win, and all of the other wins in your metro and the network in the updated Weekly KPI Report:

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Friday, December 5, 2014

Metro News: DoLA’s Year-end Ad Reporting

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 3:47 PM Labels:
Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

We know you’re all busy with post-Thanksgiving work, pre-NYE work, and Network EOY campaign work, but we wanted to share with you a great strategy DoLA has implemented to give their biggest partners the VIP treatment.

Annotated Ad Reports

Knowing that the New Year is when venues and promoters start reviewing last year’s budgets and deciding where to pull back and where to double down, DoLA has been sending out 2014 recaps to their biggest advertisers.

More than just a regular ad report, these end-of-year recaps include additional notes and summaries from the year. Take a look at the Greek Theater example below.


Josh and the team at DoLA created a normal ad report, but then imported the screenshots into a Google Doc to add in ad summaries, recaps of social campaigns and other promotions, and a nice little note looking ahead to next year.

These aren’t too difficult to produce, but can make a big difference when your partners are deciding how much money to spend next year.

Feel free to make a copy of the Google Doc linked above, or reach out to Support for help!
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Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Product Update: A Few Notes on RSVPs & a Fix For Weekly Event URLs

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 2:50 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

With the DoStuff office closed last Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving calendar, there is a little less to report than the average week. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting around doing nothing...


RSVP Guestlists: “Bad” RSVP List Field Is Going Away

Back at the end of October, we added in a new dropdown menu for sending RSVP guestlists to partners. This dropdown fixed the old timezone issue where you would need to estimate the speed of the rotation of the Earth just to send out a guestlist on time.

When we added the new (“GOOD”) field, we told you we’ve give you a few weeks to transition all your RSVPs over. Well, time is up.

Friday morning the “BAD” field will disappear -- so take the next day to make sure all your RSVPs are switched over to the new field and the old one is left blank.

RSVP +1: Does NOT Affect The Vote Count

A quick note about RSVP +1 that shouldn’t be new to anyone, but we still wanted to clarify.

Last week we shared that RSVP +1 has now been fixed and added to Radmin. If you set up an RSVP +1 in the back-end, users can check a box on the front-end saying they would like to add a +1. This does NOT change the vote count, however, so do not look at the number on your Event page as an estimate of head count.

If you need to give your partner an accurate headcount, download the guestlist from Radmin, import it into Google Docs or Excel, and add up the number of RSVPs and +1’s that way.

URLs for Weekly Events Fixed

There was a bug where weekly repeating Events would be set up with the same URL if they had the same title (e.g. http://do314.com/events/weekly/sat/happy-hour). This meant that Event cards and other links would often send you to the wrong Event page.

This has been fixed and all new weekly repeating Events will given a unique URL. The system checks for a match and adds a footer to the end of the URL in the case that a match is detected. No more misdirected links!
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Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Product Update (Thanksgiving Edition): New Dupes Queue, RSVPs +1 Fixed, and More!

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 1:21 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the U.S., so most of you are probably working hard to get you site in order for the holiday or getting your turkeys ready to put in the oven tomorrow morning.

While you’re getting your last-minute preparations in order, check out the latest from the Product team!

Redesigned Dupes Queue

As most content managers have noticed by now, the Duplicates Queue got a bit of facelift to help you move through Events even faster.

When we built Radmin, we wanted to make sure we created a dupes queue that was easier to understand than the jumbled mess in the old Admin. 

Instead of a long, continuous list of Events, we added color coding in Radmin to help you identify what was an original and what was a duplicate. The decision to add one match per page, though, slowed down work and made it difficult to gauge how many dupes you were dealing with.

Now, your Duplicates Queue shows 20 matches per page -- clearly marked and color coded -- to bring more speed to your morning workflow.

RSVP +1 Added to Radmin

In old Admin, there was an option to add a “+1” to an RSVP, but when we moved over to Radmin this was not added. To add frustration, you could still get the “+1?” box to show up on the front-end through Admin -- but it didn’t actually work.

After hearing that this broken feature was causing confusion among your teams and with your partners, we set about rebuilding +1’s for the new system.

Now live in Radmin, you can check the “RSVP +1?” box to let users record +1’s when they RSVP through the front-end. This is a great option to offer to RSVP partners that have limited capacity and want to get clear estimates on head-count.


When you send the Guestlist to a partner that used the RSVP +1 option, there will be “+1” next to the name of anyone that checked the box.

The Other Bits

Before you run out to the store to grab the last can of cranberry sauce, here are the other important updates that went live this week:
  • Targeted Ads Are Live: The Lens-specific ad targeting feature previewed in last week's update is now live!
  • Pending Queue Edits: We tweaked the look of the Pending Queue when you're editing Event titles. Now a small modal pops up when you're editing titles to reduce jumpiness and improve the overall UI of the Queue.
  • New ECP Co-Reg Reporting Bug Fixed: Some of your newer ECPs weren't showing up in the co-reg reports in Radmin. This bug is fixed so your co-reg reports are now accurate.
  • Reordered Front-end Search Results: We re-ordered the search results tabs on the front-end to match other parts of the site. The tabs are now ordered: "All, Events, Venues, Artists, Influencers/Lists, Articles".
Have a happy Thanksgiving!
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Friday, November 21, 2014

Metro News: Summit Wrap-up, Red Bull Sound Select List, & A New ECP Pitch Deck

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 4:11 PM Labels:
Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

Next week is a short week here in the U.S. with the Thanksgiving holiday, so we know a lot of you are rushing to get your work done.

While you're packing your suitcase or searching for Turkey fryers on Amazon, take a look at what's going on around the Network!

5th Annual DoStuff Summit Is a Wrap!

We just wanted to say one more big, “thank you," to everyone for making it down to Austin last week for the Summit.

We had high hopes but it's safe to say you guys really blew away our expectations. Everyone brought a lot of energy and sincerity to the discussions, and somehow still found the strength to party in freezing temperatures afterwards.

Now that we've had a week to recover, we're feeling really inspired to be working on this big experiment with so many smart, talented, and good looking people. Here's to a big and exciting 2015 for DoStuff!

Red Bull Sound Select List

A while back, the Do214 team created a Red Bull Sound Select list to keep track of shows in Dallas that feature Sound Select artists. We thought this was a pretty awesome idea, especially as the Sound Select program grows, so we turned this list into a national user for the entire Network to take advantage of.

Now, every single metro has a Red Bull Sound Select list on their site featuring some fancy custom CSS. Just go to doXYZ.com/redbullsoundselect and take a look!


You can also view a list of artists by going to doXYZ.com/redbullsoundselct/artists.

There's no promotional plan with this user or anything. We just thought it would be a cool put together since Sound Select is doing such great work in many of your metros and our interests are often aligned. 

We'll leave it up to your discretion how to promote this user on your site, newsletter, and social -- if at all!

Other News

Here's a quick rundown of other big happenings around the Network.

Houndmouth and Do502
  • New ECP Pitch Deck: After our last update, a lot of you asked to get your hands on Do512's awesome new ECP pitch deck. With help from Liz at Do512, we put together this Google Docs template for you to fill in with your info and supercharge your ECP sales.
  • Do317 Turns 3: As one of the elder statesmen of the Network, we're proud to see Do317 reach the ripe-old age of 3 this weekend! Do317 launched on Nov. 23, 2011 as "Indy's Premier Events Calendar".
  • Do502 and Houndmouth Rocked Louisville: Do502 had a launch party for the books, featuring alt-country darlings (and Louisville natives) Houndmouth. Pressure is on for the next metro's launch!
  • Vancouver Is In: Speaking of next... We're happy to announce Vancouver as the 16th metro in the DoStuff Network! Do604/Do250 marks the second Canadian metro, the second in the Pacific NW, and the third outside the U.S.
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Thursday, November 20, 2014

Product Update: Targeting Ads to Specific Lenses and ECPs

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 11:47 AM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

It's the first Product Update after last week's DoStuff Summit and we're starting off with a bang. Check below for a sneak peek at the new (and much-requested) ad targeting feature in Radmin.

Ad Targeting

We know that one of the single greatest sources of frustration when working with ECPs and Lenses is ads. Up until now, if an ad was running on your main site it would also run on every one of your ECP, Metro, and Conference Lenses. Period. (Unless you did created a CSS hack to get around it.)

Well, that’s all about to change. Rolling out next week, you will now have Lens-level targeting abilities for every ad you sell.

How It Works

From now on when you create an ad in Radmin, you will see a big blue Targeting box at the bottom of the setup page. This is now your command center for where an ad will appear at any given time.

By default, the box for every property (main site and Lenses) will be checked for a new ad. You have the option to manually deselect any property you don’t want the ad to appear on. If you only want the ad to appear on certain lenses and not the main metro page, that’s an option too.



If you need to edit an existing ad's targeting options at any time, just go to that ad’s details page (the “magnifying glass” icon). You’ll see a section below the ad preview that says “Properties Attached To”. This is a list of all the places the ad is currently set to run on.

If you want to add or remove a property from the list, click “Edit” and select/deselect the appropriate check boxes.

It’s that simple.

Why Is This Such a Big Deal?

We probably don't need to tell you this, but these new targeting features will open up a ton of opportunities for ad sales.

If you have a potential ECP partner that's uneasy about showing Featured Event ads that don't match their audience, you can assure them that if an ad comes up that they REALLY don't want on their site you can easily take it down.

Or, if you're thinking of building a Metro Lens focused on a niche audience -- like Do312's Rainbow Lens or Do206's Geek Lens -- you can now sell brand ads that only appear on that property. That can be a big deal for local brands looking to target a specific scene.

How to Weigh Brand Ads

While Featured Event ads are easy enough -- you just check the box for the properties they should appear on and move on -- brand ads are a bit trickier. With these new targeting features, managing the weights for each brand ad space is a little more complex. But fear not.

The primary rule of thumb is to just weigh everything the way you want them to appear on your main site.

If you choose not to run an ad on a certain Lens, the remaining ads will adjust proportionally -- nothing else required from you. If it's an ad that will only run on a Lens and not the main metro site, just deselect that main metro property and set the weight to how often you want it to run on the Lens(es).

Confused? Here's a breakdown of the math

There is one BIG caveat here -- if you set a brand ad's weight to 100 it will pause all other ads on your metro, even ads only running on a single Lens. The best way to avoid this is to NEVER set an ad weight to 0 or 100.

For example, if you're creating a brand ad for a single Lens and it will be the only ad on that Lens, just pick any number between 1 and 99. If there are no other ads attached to that Lens, it will run 100% of the time.

SEO Improvements: New Metadata Formats

As Do206 MP Scott Porad pointed out during his Summit presentation, improving the way we appear in Google search results can have a big impact on our user growth over the coming years.

Well, we've already gotten started on some of those SEO improvements by changing the way the metadata on your sites is formatted. Metadata is the HTML that Google reads to figure out what words to display in its search results.


While we clearly have the best event listings in every metro, our metadata wasn't making it obvious to Google's bots what we're all about. Now when someone searches "New Year's Eve in Indianapolis", "The Black Keys Seattle", or "Comedy tonight in Nashville", Google will start ranking the DoStuff Network higher and higher.

There's one issue with the new metadata that could cause problems if your metro spans more than one city or borough (I'm looking at you, Do314, Do415, DoLA, doNYC, Do617, Do415, Do502, and Vancouver!). If the city/borough in the Venue's address is incorrect on your site, the metadata is going to display it incorrectly on Google and it's going to hurt your page rankings (see Do415 example below).


Over the next week or so, take a look at your Venues across the river/bay/I-35 split and make sure they're listed in the right city. As the Google search bots start recognizing our new metadata formatting over the next few weeks, we want to make sure they pull in the right info.

The Other Bits

This Product Update is already big enough, but there are a few more important fixes to note this week:

  • Past Events Search Fixed: Since the launch of Radmin, we've been having trouble getting all past Events to show up in search. We're confident that we've finally cleaned out the last of the bugs and Event search should be working as expected. Success!
  • More RSVP Times: We added a LOT more options for when to send RSVP lists from the dropdown menu in Radmin. Pretty much anytime within 24 hours is now available.
  • Fixed Ongoing Events Bug: Now when you remove the end date from an ongoing event, the "Ongoing?" box will be automatically deselected. This prevents a previous issue with linked ads.
That's all for this week! Keep an eye out in your email and Slack for the rollout of ad targeting in Radmin.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 11/17/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 9:55 AM Labels:
Hi network,

Hope everybody is rejuvenated/recovered from last week's Summit! 

After a few weeks off, we're resuming our Winners of the Week series. That said, we'll be gradually transitioning over the next several weeks to have slightly fewer Winners of the Week entries in favor of focusing on generally more in-depth analysis of best practices and metro wins. 

Our goal is to make everything in these emails as actionable as possible, so we'll be honing in on novel ways to improve your metro's business, rather than just the latest big giveaway from DoXYZ. Also, feel free to continue to give us feedback on what information is the most helpful to your day-to-day.

With that out of the way, check out the latest Winner of the Week:

Do415 Knows Something You Don't Know. One thing that kept coming up when discussing content wins during the Summit was the power of exclusivity. A big ticket giveaway is one thing, but a ticket giveaway to a sold out show or a show nobody else has access to is a whole different level of enticing. Do415 used this to their advantage by securing tickets to a series of private shows, building a Secret Shows list that aggregates all of these giveaway events, and then promoting them collectively to their audience. 

This strategy paid big engagement dividends for their newsletter. Last week's top picks received 2,334 clicks, a WoW increase of 147%, and the second most clicks for any email they've sent in the past 5 months. 80% of those 2,334 clicks were to Secret Show pages. Check out this screenshot to see how they teased both content features in their email, and start thinking if you can offer content with similar exclusivity to your audience.
  
That's all for now; check out your updated Weekly KPI report and get working on making each week a win!
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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Product Update: Episode 8 Prep

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 4:46 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

This week is full of planning meetings here at DoStuff HQ. Not only are we in the homestretch of Summit prep, we're also wrapping up Episode 7 and planning for Episode 8.

One of the most important parts of this planning period for the Product team is going through the DSD Queue to figure out what projects need more focus over the next few months.

Prepping DSD Queue For New Episode

Just as a quick refresh -- here at DoStuff we break our year into periods we call Episodes to assist in planning. An Episode ranges anywhere from 2-3 months depending on the time of year and what else is going on.

The week of planning between the old Episode and the new one is especially important because we need to decide where to dedicate our limited manpower in the coming months.

We'll have a full Episode 7 recap and Episode 8 preview coming soon, but in the meantime you might enjoy a peek into part of the planning process. Over the past few days, you may have noticed the Product team combing through all the tickets in the DSD Queue in Asana and segmenting them into buckets for E8 prep.



These segments have been used throughout this week by the product team to identify what's been generating a lot of DSD tickets lately and where they may need to focus their time over the next couple of months.

If you have any questions about what projects get picked for an Episode, it may be useful to go back to this exchange from the last Episode recap and to keep an eye out for the full Episode 8 preview in the coming weeks.


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Friday, October 24, 2014

Metro News: doNYC's CMJ Lens, DoStuff Office Exchange, Do502 Launch Party, and more!

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 11:52 AM Labels:
Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

It's Friday afternoon and we know you're looking to get outside and enjoy this fall weather. But before you walk out the door for the weekend, take a look at what's going on around the Network this month.

doNYC’s CMJ Lens

As the CMJ Music Marathon heads towards its finale this weekend, we wanted to highlight one of the fest’s breakout acts -- doNYC.

For those that aren’t familiar, the CMJ Music Marathon is a week-long music fest in NYC consisting of 1,400 acts playing 80 clubs spread out across 2 boroughs. It’s the Big Apple’s answer to SXSW, only without Lady Gaga playing inside of a giant Doritos bag. Think SXSW of the early 2000’s, not 2014.

Really wanting to take advantage of this influx of indie music fans, doNYC spent months putting together a badass Conference Lens for CMJ.


The Conference Lens format gave doNYC a number of big advantages for engaging the CMJ crowd -- including customized site design, a default “slim cards” view to pack more shows onto a single page, and a “view by start time” check box for sorting through hundreds of daily shows.

It took a lot of planning a design work from the doNYC team, but people are noticing. Not least of whom, the CMJ team itself.


The engagement numbers have also been pretty impressive this week, with more than 25,000 page views and over 20,000 unique visitors to cmj.donyc.com. That’s the most trafficked Lens in DoStuff history after the Do512 SXSW Lens.

Check out this week’s product update for more info on building Lenses in Radmin, and keep doNYC’s baller CMJ Lens in mind the next time a conference-style festival is happening in your metro.

DoStuff Office Exchange

Some of you are already clued into this, but DoStuff is doing its first Network Office Exchange this month. Members of the Delivery team are spending a few days with a metro to get a better feel for needs on the "front lines", and to provide a bit more hands-on assistance as needed.

Google Hangouts and Slack are great and all, but it's not the same as working with y'all in person. And to be honest, we just miss your musk.


Here's the office exchange lineup for this October, and to those that feel left out don't worry. We're coming to hang with you soon.

  • Oct. 20-24
    • HazDF - Stuart
    • Do214 - Ted
    • Do206 - Kristin
  • Oct. 27-31
    • Do317 - Adi
    • Do617 - Jordan
    • DoLA - Justin

Other News

Here's a quick rundown of other big happenings around the Network this month.

  • Do502's Launch Party: After debuting their site earlier this month to the fine folks of Louisville, the Do502 team is throwing a launch party on November 15th -- the Saturday after the Summit. They're still in the planning stages, but rumor has it that one of Kentucky's hottest new acts could be playing. Let Jeffrey and team know if you're looking to attend!
  • DoLA's Jack Daniels Pitch: Josh and the DoLA team put together this badass influencer program deck for their contacts at Jack Daniels last month. This is a perfect example of the type of prep that should go into one of these conversations. Josh said he's happy to make a copy for anyone that wants to use it as a template. (PLEASE do not share that link outside of the Network.)
  • Do512's ECP Deck: Speaking of well designed sales decks, look at Do512's new ECP deck. 
  • doNYC's Birthday: doNYC turned two earlier this month! And you know what they say, the first two years are the hardest. Be sure to congratulate Jon and Johnny next time you talk to them.
  • Do512's Raw Paw x PBR Activation: We'll leave you with this sweet recap video from Do512's "New Magic" party -- a collaboration between Do512, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Austin's Raw Paw art collective.


That's all this week! If you ever have news or tips to share with the Network, just drop it in the #bigwins channel in Slack.
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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Product Update: Lenses and ECPs in Radmin, Timezone Fix for RSVPs, and more

4 comments: Posted by Anonymous at 4:57 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Big update this week! We have a brand new "Lenses" tab rolling out in Radmin, plus some other features and fixes added to the backend. Make sure you check out each one below!

(There WILL be a quiz.)

Lens and ECP Creation In Radmin

As we’re getting closer to moving the final bits of Admin over to Radmin, one of the features that’s been totally reimagined is Lenses. Lens creation, especially for ECPs, has long been a decentralized and pretty confusing process.

The new Lenses tab in Radmin, going live this week, will be the centralized place for you to manage existing lenses and oversee the creation of new ones.

But first, it’s probably best we do a little vocab review.

Vocab Review: Lenses and ECPs

We throw around a lot of acronyms and made-up lingo here at DoStuff and it can sometimes be hard to keep track. To make it even more fun, we sometimes switch up the meanings over time.


So before your head starts spinning, here are two terms we should define:

  • Lens: A customized view of your metro’s Event listings, or a certain cross section of those listings. When viewing a Lens, the design elements stay consistent across Lists and Event pages. Lenses can live on-site or on a third-party site and come in three different flavors:
  • ECP: An Event Calendar Partner (ECP) is a type of Lens that "lives" on a third-party partner’s site, and lists a personalized calendar of Events for their audience.
Creating an ECP in Radmin

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at the new Lens Creation process that will be coming to Radmin in the next few days. The set up is pretty much the same for all Lenses, but we’re going to use ECPs as an example.

With Radmin you can automate a large portion of ECP set up -- from emailing designers to creating the URL to building a service agreement. In fact, our goal is to give you the ability to build an entire ECP from start to finish without DoStuff’s help whatsoever.

To create a new ECP in Radmin, you'll click “New Lens” in the top-right of the ECPs page and be taken to this form:


Here's what you'll enter into each field:

  1. Title: What's the ECP going to be called?
  2. Mode: What type of Lens are you building? (Hint: You’re building an ECP.)
  3. User: Enter the email of the user that will be voting on Events for the ECP. (Note: They must be a registered user on your site before you can create the ECP.)
  4. Original URL: Paste the URL for your ECP partner's website so your designer can match the design and layout. (Note: This field only appears for ECPs.)
  5. Designers: Enter the email of the designer(s) that will be building the ECP. As soon as the ECP is created, they will be notified along with a link to their Radmin Dashboard so they can get started. (Note: This field only appears for ECPs.)
  6. Domain: What will the Lens' domain URL be? This will create a new URL on our server. (Note: You must create a URL ending in your metro's domain name to get started -- e.g. ecpname.doxxx.com. Later on you can redirect to a partner's domain URL if that was part of the agreement.)
  7. Locked Username: Is the Locked box checked? This is the username that will be used to access the ECP before it's unlocked (be sure to give to you designer and parters).
  8. Locked Password: Is the Locked box checked? This is the password that will be used to access the ECP before it's unlocked.

Before you press 'Save', click on the Service Agreement tab to enter the contact details for your ECP partner. The Service Agreement is a standard contract generated for all ECPs and basically says that DoStuff gives the partner permission to host our Event listings on their site. Enter the required info on this tab and press "Save".

A number of things will happen when you finish all these steps. First and foremost, the ECP will be created and will be visible in your Lenses tab in Radmin.

In addition, 1.) the ECP domain URL will be added to our server automatically, 2.) your designer will receive an email with the relevant details and instructions for building the ECP, and 3.) a Service Agreement will be generated using the contact details you entered earlier.

From this point, you can work 1-on-1 with your designer and ECP contact to finalize the site design, get the Service Agreement "signed", and decide on a launch date. Before you can launch the ECP, it's your responsibility to make sure your partner reads the Service Agreement and clicks "Agree" while logged into their account. To find the link to the Service Agreement at any time, click "View Agreement" on the ECP's details page in Radmin, or through the cog menu on the main ECP page.

While all this is may seem like a lot to learn right now, you'll find that you'll soon be creating and launching ECPs completely independent of DoStuff and the support team using this new process.

Service Agreements

With this new ECP creation process in Radmin, a signed Service Agreement will now be required for every single active ECP.

We’re well aware that the large majority of existing ECPs do not have a signed Service Agreement in place at this time -- the blame for this rests mostly on our shoulders anyway. But in order to make sure that DoStuff and the metros are protected going forward, we need all ECPs to agree to the standard Service Agreement.

We’ll work with each of you in the coming weeks to help you along the process of getting these generated and "signed" using Radmin.

Timezone Fix for RSVPs

As some of you have noticed in the past, the field for automatically emailing guestlists in Radmin hasn’t always worked too well.

The root cause was that Radmin standardized all events to the same time zone in the backend, but wasn’t taking this into account in the RSVP modal. Depending on what time zone you’re in, “1 hour prior” could turn into “3 hours prior”.

To fix this, we had to add an entirely new field at the bottom of the modal that now runs on a dropdown. This is the “good” guest list field. It can tell time and do basic addition and subtraction, as opposed to the “bad” field.


But here’s the catch, before we can kill the “bad’ field we need you to manually switch all your current RSVPs to the “good” one. You can do this by entering the proper time in the “good” field and leaving the “bad” field blank.

Since both of these are currently working, it’s really important you do this for all RSVPs (Approved Events > Filters > RSVP) and let us know when you’re done. Once we know that everyone has successfully switched over we’ll kill the “bad” field and you’ll never hear from it again.

Default Share Image

We’ve added a new field in Radmin under Site Design > Images for setting the default share image on Facebook and other social sites. Up until now, the thumbnail that pops up when you share a link has been your metro’s logo, which doesn’t always look too hot when it shows up against Facebook’s white background (see below).


Now you can upload a custom photo or graphic to Radmin to improve the way your links appear in Facebook's News Feed and help drive more clicks.

Media Search Functions

There’s been some confusion about what all the buttons in Radmin’s new media search widget do, so we thought we’d clear it up so you’re not left worrying about pressing the wrong thing:


  1. Page Icon: Updates the Facebook Page info (Does NOT change the current image)
  2. Check Icon: Update the current image AND updates the Facebook Page info
  3. Arrow Icon: Scrolls to next image



The difference between the page icon and the check icon are important to note the next time you need to update a Venue or Artist’s Facebook ID but don’t want to change the background image that’s currently being used.

Hidden User Activity Is Hidden

This may sound redundant, but the activity of hidden users is now hidden across the entire site. In the past, hidden users have appeared in the Event Activity feed under the name “Anonymous Coward”.

We decided it was kind of mean to call everyone a coward so now their activity just doesn’t show up anymore.

------

That's all for this week! We'll let you know in Slack when the Lenses tab is about to go live in Radmin so you know to keep an eye out for it.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 10/20/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 7:26 AM Labels:
Greetings!

Before we dive in, a quick reminder that I'll be leading a brief "Tips and Tricks" Google Analytics training session on Thursday, 10/23 at 2pm CST. For anyone interested in joining - just shoot me an email in reply and I'll get you added to the calendar invite.

Hokay, now for the Winners of the Week!
  1. Seattle Sharing In Bike Share's Success. Do206 had their first big RSVP event, and the results are unquestionably worth sharing (sorry). After the homepage, the event received the most traffic of any page on Do206, accounting for 10% of their traffic over the last week. This and the 335 people who RSVP'd helped propel Do206 to its second highest week of site traffic AND new users in the 4 months we've tracked weekly stats.

    Your DoXXX platform is perfect for partnering with these buzz-worthy product launches by hosting their RSVPs and driving people to launch events. Come up with an incentive to dangle in front of users (in this case, free beer and swag bags), use the incentive to get RSVPs, and watch people come in droves. Happy partners + happy users = DoXXX no-brainer.
  2. Louisville is off to the Races! Louisville launched last week on Wednesday, October 15th, and they've already had 3644 visits to their site. They're off to a great start thanks to some speedy Slugger outreach (already up to 40+), a handful of ticket giveaways, and some nifty pieces of content like their Neighborhoods page and Badass Shows for $12 or Less (complete with Eric Wareheim GIF). To top it all off, they already have an ECP live within a week of launch.

    Not too shabby, Do502! We're looking forward to reporting on all the big wins happening out in the heart of bourbon country in the weeks to come. 
That's all for today; take a peek at this week's updated Weekly KPI Report for the full rundown of all things Do:
As always, reach out if you have questions or want to share a win that we overlooked.

Thanks!
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Thursday, October 16, 2014

Product Update: Quick List of Bug Fixes

1 comment: Posted by Anonymous at 2:47 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

There are no big product updates this week so we're just giving you a quick rundown of all the recent bug fixes.

Bug Fixes

  • Auto-voting Venues: Users that are set to autovote were not always voting on Events at Venues that they follow. This was especially troublesome for neighborhood pages and other site-specific users. This has been fixed.
  • Co-reg for Future DoSites: This will only affect future DoStuff sites, but new users are now co-registered to the nearest metro -- even if it's not live yet. Unfortunately for Do502, no one from Louisville that created a Forecastle schedule this summer was added as a Do502 user because their site was still inactive. This was a big pain point and has been remedied by DoStuff for future launches.
  • Event Photos on ECPs: If an Event was created on the front-end of your site, the photos were not always displaying properly on ECP sites, and vice versa. This has been corrected so that photos are consistent on both ECPs and metro sites.
  • Past Events Popping Up Unexpectedly: There was a recent issue with past repeating Events showing up at the top of certain venue pages. This has been fixed.

That's all for this week! Stay tuned to Slack for the latest news from around the Network and be sure to log all bugs and suggestions in the DSD Queue.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 10/13/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 8:48 AM Labels:
Evenin' everybody,

A couple logistic notes:
  • As this marks our 15th week of collecting data for the Weekly KPI Report, we've decided to start posting each edition of these on the Doing Big Stuff blog.Clicking the "KPI Update" tag will take you to a collection of these weekly emails, extending back to when they first began. That way you can reference anything from the past or find content you might have missed.
  • I'll be hosting a "Tips and Tricks" Google Analytics training session on Thursday, 10/23 at 2pm CST. It should only last for 30-45 minutes, and it will focus on how to most efficiently use GA to look at data that affects your business. If you'd like to attend, just reply to this email and I'll send you a calendar invite.

Now, on to the Winners of the Week!
  1. Traffic In Indie? Indeed. Do416 had their highest week of ECP traffic, thanks to the launch of their Indieweek ECP. In the last week, that particular ECP received nearly 5K pageviews, pushing their total ECP visits last week to over 2,000 - higher than their previous record by 700 visits.

    In a unique content combination we haven't seen before, Do416 also created the Indie Week Lense as a way to showcase all of the Indie Week shows in a cohesive piece of content that could be sold to advertisers (as Do416 did with Levi Stephens). All of this is a great example of finding a local smaller conference, creating a customized piece of content (in this case, dedicated Lense + ECP) and then using it to build audience and revenue.
  2. Reaping Rewards from the Red River Rivalry. Though the Texas-OU game has been a tradition for over 100 years, this was the first where fans had the help of Do214 to find all the best parties the weekend had to offer. Do214 created their TX/OU weekend list to round up all of the watch parties, after parties, alumni gatherings, and hangover brunches happening around town.

    The work paid off, as the page accounted for 20% of Do214's total traffic for the week, receiving 1,747 pageviews (400 more than even their homepage). After coupling this with a ticket giveaway and a sponsored Facebook post that hit home with fans, Do214 was able to get the second most traffic to site of any week in the 15 weeks we've done the KPI report.

    And with all that traffic, the list makes an easy sell to American Born Moonshine. Yet another example of good content turning into dollars. Next time your city hosts a major sporting event, don't just stop at listing the event. Instead, make a list of all the cool stuff happening around the game, since that's where your DoXXX site can really shine.

That's it for this week. Enjoy perusing your updated numbers below:
As always, reach out if you have questions or want to share a win that we overlooked.

Thanks!
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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Product Update: Improved Event Search, Copying Events, and Sorting Event Ads

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 7:36 PM Labels:
Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes coming to your site or to Radmin.

A few bug fixes and improvements for you guys this week. Hope you like 'em!


Event Search

The Dev team is working hard to improve the power and functionality of Event Search in Radmin. Hopefully you’ve been able to notice the difference as of late.

Filtering By Event Type

This week we added the ability to filter past and current Events by type -- single day, ongoing, and repeating. In your Approved Events queue, expand the Filters menu and you’ll see the new “Event Type” options at the bottom.



Filtering by Event type will help you quickly spot how many weekly repeating Events you have on the site, or track down ongoing Events that might need to be broken up into multiple Events so they show up on your daily listings.

Improved Past Event Search

We’re still working to make it perfect, but searching for past Events has been much improved over the past couple weeks. Drop a line to support if you’re still seeing new issues, or just to let us know that it’s working now!

Copying Events With Images

Copying an Event now copies over all attached images to the new Event. Copying (Click on the gear icon > “Copy”) has always carried over all Event details and Artists, but now any attached cover images and poster images will be carried over as well.

Time saving FTW!

Finding Recently Ended Event Ads

When viewing inactive Event Ads (Advertising > Filters > “Include Inactive”), they are now sorted automatically by most recently completed. Before the default view was alphabetically by Campaign title, which wasn’t too useful for finding an Event Ad that ended last week.



For a number of complicated reasons, it’s not possible right now to sort the date columns for Event Ads any other way (all the columns are fully sortable with Brand Ads), but default sorting by most recent end date should help you find recently ended campaigns for your ad reports.

Radmin Dashboard Is Live!

For those following along in Slack earlier today, you saw the announcement that the Radmin Dashboard is now live. Read more about the features in last week's Product Update and share any thoughts you have with the rest of the Network over on Slack.

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Tuesday, October 7, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 10/6/14

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 4:22 PM Labels:
Welcome to October!

This edition of Winners of the Week spotlights the metros whose stats are on the rise, even though it's fall:
  1. San Antonio does its Heather Mills impersonation. Do210 became the latest in a long list of people that have benefited from Paul McCartney (lookin' at you, Ringo). In this case, Do210 landed a ticket giveaway for Paul's show in San Antonio, and fans wend bazonkers at the chance to win tickets.

    The previous most amount of "WIN" clicks Do210 received in a week was 633; this week they had 2386 WIN clicks. In the past week, they got more WIN clicks than everyone in thenetwork except for Do512 and DoLA. Total entrants in the contest topped out at over 1,200, and the page itself received 2.5K pageviews in a week (20% of Do210's total traffic). Traffic to the entire site doubled WoW.

    All of that is great, but what really makes it a fantastic win for a new market is the user acquisition. Those 1,200+ entrants helped Do210 grow their list by 1,476 new subscribers last week. That's more than any other market, and proves that one massive event can make a lasting difference to your business.
  2. DoLA's giveaway straws break the traffic camel's back. Awkward metaphors aside, it's not always one massive giveaway that turns the tide on traffic. DoLA's site traffic is up thanks to a whole bunch of giveaways, among them Aziz Ansari, The War On Drugs,  a block party with big-name headliners, and a whole bunch more thanks to this inventive partnership with Curb.

    All of those combined (plus other content winners like a free/donation-based festival, and the beginnings of their Halloween list) meant DoLA was in for a surge of traffic. YoY traffic to site was up 14%, and traffic compared to last week was up 56%. A huge chunk of that can be traced back to the fact that more people are clicking the WIN button than any week in the past 2 months.

    If you're not getting as many giveaways for your site as you can get your hands on, you're missing out on that nice hefty boost of traffic, and event more important - the users that join your mail list/register for your site. 
Updated numbers in the doc below. Give 'em a look through, and see how you can make October your best month yet!​
As always, reach out if you have questions or want to share a win that we overlooked.

Thanks!
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Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Product Update: New Show Email Alerts Fixed, Links to Google Maps, and more

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Our Product team has been over here knocking. shit. out. Check out the latest below!


New Show Email Alerts Fixed

Some of you may have noticed that you’ve been receiving a lot more new show alerts in your Inbox over the past week.


Automatically alerting users when a band they follow adds a show has always been a feature, but it had been working sporadically -- if at all. The Product team recently revamped the script that powers this feature and fixed all the old bugs that were breaking it.

Now, the script runs every three hours to check if a show has been added, leading to near-instant email alerts.

Getting this right has been a priority as we’re getting close to launch Mandrill as our transactional email provider. Mandrill will give us the power to customize the layout and content of our automated emails, but we needed to make sure they were actually sending first.

Venue Icon Links to Google Maps

We rolled out a little add-on to Event cards this week. Clicking on the little icon to the left of the Venue name will now open up a Google Map in a new window pointing to the Venue address.

Clicking on the name will still send you to the Venue page where you can find the address, phone number, social profiles, etc., but this will be a quicker way for users to find directions to the show.


The Other Bits

Here are the other important updates to note this week:

  • Free Filter Added - You can now filter out shows that have the “Free?” box checked in the Approved Events queue in Radmin. This is useful when looking for the best free Events to to add to your Free list.
  • Ability to Delete Event Photos in Radmin - If you add a cover photo or a poster image that you don’t want anymore, you can now remove it by clicking a handy little “x” in Radmin.
  • Artist Tags Are Gone From Radmin - You’ll remember that this fall we removed tags entirely from the front-end. We didn’t like how they looked and a lot of them were pretty useless. Well, we finally removed them from Radmin, too, so there’s no longer a field filled with random, pointless tags.
  • Media Search Update - The YouTube tab in the Media Search widget now shows you how old a video is so you can find the most relevant music videos for an Artist.
  • Show In Footer? Bug Fixed - The “Show In Footer?” box that shows up when adding/editing /p/ Pages had a bug that caused it to disappear at certain times. This has been fixed.
  • Renamed Ads in Radmin - We renamed the types of ads in Radmin to make it easier to figure out where you’re placing a new ad. Your options when creating a new ad now read:
    • Featured Event
    • Featured Venue/User
    • Top Right Brand Ad
    • Listings Middle Brand Ad
    • Leaderboard Brand Ad


Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Product Update: Changes to “TODAY” Drop-down, Improved Artist Creation, and Sorting Pending Queue by Date

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

There are a wide range of changes and improvements across Radmin and the front-end this week, so listen up!

TODAY Drop-down Getting Some Changes


As with any change to the front-end functionality of your sites, we wanted to give you a heads up on this one before it goes live.

Sometime in the next week, we will be removing “WEEKEND”, “WEEK”, and “MONTH” from the TODAY drop-down on your front page. “TODAY” and “TOMORROW” will remain, as will the calendar widget.

The problem is that WEEKEND, WEEK, and MONTH display a very limited number of Events without a lot of explanation for how these Events are picked. To a new user, it could appear that these are the only Event options on the site for the entire weekend -- undercutting your brand as the most comprehensive Events guide in the entire city.

These display options may return in the future with a more intuitive UI, but for now your Top Picks and other editorialized pages should suffice as “best of” lists of Events.

Improved Artist Creation Across Front-end and Radmin

The Dev team has been working on a number of tickets over the past week to improve the process of adding new Artists.

Create Artists From Pending/Dupes Queues

Until recently, you could only add existing artists to an Event from the Pending and Dupes queue. If the show featured an Artist that wasn’t in our database, you would have to leave the queue to create the Artist and then come back to update the show.

Now you have the option to add a band that isn’t in the drop-down, and an Artist page will automatically be created for this new band. This is especially helpful when adding shows for small venues that host lots of local bands.

But be careful not to create duplicate pages for Artists that already exist!

Improved Front-end UI For Adding Artists

This one came to us from Courtney at Do512 via the DSD Queue. Do512 is organizing happy hours with local Austin bands to show them how to take advantage of their site, but wanted to make sure the front-end tools were as intuitive as possible.

We updated the New Artist form on the front-end (New Event > Add a New Artist) to hide fields for Flickr, Instagram, Myspace, and Tumblr, and add fields for the hometown, description, and Twitter handle.

This is more consistent with the info that gets displayed on the front-end, so bands know that what they enter here will have a direct effect on their Artist page.


Photo Bug Fixed For New Artists

There was a bug that wouldn’t save the attached photo for a new Artist. After pressing “Save” to create the new Artist page, you would inevitably find that the photo was missing and would have to be attached again. The same bug was affecting new Venue pages, as well.

Now when you attach a photo to a new Artist or Venue page the photo will save as expected -- across both Radmin and the front-end.

The Other Bits

Here are the other important updates to note this week:
  • No more auto-voting for "Free" user: This shouldn't be new to anyone here, but we mention it since we removed the last remnant of Free user auto-voting from old Admin. Just to recap the new system, checking "Free?" on an Event in Radmin will add the "FREE" banner but you will still need to manually vote to add it to your Free list. This is so you have more editorial control over what Events show up in this list.
  • Fixed HTML for repeating Events: There was a bug where repeating Events with different start/end dates would look completely crazy on the front-end. This is because the date abbreviations (e.g. 12/10) were screwing up the HTML. This is fixed so Events like happy hours that extend past midnight won't go haywire.
  • Pending queue now sortable by start date: This was a much-requested feature since the launch of Radmin. Now, when working in the Pending queue you have the option to sort by date or by Popularity ranking.



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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/8/14

Evening all,

We know you guys are all busy churning out and promoting your End of Year content, but when you get tired of sitting back and looking at how dang pretty everyone's best 2014 shows look, give a read through this edition of the Winner of the Week and then check out your stats for the first week of December at the end of the email.

Indy realizes it takes weeks of planning to get drunk. Early last week, we noticed that over 3,000 people in November were visiting Do317 after searching for what to do in Indy on NYE. Thanks to Do317's strong position on search results pages for queries involving "Indianapolis/Indy" and "New Years Eve," we knew this could potentially be a huge source of great traffic for Do317.

In response, the team in Indy spent some time sprucing up the page, getting good events listed, and generally making it a visually appealing and helpful landing page for users coming in through search.  

The result? On the NYE page alone, bounce rate dropped 40%. This is crucial, since traffic to that page is blowing up. The page is the most popular page on Do317 after the homepage, has received 74% more traffic than last year, and is continuing to grow its pageviews daily.

This NYE content win (in addition to a Lana Del Rey giveaway, a couple successful nightclub RSVPs, and their always popular First Friday list) helped to give Do317 its highest week of traffic and email clicks since we've been doing the Weekly KPI Report.

A couple lessons from this:
  1. NYE parties are huge. If you haven't built out a great list for this, you're already behind.
  2. Even more important than NYE (blasphemy, I know) is monitoring your organic traffic for peaks in people coming to your site. This will let you see what content people are searching for, so that you can make sure you provide them with content that's relevant.

    One great way to do this is via the Organic Traffic dashboard (download here) for Google Analytics. Also, if you want, I can enable search query data in your GA account. Just respond to this email, and I'll give you instructions on how to see that data.
That's all for this week! Updated Weekly KPI Report below:
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How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 12/1/14

Happy December everybody!

It's Monday, which means it's time for a piping fresh delivery of your Weekly KPI Report. And although the weather might be getting colder for the most of us, this particular edition of the Winner of the Week comes from sunny Los Angeles:


DoLA gets EMOuntains of traffic. The 8th most popular landing page on DoLA for all of 2014 was this retrospective covering the LA emo scene and its relevance today. Some takeaways on why it was successful:
--It's an easily digestible list: 12 bands; one paragraph each. A few good quality images. There are links out to more information, so that readers can go further in depth if they wish, but everything on the page itself is concise enough to digest quickly.

--It has a well-informed local voice: The piece makes it immediately obvious to the reader that this is from someone knowledgeable about LA emo; it's not just an intern that had to do an artist interview and slapped 5 questions together.

--It uses event cards to keep the piece tied into events: DoLA is still about what to do tonight, not what you should've done 10 years ago. This piece reflects that by focusing on what the bands are up to now and by embedding in event cards for any upcoming shows. In the future, DoLA can keep content like this even more integrated into their site by making sure all of the related artist pages are up to snuff and linking in to them. 

DoLA showcased the content piece in their newsletter, which ended up being a complete hit with their audience. 1,369 people clicked the link in the newsletter, accounting for half of the traffic to the page on site. With all of the traffic taken together, the Emo List was the most popular page on DoLA for the previous week (400 more pageviews than the homepage) and drove DoLA to more than double their YoY traffic. 

Hopefully all of that is just going to be a taste of the kind of traffic all metros will see once the end of year content/lists debut, but until then, check out the updated KPI's and see how you can make next week even better:
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How You (and the network did last week) - 11/24/14

Holiday greetings (for those of you in the US; normal greetings to HazDF and Do416)!

We've got a lot to be thankful for network-wide this week, as Do214, Do617, and HazDF all had their highest weeks of traffic since we started the Weekly KPI reports. Do617 got bazonkers traffic to their Foo at Fenway giveaway, and HazDF got 3K+ pageviews (over a third of their total site traffic) from people checking out their Foodtruck festival event pages. Nice work guys!

However, for this week's Winner of the Week, we'll be honing in on Do214's novel, successful, and super-replicable content feature:

Dallas Arrives Fashionably Great. Sponsored content hits the sweet spot when it wins for the advertiser, wins for your metro, and wins for your audience. Do214 nailed this trifecta when they partnered with a local boutique owner and Tastemaker/aspiring blogger to produce a piece of content that tied together fashion with music events. The details:

--Win for advertiser: Dainty Lion (the boutique featured) got exposure to Do214's audience via Do214's social and email, plus they have a special coupon code for people referred from Do214, allowing them to track the efficacy of this sponsored content. Plus, they get to tie their brand, whose slogan is "Where Rock'n Roll inspires style," to Do214's brand of being the authority on Dallas music and nightlife. 

--Win for metro: Do214 was able to keep the content squarely on brand by relating each fashion piece to a related outfit-appropriate event, complete with embedded event cards. Plus, Do214 got exposure to an audience they otherwise wouldn't reach. Friends of Dainty Lion that engaged with and shared the post on Facebook helped drive it to an organic reach of over 5k, accounting for over half of the traffic to the Do214 page itself. 

--Win for audience: This piece of content was the #1 page on Do214 over the last week, accounting for 16% of their total site traffic. The event cards and special Do214 discount helped to keep people engaged once they got to the page, as the average time spent on the page was almost 4 minutes. 

Of course the stat that matters the most is $500, which is the amount of money Do214 received simply by connecting the blogger and boutique owner, hosting the content on their site, and then throwing an email mention and some social its way.

Odds are that there are some small boutiques in your city looking for innovative ways to push their products during the holidays. Consider taking their money by taking a page from Do214's book. 

Check out that win, and all of the other wins in your metro and the network in the updated Weekly KPI Report:

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Friday, December 5, 2014

Metro News: DoLA’s Year-end Ad Reporting

Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

We know you’re all busy with post-Thanksgiving work, pre-NYE work, and Network EOY campaign work, but we wanted to share with you a great strategy DoLA has implemented to give their biggest partners the VIP treatment.

Annotated Ad Reports

Knowing that the New Year is when venues and promoters start reviewing last year’s budgets and deciding where to pull back and where to double down, DoLA has been sending out 2014 recaps to their biggest advertisers.

More than just a regular ad report, these end-of-year recaps include additional notes and summaries from the year. Take a look at the Greek Theater example below.


Josh and the team at DoLA created a normal ad report, but then imported the screenshots into a Google Doc to add in ad summaries, recaps of social campaigns and other promotions, and a nice little note looking ahead to next year.

These aren’t too difficult to produce, but can make a big difference when your partners are deciding how much money to spend next year.

Feel free to make a copy of the Google Doc linked above, or reach out to Support for help!
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Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Product Update: A Few Notes on RSVPs & a Fix For Weekly Event URLs

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

With the DoStuff office closed last Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving calendar, there is a little less to report than the average week. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting around doing nothing...


RSVP Guestlists: “Bad” RSVP List Field Is Going Away

Back at the end of October, we added in a new dropdown menu for sending RSVP guestlists to partners. This dropdown fixed the old timezone issue where you would need to estimate the speed of the rotation of the Earth just to send out a guestlist on time.

When we added the new (“GOOD”) field, we told you we’ve give you a few weeks to transition all your RSVPs over. Well, time is up.

Friday morning the “BAD” field will disappear -- so take the next day to make sure all your RSVPs are switched over to the new field and the old one is left blank.

RSVP +1: Does NOT Affect The Vote Count

A quick note about RSVP +1 that shouldn’t be new to anyone, but we still wanted to clarify.

Last week we shared that RSVP +1 has now been fixed and added to Radmin. If you set up an RSVP +1 in the back-end, users can check a box on the front-end saying they would like to add a +1. This does NOT change the vote count, however, so do not look at the number on your Event page as an estimate of head count.

If you need to give your partner an accurate headcount, download the guestlist from Radmin, import it into Google Docs or Excel, and add up the number of RSVPs and +1’s that way.

URLs for Weekly Events Fixed

There was a bug where weekly repeating Events would be set up with the same URL if they had the same title (e.g. http://do314.com/events/weekly/sat/happy-hour). This meant that Event cards and other links would often send you to the wrong Event page.

This has been fixed and all new weekly repeating Events will given a unique URL. The system checks for a match and adds a footer to the end of the URL in the case that a match is detected. No more misdirected links!
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Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Product Update (Thanksgiving Edition): New Dupes Queue, RSVPs +1 Fixed, and More!

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving here in the U.S., so most of you are probably working hard to get you site in order for the holiday or getting your turkeys ready to put in the oven tomorrow morning.

While you’re getting your last-minute preparations in order, check out the latest from the Product team!

Redesigned Dupes Queue

As most content managers have noticed by now, the Duplicates Queue got a bit of facelift to help you move through Events even faster.

When we built Radmin, we wanted to make sure we created a dupes queue that was easier to understand than the jumbled mess in the old Admin. 

Instead of a long, continuous list of Events, we added color coding in Radmin to help you identify what was an original and what was a duplicate. The decision to add one match per page, though, slowed down work and made it difficult to gauge how many dupes you were dealing with.

Now, your Duplicates Queue shows 20 matches per page -- clearly marked and color coded -- to bring more speed to your morning workflow.

RSVP +1 Added to Radmin

In old Admin, there was an option to add a “+1” to an RSVP, but when we moved over to Radmin this was not added. To add frustration, you could still get the “+1?” box to show up on the front-end through Admin -- but it didn’t actually work.

After hearing that this broken feature was causing confusion among your teams and with your partners, we set about rebuilding +1’s for the new system.

Now live in Radmin, you can check the “RSVP +1?” box to let users record +1’s when they RSVP through the front-end. This is a great option to offer to RSVP partners that have limited capacity and want to get clear estimates on head-count.


When you send the Guestlist to a partner that used the RSVP +1 option, there will be “+1” next to the name of anyone that checked the box.

The Other Bits

Before you run out to the store to grab the last can of cranberry sauce, here are the other important updates that went live this week:
  • Targeted Ads Are Live: The Lens-specific ad targeting feature previewed in last week's update is now live!
  • Pending Queue Edits: We tweaked the look of the Pending Queue when you're editing Event titles. Now a small modal pops up when you're editing titles to reduce jumpiness and improve the overall UI of the Queue.
  • New ECP Co-Reg Reporting Bug Fixed: Some of your newer ECPs weren't showing up in the co-reg reports in Radmin. This bug is fixed so your co-reg reports are now accurate.
  • Reordered Front-end Search Results: We re-ordered the search results tabs on the front-end to match other parts of the site. The tabs are now ordered: "All, Events, Venues, Artists, Influencers/Lists, Articles".
Have a happy Thanksgiving!
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Friday, November 21, 2014

Metro News: Summit Wrap-up, Red Bull Sound Select List, & A New ECP Pitch Deck

Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

Next week is a short week here in the U.S. with the Thanksgiving holiday, so we know a lot of you are rushing to get your work done.

While you're packing your suitcase or searching for Turkey fryers on Amazon, take a look at what's going on around the Network!

5th Annual DoStuff Summit Is a Wrap!

We just wanted to say one more big, “thank you," to everyone for making it down to Austin last week for the Summit.

We had high hopes but it's safe to say you guys really blew away our expectations. Everyone brought a lot of energy and sincerity to the discussions, and somehow still found the strength to party in freezing temperatures afterwards.

Now that we've had a week to recover, we're feeling really inspired to be working on this big experiment with so many smart, talented, and good looking people. Here's to a big and exciting 2015 for DoStuff!

Red Bull Sound Select List

A while back, the Do214 team created a Red Bull Sound Select list to keep track of shows in Dallas that feature Sound Select artists. We thought this was a pretty awesome idea, especially as the Sound Select program grows, so we turned this list into a national user for the entire Network to take advantage of.

Now, every single metro has a Red Bull Sound Select list on their site featuring some fancy custom CSS. Just go to doXYZ.com/redbullsoundselect and take a look!


You can also view a list of artists by going to doXYZ.com/redbullsoundselct/artists.

There's no promotional plan with this user or anything. We just thought it would be a cool put together since Sound Select is doing such great work in many of your metros and our interests are often aligned. 

We'll leave it up to your discretion how to promote this user on your site, newsletter, and social -- if at all!

Other News

Here's a quick rundown of other big happenings around the Network.

Houndmouth and Do502
  • New ECP Pitch Deck: After our last update, a lot of you asked to get your hands on Do512's awesome new ECP pitch deck. With help from Liz at Do512, we put together this Google Docs template for you to fill in with your info and supercharge your ECP sales.
  • Do317 Turns 3: As one of the elder statesmen of the Network, we're proud to see Do317 reach the ripe-old age of 3 this weekend! Do317 launched on Nov. 23, 2011 as "Indy's Premier Events Calendar".
  • Do502 and Houndmouth Rocked Louisville: Do502 had a launch party for the books, featuring alt-country darlings (and Louisville natives) Houndmouth. Pressure is on for the next metro's launch!
  • Vancouver Is In: Speaking of next... We're happy to announce Vancouver as the 16th metro in the DoStuff Network! Do604/Do250 marks the second Canadian metro, the second in the Pacific NW, and the third outside the U.S.
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Thursday, November 20, 2014

Product Update: Targeting Ads to Specific Lenses and ECPs

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

It's the first Product Update after last week's DoStuff Summit and we're starting off with a bang. Check below for a sneak peek at the new (and much-requested) ad targeting feature in Radmin.

Ad Targeting

We know that one of the single greatest sources of frustration when working with ECPs and Lenses is ads. Up until now, if an ad was running on your main site it would also run on every one of your ECP, Metro, and Conference Lenses. Period. (Unless you did created a CSS hack to get around it.)

Well, that’s all about to change. Rolling out next week, you will now have Lens-level targeting abilities for every ad you sell.

How It Works

From now on when you create an ad in Radmin, you will see a big blue Targeting box at the bottom of the setup page. This is now your command center for where an ad will appear at any given time.

By default, the box for every property (main site and Lenses) will be checked for a new ad. You have the option to manually deselect any property you don’t want the ad to appear on. If you only want the ad to appear on certain lenses and not the main metro page, that’s an option too.



If you need to edit an existing ad's targeting options at any time, just go to that ad’s details page (the “magnifying glass” icon). You’ll see a section below the ad preview that says “Properties Attached To”. This is a list of all the places the ad is currently set to run on.

If you want to add or remove a property from the list, click “Edit” and select/deselect the appropriate check boxes.

It’s that simple.

Why Is This Such a Big Deal?

We probably don't need to tell you this, but these new targeting features will open up a ton of opportunities for ad sales.

If you have a potential ECP partner that's uneasy about showing Featured Event ads that don't match their audience, you can assure them that if an ad comes up that they REALLY don't want on their site you can easily take it down.

Or, if you're thinking of building a Metro Lens focused on a niche audience -- like Do312's Rainbow Lens or Do206's Geek Lens -- you can now sell brand ads that only appear on that property. That can be a big deal for local brands looking to target a specific scene.

How to Weigh Brand Ads

While Featured Event ads are easy enough -- you just check the box for the properties they should appear on and move on -- brand ads are a bit trickier. With these new targeting features, managing the weights for each brand ad space is a little more complex. But fear not.

The primary rule of thumb is to just weigh everything the way you want them to appear on your main site.

If you choose not to run an ad on a certain Lens, the remaining ads will adjust proportionally -- nothing else required from you. If it's an ad that will only run on a Lens and not the main metro site, just deselect that main metro property and set the weight to how often you want it to run on the Lens(es).

Confused? Here's a breakdown of the math

There is one BIG caveat here -- if you set a brand ad's weight to 100 it will pause all other ads on your metro, even ads only running on a single Lens. The best way to avoid this is to NEVER set an ad weight to 0 or 100.

For example, if you're creating a brand ad for a single Lens and it will be the only ad on that Lens, just pick any number between 1 and 99. If there are no other ads attached to that Lens, it will run 100% of the time.

SEO Improvements: New Metadata Formats

As Do206 MP Scott Porad pointed out during his Summit presentation, improving the way we appear in Google search results can have a big impact on our user growth over the coming years.

Well, we've already gotten started on some of those SEO improvements by changing the way the metadata on your sites is formatted. Metadata is the HTML that Google reads to figure out what words to display in its search results.


While we clearly have the best event listings in every metro, our metadata wasn't making it obvious to Google's bots what we're all about. Now when someone searches "New Year's Eve in Indianapolis", "The Black Keys Seattle", or "Comedy tonight in Nashville", Google will start ranking the DoStuff Network higher and higher.

There's one issue with the new metadata that could cause problems if your metro spans more than one city or borough (I'm looking at you, Do314, Do415, DoLA, doNYC, Do617, Do415, Do502, and Vancouver!). If the city/borough in the Venue's address is incorrect on your site, the metadata is going to display it incorrectly on Google and it's going to hurt your page rankings (see Do415 example below).


Over the next week or so, take a look at your Venues across the river/bay/I-35 split and make sure they're listed in the right city. As the Google search bots start recognizing our new metadata formatting over the next few weeks, we want to make sure they pull in the right info.

The Other Bits

This Product Update is already big enough, but there are a few more important fixes to note this week:

  • Past Events Search Fixed: Since the launch of Radmin, we've been having trouble getting all past Events to show up in search. We're confident that we've finally cleaned out the last of the bugs and Event search should be working as expected. Success!
  • More RSVP Times: We added a LOT more options for when to send RSVP lists from the dropdown menu in Radmin. Pretty much anytime within 24 hours is now available.
  • Fixed Ongoing Events Bug: Now when you remove the end date from an ongoing event, the "Ongoing?" box will be automatically deselected. This prevents a previous issue with linked ads.
That's all for this week! Keep an eye out in your email and Slack for the rollout of ad targeting in Radmin.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 11/17/14

Hi network,

Hope everybody is rejuvenated/recovered from last week's Summit! 

After a few weeks off, we're resuming our Winners of the Week series. That said, we'll be gradually transitioning over the next several weeks to have slightly fewer Winners of the Week entries in favor of focusing on generally more in-depth analysis of best practices and metro wins. 

Our goal is to make everything in these emails as actionable as possible, so we'll be honing in on novel ways to improve your metro's business, rather than just the latest big giveaway from DoXYZ. Also, feel free to continue to give us feedback on what information is the most helpful to your day-to-day.

With that out of the way, check out the latest Winner of the Week:

Do415 Knows Something You Don't Know. One thing that kept coming up when discussing content wins during the Summit was the power of exclusivity. A big ticket giveaway is one thing, but a ticket giveaway to a sold out show or a show nobody else has access to is a whole different level of enticing. Do415 used this to their advantage by securing tickets to a series of private shows, building a Secret Shows list that aggregates all of these giveaway events, and then promoting them collectively to their audience. 

This strategy paid big engagement dividends for their newsletter. Last week's top picks received 2,334 clicks, a WoW increase of 147%, and the second most clicks for any email they've sent in the past 5 months. 80% of those 2,334 clicks were to Secret Show pages. Check out this screenshot to see how they teased both content features in their email, and start thinking if you can offer content with similar exclusivity to your audience.
  
That's all for now; check out your updated Weekly KPI report and get working on making each week a win!
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Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Product Update: Episode 8 Prep

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

This week is full of planning meetings here at DoStuff HQ. Not only are we in the homestretch of Summit prep, we're also wrapping up Episode 7 and planning for Episode 8.

One of the most important parts of this planning period for the Product team is going through the DSD Queue to figure out what projects need more focus over the next few months.

Prepping DSD Queue For New Episode

Just as a quick refresh -- here at DoStuff we break our year into periods we call Episodes to assist in planning. An Episode ranges anywhere from 2-3 months depending on the time of year and what else is going on.

The week of planning between the old Episode and the new one is especially important because we need to decide where to dedicate our limited manpower in the coming months.

We'll have a full Episode 7 recap and Episode 8 preview coming soon, but in the meantime you might enjoy a peek into part of the planning process. Over the past few days, you may have noticed the Product team combing through all the tickets in the DSD Queue in Asana and segmenting them into buckets for E8 prep.



These segments have been used throughout this week by the product team to identify what's been generating a lot of DSD tickets lately and where they may need to focus their time over the next couple of months.

If you have any questions about what projects get picked for an Episode, it may be useful to go back to this exchange from the last Episode recap and to keep an eye out for the full Episode 8 preview in the coming weeks.


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Friday, October 24, 2014

Metro News: doNYC's CMJ Lens, DoStuff Office Exchange, Do502 Launch Party, and more!

Our regular Metro News updates highlight big wins, cool ideas, and notable events from around the Network so you can stay up to date on what your counterparts around the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are doing.

It's Friday afternoon and we know you're looking to get outside and enjoy this fall weather. But before you walk out the door for the weekend, take a look at what's going on around the Network this month.

doNYC’s CMJ Lens

As the CMJ Music Marathon heads towards its finale this weekend, we wanted to highlight one of the fest’s breakout acts -- doNYC.

For those that aren’t familiar, the CMJ Music Marathon is a week-long music fest in NYC consisting of 1,400 acts playing 80 clubs spread out across 2 boroughs. It’s the Big Apple’s answer to SXSW, only without Lady Gaga playing inside of a giant Doritos bag. Think SXSW of the early 2000’s, not 2014.

Really wanting to take advantage of this influx of indie music fans, doNYC spent months putting together a badass Conference Lens for CMJ.


The Conference Lens format gave doNYC a number of big advantages for engaging the CMJ crowd -- including customized site design, a default “slim cards” view to pack more shows onto a single page, and a “view by start time” check box for sorting through hundreds of daily shows.

It took a lot of planning a design work from the doNYC team, but people are noticing. Not least of whom, the CMJ team itself.


The engagement numbers have also been pretty impressive this week, with more than 25,000 page views and over 20,000 unique visitors to cmj.donyc.com. That’s the most trafficked Lens in DoStuff history after the Do512 SXSW Lens.

Check out this week’s product update for more info on building Lenses in Radmin, and keep doNYC’s baller CMJ Lens in mind the next time a conference-style festival is happening in your metro.

DoStuff Office Exchange

Some of you are already clued into this, but DoStuff is doing its first Network Office Exchange this month. Members of the Delivery team are spending a few days with a metro to get a better feel for needs on the "front lines", and to provide a bit more hands-on assistance as needed.

Google Hangouts and Slack are great and all, but it's not the same as working with y'all in person. And to be honest, we just miss your musk.


Here's the office exchange lineup for this October, and to those that feel left out don't worry. We're coming to hang with you soon.

  • Oct. 20-24
    • HazDF - Stuart
    • Do214 - Ted
    • Do206 - Kristin
  • Oct. 27-31
    • Do317 - Adi
    • Do617 - Jordan
    • DoLA - Justin

Other News

Here's a quick rundown of other big happenings around the Network this month.

  • Do502's Launch Party: After debuting their site earlier this month to the fine folks of Louisville, the Do502 team is throwing a launch party on November 15th -- the Saturday after the Summit. They're still in the planning stages, but rumor has it that one of Kentucky's hottest new acts could be playing. Let Jeffrey and team know if you're looking to attend!
  • DoLA's Jack Daniels Pitch: Josh and the DoLA team put together this badass influencer program deck for their contacts at Jack Daniels last month. This is a perfect example of the type of prep that should go into one of these conversations. Josh said he's happy to make a copy for anyone that wants to use it as a template. (PLEASE do not share that link outside of the Network.)
  • Do512's ECP Deck: Speaking of well designed sales decks, look at Do512's new ECP deck. 
  • doNYC's Birthday: doNYC turned two earlier this month! And you know what they say, the first two years are the hardest. Be sure to congratulate Jon and Johnny next time you talk to them.
  • Do512's Raw Paw x PBR Activation: We'll leave you with this sweet recap video from Do512's "New Magic" party -- a collaboration between Do512, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Austin's Raw Paw art collective.


That's all this week! If you ever have news or tips to share with the Network, just drop it in the #bigwins channel in Slack.
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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Product Update: Lenses and ECPs in Radmin, Timezone Fix for RSVPs, and more

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

Big update this week! We have a brand new "Lenses" tab rolling out in Radmin, plus some other features and fixes added to the backend. Make sure you check out each one below!

(There WILL be a quiz.)

Lens and ECP Creation In Radmin

As we’re getting closer to moving the final bits of Admin over to Radmin, one of the features that’s been totally reimagined is Lenses. Lens creation, especially for ECPs, has long been a decentralized and pretty confusing process.

The new Lenses tab in Radmin, going live this week, will be the centralized place for you to manage existing lenses and oversee the creation of new ones.

But first, it’s probably best we do a little vocab review.

Vocab Review: Lenses and ECPs

We throw around a lot of acronyms and made-up lingo here at DoStuff and it can sometimes be hard to keep track. To make it even more fun, we sometimes switch up the meanings over time.


So before your head starts spinning, here are two terms we should define:

  • Lens: A customized view of your metro’s Event listings, or a certain cross section of those listings. When viewing a Lens, the design elements stay consistent across Lists and Event pages. Lenses can live on-site or on a third-party site and come in three different flavors:
  • ECP: An Event Calendar Partner (ECP) is a type of Lens that "lives" on a third-party partner’s site, and lists a personalized calendar of Events for their audience.
Creating an ECP in Radmin

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a look at the new Lens Creation process that will be coming to Radmin in the next few days. The set up is pretty much the same for all Lenses, but we’re going to use ECPs as an example.

With Radmin you can automate a large portion of ECP set up -- from emailing designers to creating the URL to building a service agreement. In fact, our goal is to give you the ability to build an entire ECP from start to finish without DoStuff’s help whatsoever.

To create a new ECP in Radmin, you'll click “New Lens” in the top-right of the ECPs page and be taken to this form:


Here's what you'll enter into each field:

  1. Title: What's the ECP going to be called?
  2. Mode: What type of Lens are you building? (Hint: You’re building an ECP.)
  3. User: Enter the email of the user that will be voting on Events for the ECP. (Note: They must be a registered user on your site before you can create the ECP.)
  4. Original URL: Paste the URL for your ECP partner's website so your designer can match the design and layout. (Note: This field only appears for ECPs.)
  5. Designers: Enter the email of the designer(s) that will be building the ECP. As soon as the ECP is created, they will be notified along with a link to their Radmin Dashboard so they can get started. (Note: This field only appears for ECPs.)
  6. Domain: What will the Lens' domain URL be? This will create a new URL on our server. (Note: You must create a URL ending in your metro's domain name to get started -- e.g. ecpname.doxxx.com. Later on you can redirect to a partner's domain URL if that was part of the agreement.)
  7. Locked Username: Is the Locked box checked? This is the username that will be used to access the ECP before it's unlocked (be sure to give to you designer and parters).
  8. Locked Password: Is the Locked box checked? This is the password that will be used to access the ECP before it's unlocked.

Before you press 'Save', click on the Service Agreement tab to enter the contact details for your ECP partner. The Service Agreement is a standard contract generated for all ECPs and basically says that DoStuff gives the partner permission to host our Event listings on their site. Enter the required info on this tab and press "Save".

A number of things will happen when you finish all these steps. First and foremost, the ECP will be created and will be visible in your Lenses tab in Radmin.

In addition, 1.) the ECP domain URL will be added to our server automatically, 2.) your designer will receive an email with the relevant details and instructions for building the ECP, and 3.) a Service Agreement will be generated using the contact details you entered earlier.

From this point, you can work 1-on-1 with your designer and ECP contact to finalize the site design, get the Service Agreement "signed", and decide on a launch date. Before you can launch the ECP, it's your responsibility to make sure your partner reads the Service Agreement and clicks "Agree" while logged into their account. To find the link to the Service Agreement at any time, click "View Agreement" on the ECP's details page in Radmin, or through the cog menu on the main ECP page.

While all this is may seem like a lot to learn right now, you'll find that you'll soon be creating and launching ECPs completely independent of DoStuff and the support team using this new process.

Service Agreements

With this new ECP creation process in Radmin, a signed Service Agreement will now be required for every single active ECP.

We’re well aware that the large majority of existing ECPs do not have a signed Service Agreement in place at this time -- the blame for this rests mostly on our shoulders anyway. But in order to make sure that DoStuff and the metros are protected going forward, we need all ECPs to agree to the standard Service Agreement.

We’ll work with each of you in the coming weeks to help you along the process of getting these generated and "signed" using Radmin.

Timezone Fix for RSVPs

As some of you have noticed in the past, the field for automatically emailing guestlists in Radmin hasn’t always worked too well.

The root cause was that Radmin standardized all events to the same time zone in the backend, but wasn’t taking this into account in the RSVP modal. Depending on what time zone you’re in, “1 hour prior” could turn into “3 hours prior”.

To fix this, we had to add an entirely new field at the bottom of the modal that now runs on a dropdown. This is the “good” guest list field. It can tell time and do basic addition and subtraction, as opposed to the “bad” field.


But here’s the catch, before we can kill the “bad’ field we need you to manually switch all your current RSVPs to the “good” one. You can do this by entering the proper time in the “good” field and leaving the “bad” field blank.

Since both of these are currently working, it’s really important you do this for all RSVPs (Approved Events > Filters > RSVP) and let us know when you’re done. Once we know that everyone has successfully switched over we’ll kill the “bad” field and you’ll never hear from it again.

Default Share Image

We’ve added a new field in Radmin under Site Design > Images for setting the default share image on Facebook and other social sites. Up until now, the thumbnail that pops up when you share a link has been your metro’s logo, which doesn’t always look too hot when it shows up against Facebook’s white background (see below).


Now you can upload a custom photo or graphic to Radmin to improve the way your links appear in Facebook's News Feed and help drive more clicks.

Media Search Functions

There’s been some confusion about what all the buttons in Radmin’s new media search widget do, so we thought we’d clear it up so you’re not left worrying about pressing the wrong thing:


  1. Page Icon: Updates the Facebook Page info (Does NOT change the current image)
  2. Check Icon: Update the current image AND updates the Facebook Page info
  3. Arrow Icon: Scrolls to next image



The difference between the page icon and the check icon are important to note the next time you need to update a Venue or Artist’s Facebook ID but don’t want to change the background image that’s currently being used.

Hidden User Activity Is Hidden

This may sound redundant, but the activity of hidden users is now hidden across the entire site. In the past, hidden users have appeared in the Event Activity feed under the name “Anonymous Coward”.

We decided it was kind of mean to call everyone a coward so now their activity just doesn’t show up anymore.

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That's all for this week! We'll let you know in Slack when the Lenses tab is about to go live in Radmin so you know to keep an eye out for it.
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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 10/20/14

Greetings!

Before we dive in, a quick reminder that I'll be leading a brief "Tips and Tricks" Google Analytics training session on Thursday, 10/23 at 2pm CST. For anyone interested in joining - just shoot me an email in reply and I'll get you added to the calendar invite.

Hokay, now for the Winners of the Week!
  1. Seattle Sharing In Bike Share's Success. Do206 had their first big RSVP event, and the results are unquestionably worth sharing (sorry). After the homepage, the event received the most traffic of any page on Do206, accounting for 10% of their traffic over the last week. This and the 335 people who RSVP'd helped propel Do206 to its second highest week of site traffic AND new users in the 4 months we've tracked weekly stats.

    Your DoXXX platform is perfect for partnering with these buzz-worthy product launches by hosting their RSVPs and driving people to launch events. Come up with an incentive to dangle in front of users (in this case, free beer and swag bags), use the incentive to get RSVPs, and watch people come in droves. Happy partners + happy users = DoXXX no-brainer.
  2. Louisville is off to the Races! Louisville launched last week on Wednesday, October 15th, and they've already had 3644 visits to their site. They're off to a great start thanks to some speedy Slugger outreach (already up to 40+), a handful of ticket giveaways, and some nifty pieces of content like their Neighborhoods page and Badass Shows for $12 or Less (complete with Eric Wareheim GIF). To top it all off, they already have an ECP live within a week of launch.

    Not too shabby, Do502! We're looking forward to reporting on all the big wins happening out in the heart of bourbon country in the weeks to come. 
That's all for today; take a peek at this week's updated Weekly KPI Report for the full rundown of all things Do:
As always, reach out if you have questions or want to share a win that we overlooked.

Thanks!
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Thursday, October 16, 2014

Product Update: Quick List of Bug Fixes

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes that are on the way.

There are no big product updates this week so we're just giving you a quick rundown of all the recent bug fixes.

Bug Fixes

  • Auto-voting Venues: Users that are set to autovote were not always voting on Events at Venues that they follow. This was especially troublesome for neighborhood pages and other site-specific users. This has been fixed.
  • Co-reg for Future DoSites: This will only affect future DoStuff sites, but new users are now co-registered to the nearest metro -- even if it's not live yet. Unfortunately for Do502, no one from Louisville that created a Forecastle schedule this summer was added as a Do502 user because their site was still inactive. This was a big pain point and has been remedied by DoStuff for future launches.
  • Event Photos on ECPs: If an Event was created on the front-end of your site, the photos were not always displaying properly on ECP sites, and vice versa. This has been corrected so that photos are consistent on both ECPs and metro sites.
  • Past Events Popping Up Unexpectedly: There was a recent issue with past repeating Events showing up at the top of certain venue pages. This has been fixed.

That's all for this week! Stay tuned to Slack for the latest news from around the Network and be sure to log all bugs and suggestions in the DSD Queue.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 10/13/14

Evenin' everybody,

A couple logistic notes:
  • As this marks our 15th week of collecting data for the Weekly KPI Report, we've decided to start posting each edition of these on the Doing Big Stuff blog.Clicking the "KPI Update" tag will take you to a collection of these weekly emails, extending back to when they first began. That way you can reference anything from the past or find content you might have missed.
  • I'll be hosting a "Tips and Tricks" Google Analytics training session on Thursday, 10/23 at 2pm CST. It should only last for 30-45 minutes, and it will focus on how to most efficiently use GA to look at data that affects your business. If you'd like to attend, just reply to this email and I'll send you a calendar invite.

Now, on to the Winners of the Week!
  1. Traffic In Indie? Indeed. Do416 had their highest week of ECP traffic, thanks to the launch of their Indieweek ECP. In the last week, that particular ECP received nearly 5K pageviews, pushing their total ECP visits last week to over 2,000 - higher than their previous record by 700 visits.

    In a unique content combination we haven't seen before, Do416 also created the Indie Week Lense as a way to showcase all of the Indie Week shows in a cohesive piece of content that could be sold to advertisers (as Do416 did with Levi Stephens). All of this is a great example of finding a local smaller conference, creating a customized piece of content (in this case, dedicated Lense + ECP) and then using it to build audience and revenue.
  2. Reaping Rewards from the Red River Rivalry. Though the Texas-OU game has been a tradition for over 100 years, this was the first where fans had the help of Do214 to find all the best parties the weekend had to offer. Do214 created their TX/OU weekend list to round up all of the watch parties, after parties, alumni gatherings, and hangover brunches happening around town.

    The work paid off, as the page accounted for 20% of Do214's total traffic for the week, receiving 1,747 pageviews (400 more than even their homepage). After coupling this with a ticket giveaway and a sponsored Facebook post that hit home with fans, Do214 was able to get the second most traffic to site of any week in the 15 weeks we've done the KPI report.

    And with all that traffic, the list makes an easy sell to American Born Moonshine. Yet another example of good content turning into dollars. Next time your city hosts a major sporting event, don't just stop at listing the event. Instead, make a list of all the cool stuff happening around the game, since that's where your DoXXX site can really shine.

That's it for this week. Enjoy perusing your updated numbers below:
As always, reach out if you have questions or want to share a win that we overlooked.

Thanks!
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Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Product Update: Improved Event Search, Copying Events, and Sorting Event Ads

Our regular Product Updates give you a rundown of the features and bug fixes that were rolled out over the past week, plus a look ahead to some of the bigger changes coming to your site or to Radmin.

A few bug fixes and improvements for you guys this week. Hope you like 'em!


Event Search

The Dev team is working hard to improve the power and functionality of Event Search in Radmin. Hopefully you’ve been able to notice the difference as of late.

Filtering By Event Type

This week we added the ability to filter past and current Events by type -- single day, ongoing, and repeating. In your Approved Events queue, expand the Filters menu and you’ll see the new “Event Type” options at the bottom.



Filtering by Event type will help you quickly spot how many weekly repeating Events you have on the site, or track down ongoing Events that might need to be broken up into multiple Events so they show up on your daily listings.

Improved Past Event Search

We’re still working to make it perfect, but searching for past Events has been much improved over the past couple weeks. Drop a line to support if you’re still seeing new issues, or just to let us know that it’s working now!

Copying Events With Images

Copying an Event now copies over all attached images to the new Event. Copying (Click on the gear icon > “Copy”) has always carried over all Event details and Artists, but now any attached cover images and poster images will be carried over as well.

Time saving FTW!

Finding Recently Ended Event Ads

When viewing inactive Event Ads (Advertising > Filters > “Include Inactive”), they are now sorted automatically by most recently completed. Before the default view was alphabetically by Campaign title, which wasn’t too useful for finding an Event Ad that ended last week.



For a number of complicated reasons, it’s not possible right now to sort the date columns for Event Ads any other way (all the columns are fully sortable with Brand Ads), but default sorting by most recent end date should help you find recently ended campaigns for your ad reports.

Radmin Dashboard Is Live!

For those following along in Slack earlier today, you saw the announcement that the Radmin Dashboard is now live. Read more about the features in last week's Product Update and share any thoughts you have with the rest of the Network over on Slack.

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Tuesday, October 7, 2014

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 10/6/14

Welcome to October!

This edition of Winners of the Week spotlights the metros whose stats are on the rise, even though it's fall:
  1. San Antonio does its Heather Mills impersonation. Do210 became the latest in a long list of people that have benefited from Paul McCartney (lookin' at you, Ringo). In this case, Do210 landed a ticket giveaway for Paul's show in San Antonio, and fans wend bazonkers at the chance to win tickets.

    The previous most amount of "WIN" clicks Do210 received in a week was 633; this week they had 2386 WIN clicks. In the past week, they got more WIN clicks than everyone in thenetwork except for Do512 and DoLA. Total entrants in the contest topped out at over 1,200, and the page itself received 2.5K pageviews in a week (20% of Do210's total traffic). Traffic to the entire site doubled WoW.

    All of that is great, but what really makes it a fantastic win for a new market is the user acquisition. Those 1,200+ entrants helped Do210 grow their list by 1,476 new subscribers last week. That's more than any other market, and proves that one massive event can make a lasting difference to your business.
  2. DoLA's giveaway straws break the traffic camel's back. Awkward metaphors aside, it's not always one massive giveaway that turns the tide on traffic. DoLA's site traffic is up thanks to a whole bunch of giveaways, among them Aziz Ansari, The War On Drugs,  a block party with big-name headliners, and a whole bunch more thanks to this inventive partnership with Curb.

    All of those combined (plus other content winners like a free/donation-based festival, and the beginnings of their Halloween list) meant DoLA was in for a surge of traffic. YoY traffic to site was up 14%, and traffic compared to last week was up 56%. A huge chunk of that can be traced back to the fact that more people are clicking the WIN button than any week in the past 2 months.

    If you're not getting as many giveaways for your site as you can get your hands on, you're missing out on that nice hefty boost of traffic, and event more important - the users that join your mail list/register for your site. 
Updated numbers in the doc below. Give 'em a look through, and see how you can make October your best month yet!​
As always, reach out if you have questions or want to share a win that we overlooked.

Thanks!
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