If your festival team uses collaboration tools like Slack, SparqFest can keep your entire team up to date on everything happening inside SparqFest. You have a wide set of options on how you configure our collaboration integration, but the basic idea is that when something happens in SparqFest, we tell a channel in your collaboration tool about it.
A Sample Use Case
Before we dive into configuring your collaboration tools, we'll walk through a sample use case involving a festival staff of five people using Slack for collaboration.
When a Collaboration Tool Makes Sense
If you are running a festival on your own, it's unlikely you are using a collaboration tool. After all, you have no one to collaborate with!
If your team is more than just a couple of people, however, collaboration tools can enable your team to work more effectively and reduce the number of meetings and emails going back and forth. The SparqFest staff, in fact, uses Slack to manage all aspects of our team collaboration.
Also, Slack is free.
In this use case, you may have a “general” channel for everyone, a “judging” channel for the team involved with the jury and voting, and a “programming” channel for the team members putting together the schedule. This configuration, of course, is just a simple one to illustrate how SparqFest and Slack work together. Your channels likely will be different.
In this example, you would:
- Send SparqFest “judging” events to the “judging” channel
- Send notifications of selection readiness to the “programming” channel
- Send notifications of common interest to the “general” channel
In short, everyone knows everything going on with SparqFest without the need to wonder who saw what email.
Supported Collaboration Tools
At this time, we support only Slack. If you use Microsoft Teams or another tool, please reach out to us. We prioritize the addition of other tools based on customer feedback.
Integration Steps
As with most of our integrations, you visit the integrations settings in “Account” > “Integrations” and click on the “Collaboration” panel. You are presented with a panel of all collaboration tools we support. Select your tool of choice.
Granting SparqFest Permission
When you select your collaboration tool, SparqFest sends you to that vendor's web. It's important to note that the information you are entering here goes straight to the vendor. You are now on the vendor's web site and we don't have any access to your authentication credentials with that vendor or anything else you enter. The vendor simply checks with you to make sure you really want to allow SparqFest to integrate with that tool and then sends us a token that let's SparqFest know everything is OK.
- The vendor will ask you to sign in if you are not already signed in.
- The vendor will explain what permissions SpareFest is requesting and whether you wish to grant SparqFest those rights. We focus specifically on the permissions that let us list your channels and post messages to them.
- Once you say “yes”, the vendor will send you back to SparqFest.
- SparqFest will show you a page saying that you are now done. You can close that window.
- In the other window with the Staff Portal still open, SparqFest will show you as connected to your collaboration tool and enable you to configure SparqFest integration of that tool.
Invite SparqFest into Private Channels
SparqFest can see only public channels and those private channels into which it has been invited. We recommend that the channels to which you connect SparqFest be private channels because the information posted may be mildly sensitive (selection names, for example, are mentioned). Nevertheless, you can connect SparqFest to both public and private channels.
You will therefore want to close the configuration window and go into your collaboration tool. We'll use Slack as an example here.
Go into the Slack channel into which you want to add SparqFest and type: /invite @sparqfest
Important!!!
SparqFest cannot post to a channel until you have invited the app into the channel. The app cannot even see private channels until it has been invited. If you are wondering why a given channel is not showing up in the configuration dialog, it is likely because you have yet to invite SparqFest into that channel.
Configure SparqFest Posting
Now that you have invited SparqFest into the appropriate channels, you can go back into the Staff Portal and tell SparqFest where to post what kind of messages.
We currently break down posts into four groups:
- Alerts
- Purchasing
- Programming
- Judging
For example, you can send all judging-related notifications to a channel that includes only staff authorized to know about the jury process. It doesn't even need to be about being authorized. Perhaps only part of your staff cares about receiving a notice every time someone buys a ticket. By sending purchasing messages to a special channel, you don't force your entire staff to read every single incoming ticket purchase message.
We may add other types of messaging at a later time. You can sent each type of notification to its own channel. If there is information we are not sending to your collaboration channels, please let us know.