SparqFest has so many features and its unlikely you care about each one. To get to a decision in 2 weeks, you should therefore think about the “make or break” features we offer. Most people come in looking to focus on one of the following:

• "I want to solve asset gathering once and for all"
• “I need help organizing my festival events and presenting them online”
• “I need a tool for online screenings”
• “I'd like to make managing the jury process simpler”
• “I want just one web presence that can support all aspects of my festival”

Your needs may be slightly different. We are always happy to schedule a kick-off with you if our documentation isn't specifically addressing your focus. If we just aren't the right solution, we might be able to spare you two weeks of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Customizing the Site

No matter what your focus, you probably want to get a feel for how you can “make the site your own”. Some basic customization is thus often the best place to start with any trial.

Things to customize during the trial:

• Select a theme
• Upload your logo
• Select a color palette (quick for now, you can tweak later)
• Upload placeholder artwork
• Create an “About Us” page if you intend to use SparqFest custom page capabilities

By doing the above, you should quickly see a site that no longer looks like some template out of our catalog and instead is starting to look like your own.

Things to customize once you have decided to purchase:

• Formal site artwork
• Tweaking colors to be just right
• Customizing your site fonts
• Building out all your custom pages

All of this customization is available in the Staff Portal under “Settings”. Our Customizing Site Content document dives into the details of customizing your site. However, for the trial period, it's a better use of your time doing the quick customization and satisfying yourself with whether SparqFest meets your branding needs. It's really easy to become engrossed in tweaking many of the advanced features at the expense of spending time on trying out the features critical to running your festival.

Asset Gathering

You will likely have to do some level of testing out the asset gathering simply to have useful data for testing out most of the functionality in SparqFest. If asset gathering is your focus, however, then there will be a real temptation to start with data from FilmFreeway and run through the full process. We strongly recommend against doing this for a couple of reasons:

• Your FilmFreeway is real customer data with real email addresses
• You would need to do work setting up all your categories (rather than just some test categories) just so your FilmFreeway import will work
• It will pollute your trial account with data unnecessary for testing

You can delete your test data once you have decided to use SparqFest so that you can start fresh with your real FilmFreeway information. For the purposes of the trial, just assume our FilmFreeway import works.

Submission Data

Now that we have told you what not to do, here's what you should do:

1. Go to the “Submitting” section of the Staff Portal
2. Set up one or two categories in the “Categories” subsection:
   • If you are primarily a feature film festival, make sure you have a feature film category
   • If you capture many kinds of assets (e.g. podcasts and films), make sure you have a category for each asset type
3. Play around with the requirements for each category and test out adding custom questions
4. Manually add submission in the “Submissions” subsection (make sure some of them have a decision state of “Selected”
5. Promote those submissions to selection.

This should give you a nice feel for how the process of getting submission data into SparqFest works and setting up your creators for uploading assets. Assuming you entered alternate email addresses for staff members, they should be receiving emails just as the creators would be if you were using real data. They can then gain access to begin testing out the creator portal and you can navigate to the “Programming” section to begin testing out the staff interface for asset management.

Managing Selections

As noted above, there are two avenues for getting data into SparqFest: the Creator Portal and the “Programming” section of the Staff Portal. Most people doing a SparqFest trial should be testing out both to verify:

• Does SparqFest gather all the information you need?
• Is the Creator Portal a good representative of your festival to your creators?
• Does SparqFest let you make the changes you commonly need to make during the course of a festival?

One thing you should be aware of (but probably don't want to invest time in right now) is how you get assets out of SparqFest for creating print programs or DCPs or whatever. We can push these assets to your Dropbox or Google Drive account or you can download them one by one. We recommend against testing this functionality until you are certain you want to commit to SparqFest simply because you will be authorizing SparqFest to connect to your cloud storage accounts and it's bad information security practices to give a vendor access to things like that until you are more certain they are the right solution for you.

Programming

You will need to have done some testing of the asset gathering features before you can “kick the tires” on our programming features. The exception is if you have no screenings and aren't much interested in how SparqFest is presenting your selections to the public.

To test programming screenings, you will need to have created some submission categories, created some submissions, and promoted them to selections.

Trying out programming involves slotting selections into screenings and creating events that are representative of your festival. If you have in-person events, you will first need to set up a venue or two in “Settings" > "Venues”. Key things to try out:

• Set up both screening and non-screening events
  • If your event will have online screenings, make sure at least one screening is online
  • If your event will have in-person screenings, make sure you set up at least one in-person screening
  • Make sure you have some non-screening events reflective of real events you typically have during your festival
• If you will be using us for ticketing and want to test it, make sure you set up some tickets with access to these events
• Set the “promotion” date for each event in the past so the event will immediately appear on the web site
• For selections to show up on the public site, you will need “publicize selections” enabled in the edition settings under “Settings” > “Edition”
• The tickets you create should ideally be on sale now for $0. If you set a price, that will be run through Stripe and your credit card will be charged

Don't bother with fancy artwork for now. Just create some placeholders that will help give you an idea of how the event will appear on the site

Following these steps should give you a good idea of what it is like to program a festival in SparqFest and how the events will appear on your public site.

Online Screenings

Online screenings are particularly difficult to trial because of how SparqFest manages access to content. “Out of the box”, a SparqFest site sets up an edition of your festival with dates in the future. It does not let you program any screenings except during the dates of your festival. In short, your festival must be running in order to watch its content.

The best way to test online screening is to contact us for a walkthrough on one of our demo sites configured to be “in the middle of the festival”. We can do this in an environment that matches your theme of choice with similar selection data.

If you really need to try out our online screening functionality in your own environment, however, here are the steps to make it work:

1. Change your festival dates ("Settings" > “Edition”) to start sometime in the past and end sometime in the future.
2. Make sure “publicize selections” is enabled for that edition.
3. Create a screening block that runs for the duration of the festival.
4. Assign one or more selections to it.
5. Gain access:
   • If testing ticketing, make sure there are tickets that grant access to it and “purchase” a ticket.
   • If not testing ticketing, set up the screening block not to require a ticket
6. Wait for the site rebuild.
7. Visit the page for the screening block and watch the screening.

The Judging Module

If you are not using SparqFest for audience choice or juried for voting or if you are of the opinion that “if it works how I want, I'll use it, if it doesn't I still need the other stuff”, then spending time during your trial looking our Judging Module is probably not the best use of your time. If, however, it is a focus for you, then here are our recommendations for testing it out.

Audience Choice Voting

Trialing audience choice voting can be a challenge. As with trying out online screenings, the site has to believe the festival is in the middle of its dates (see above on how to do this). Furthermore, you must have enough selections nominated to the audience choice categories you are testing so that it's possible to reach the minimum view threshold.

The simplest recommendation: Ask us for a walkthrough of this functionality in one of our demo environments.

A fairly simple alternative: Go through the process of setting up an audience choice award, making nominations, and placing it into a judging state.

The rest of this section describes detailed testing:

1. Make sure you have done everything described for testing online screenings.
2. Create a category with an audience choice deadline of tomorrow or the next day.
3. Make sure the minimum views is not greater than the number of test selections you created!
4. Nominate your selections (or just set up a nomination rule of “All”) for this category.
5. Upload any old graphic as a test laurel.
6. Set the award status to “judging”.
7. Watch the selections.
8. Go to the voting page and place your vote.
9. Change your vote.
10. Once the deadline has passed, check on the winner.

Jury Voting

The biggest question when evaluating our support for juried awards is whether our processes will map to a way in which you want to run your voting.

It's almost certain that you already have a process that has served you well over time. The idea of automating that process is probably intriguing to you, but how it might apply to the way you run things is unclear. The reality is that using SparqFest will likely encourage you to look at some ways to streamline your processes, but it should not shake up the foundation on which your awards are built.

Having said that, it's not nearly as hard to test juried voting as it is audience choice voting. Your festival doesn't have to be “running” in order for the jury to deliberate and vote.

Set up the Category

The first thing is to set up a category to use for testing the functionality. You can make it simple and just set up a “Best Drama” award, give it a type of “Skill”, and then set a judging deadline in the near future.

Configure Nominees

It's best to test with manual nomination rules for juried awards as that is the most common nomination rule in juried categories. The opposite is true for the audience choice awards as well as special awards in which everyone is a nominee. For trial purposes, we recommend nominating four selections. Make two of the selections “finalists” and two of them “runners-up”.

Define the Voting Rules

Pick out the voting rules that best match the way you like to run your voting process. The simplest process is a straight up vote for a favorite. You will also need to determine whether a category requires a majority of votes, a plurality of votes, or unanimity among the jurors.

Invite Jurors

Invite one or more people to test out the Jury Portal for you. It can also be you. If you want to try out the tiebreaking process, make sure to set up a tiebreaker judge.

Watch the Process Unfold

Have your test jurors place their votes and finalizing them. Wait for the winner to be selected.