Live Events Management Software Marcato: Constantly Evolving With Festivals

Marcato – Marcato
a range of the management modules the software offers

Pollstar spoke to Natasha Hillier, Chief Operating Officer of Marcato, a Canadian company developing a software that can help festivals run more efficiently

Marcato was founded in 2008 by Darren Gallop and Morgan Currie on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. Currie had previously worked with the Celtic Colors International Festival developing a logistics system for what is a very complex event: hundreds of artists performing in hundreds of venues across the island over 11 days. He and Gallop saw the many use cases for such a system, and, together, they founded Marcato.

Pollstar spoke to the company’s COO, Natasha Hillier, to look at some of the ways in which the software can help festival promoters. According to Hillier, Marcato assists with all of the back-end logistics for the event, including staff and guest-list management, tracking credentials and asset requirements for all back of house staff and crew. It offers a sponsors module to track the details of sponsorship arrangements and contra deals, a catering management module to track who is supposed to eat at the different catering locations and when, and a lodging module to manage where everyone is staying. The software also tracks details about each performer, who is coming with them, and what they need on stage and backstage.

Marcato is accessed online through a web browser, whether on a PC, Mac, phone or tablet. The company also has stand-alone apps for on-site deployment at festivals, including an issuance app that allows festival operators to track and access all of the data around tickets, and which areas onsite ticket holders should be able to access.

There’s a separate app to keep things efficient at catering: people can scan their wristbands or barcodes and it will let them know which catering they are eligible for. “Catering and issuance can both be run without access to the internet by using a stand-alone server that we can provide as well,” Hillier explained.

Security and, indeed, everybody working on the production team, can be managed too, with different members of the team receiving different clearances for areas on-site. This information then feeds into one of their integrated ticketing/ RFID systems that will specify which wristband each person should have when they come to pick them up.

David MacVicar – Natasha Hillier, COO of Marcato

“We work with the RFID providers to do that. You have all your different levels of wristbands entered and assigned in Marcato and if you assign a production wristband to someone, we feed that through the API to the RFID provider, so they know what areas to grant this person access to,” said Hillier.

Promoters can keep track of their staff’s details, and for example require staff to submit a photo of their driver’s license, a picture or personal information into the system, so that when they are approving credentials they can do in-depth reviews. If they ever encounter issues onsite and need to refer to that information, it is readily available and easy to find. Marcato is also SOC 2 certified, so it is able to store that information securely.

Festivals can use Marcato’s XML feeds to feed data to their mobile app or website. If promoters wanted to see data about which artists are performing or which food vendors are going to be available, they can do that through these XML feeds, which can also be integrated into festival websites. If a festival has a mobile app developed by Greencopper or Aloompa, the information will already be integrated, as Marcato works with both companies.

Most of Marcato’s clients are music festivals, but its client list includes sporting events and other festival genres, such as conferences, comedy festivals and a few venues, most of which use Marcato to track performances at their events. “It’s really easy to send out a form to an artist to collect their information, book them into a show, and push it out to your website, without having to re-enter any of that data,” Hillier said.

Marcato provides its services for a tiered annual subscription fee ranging in price from $1,500 – $10,000 USD depending on the requirements of the event. Many of its features are offered a la carte so one can pick what works for one’s festival. The company also offers onsite support and training packages.

The software enables festivals to have all the relevant information in one place and find what they’re looking for without needing to sift through Google docs and Excel spreadsheets, and knowing that all the data you’re looking at is up to date. Anybody that’s ever worked at a ticket desk knows what a pain the guest list can be. It may be out of date because someone added a couple of names, and before you know it, there are five working copies. Having data in one place saves time and money, specifically when it comes to ordering the right amount of wristbands or preparing the right amount of food.

Marcato is constantly evolving as it receives feature requests from clients. “That should keep us going for a long time,” Hillier said, adding that a couple of new features would be announced this spring.