Tools & Tricks: Improved Comedy & EDM Scrapers, Plus Page Makeovers

Our regular Tools & Tricks updates bring you badass tips from the Delivery team for making the most of the DoStuff platform, growing your audience, and improving your daily workflow.

For this Tools & Tricks update, we've got a hack for adding more comedy and EDM Events, plus some tips for improving content on your site while building up local relationships at the same time.

Improved Comedy & Nightclub Scrapers Through Cvent

Through a conversation that came to us from Jay up at Do206, we were approached by Cvent about improving Events that they sell tickets for on their sites -- TuneStub.com, LaughStub.com, and ElectroStub.com.

Their rep did an audit of our Network and found that some venues that they do ticketing for have partial Event listings, or no Event listings at all. Two weak spots of ours — comedy and EDM/nightlife listings — are especially susceptible.

See LA nightclub, Emerson Theatre, below. The current page on DoLA shows zero events, while ElectroStub.com lists at least three ticketed events per week.


Scraping Events From Cvent Sites

Obviously wanting their ticketed Events to show up correctly on DoStuff sites, Cvent offered us a little extra help in setting up Scrapers for their venue pages and fixing these discrepancies.

First, their rep emailed over a comprehensive list of every venue on their platform so we could compare their listings to their own. Then, our team set up scripts for every metro so that new Scrapers can be set up instantly for any venue on the Cvent sites.

Before you start setting up any of these improved Scrapers, however, you’re first going to want to check them against your current set up. Open up the venue list from Cvent and sort alphabetically by city or state to find links to venues in your metro (keep in mind that more than one city may apply here -- like Brooklyn or Santa Monica).

If you compare the venue page on TuneStub/LaughStub/ElectroStub to the one on your site and find that you’re missing a lot of Events, you should set up a new Scraper in Radmin to scrape Cvent's site from now on.


Using the Emerson Theatre as an example, you would go to the Scraper page in Radmin (Radmin > Events > Scrapers) and click the “New Scraper” button. In the form above you would want to add:

1. Venue: The venue that this Scraper will be attached to on your site
2. URL: The URL for the Cvent site where the Scraper will pull from
3. Category: The Category for the Events that are being scraped
4. Script: Choose the script for the corresponding Cvent site (the correct Tunestub script is named “Tunestub (shows)”

Then check “Active”, hit “Next”, and you’re ready to go.

It will take some time to browse through all the Venue pages to compare listings, so there is no rush here. We just want you to know this is available as a way to improve your Event listings, especially for comedy and EDM Events.

Event, Venue, and Artist Page Makeovers

Inspired by an article we read about About.Me’s CEO personally improving up to 50 random user profiles per week, we thought we’d suggest adopting a similar “makeover” initiative for user-created content on your sites.

It’s just a fact, user-added Event pages often look pretty shitty (see below). It’s great if people are using your site to promote their Events, but if the page looks like it was put together by your grandma it’s going to make you -- and them -- (and you) look bad in the long run.



If you spot an Event page, Venue page, or Artist profile on your site that looks like it could use some TLC, reach out to them 1-on-1 and offer to give it a makeover free of charge. Oftentimes all that's needed is to swap the Event poster out for an HD cover image. Or sometimes the Event description just needs some work.

Same goes for Venue and Artist pages. You can’t expect local bands and venues to share links to a page that looks ugly. Offer to overhaul their page with high-quality content and then share a few tips for making the most of the DoStuff platform.  If an artist or venue doesn't have HD, magazine-quality images that you can use, offer to send one of your photographers to a show and share the photos with them afterward. Nine times out of ten you will get an enthusiastic “yes”.

This 1-on-1 outreach not only improves the look of your site, it builds up good will that will pay off in the long run. As your local community gets more familiar with your site, they'll link to it more often -- driving up your audience numbers and SEO rankings. 

We try to automate as much as possible around here, but sometimes there’s just no substitute for the old-fashioned white glove treatment.