The Challenge
Bizly’s platform is designed to help teams find the perfect venue for their events with a minimum number of phone calls. The company also provides resources for managing the event, building and managing guest lists, and measuring event impact. The challenge that brought them to CloudFactory was the need to dramatically expand the database – going quickly from 2,000 venues to 18,000.
Bizly had tried to expand its venue list through third-party data providers. “But it’s hard to keep the information fresh. We realized early on that we needed to have human eyes on these venues,’’ Goldsack says.
The company also wanted to make sure venues aren’t getting requests from Bizly users that aren’t valid. “If you send an inquiry for a 100-person event to a venue that can only accommodate 20 people, that is a waste of time for everyone,’’ Goldsack added. “We wanted to make sure that by the time a Bizly client speaks to a venue, they already know the venue can accommodate them.’’
Goldsack thought he would need to hire people on site at Bizly to do the work, but that raised a host of issues. “We’re a small team without a dedicated HR resource. We weren’t sure about contract work vs. hiring part-time or full-time. We didn’t want to do anything wrong.’’
Goldsack had never heard of a managed workforce before a colleague told him about CloudFactory. “She highly recommended that we look into CloudFactory.’’