As the chair of a performing arts program, your day is often filled with routine and urgent to-do items. From managing operations and attending meetings to teaching and advising, keeping up with your busy agenda takes more than a graduate assistant.
During the department’s audition season, priorities quickly shift as you look to attract the right cohort of talents for your program and meet enrollment goals. Your staff and budgetary resources are limited, forcing you to use dated, manual processes to schedule auditions for dozens or hundreds of applicants. Managing auditions through personal or department emails and calendars has proven inefficient and unreliable.
The audition landscape is changing. Your team and prospective applicants desire an audition process that’s easy, secure, and responsive, but still personal and reliable. Utilizing an audition scheduling tool is the key to revolutionizing your program.
In this guide, you will learn how an audition scheduling tool can eliminate time-consuming tasks and improve communications and operations and transform your arts program.
What is an audition scheduling tool?
Audition Schedulers: Features to Look For
A Closer Look at Acceptd’s Audition Scheduling Tool
What is an audition scheduling tool?
An audition scheduling tool is a solution vital to any performing arts program. It is a digital system that empowers arts departments to streamline the audition process from the staff and applicant perspective. Designed to make scheduling quick and easy, the right platform alleviates the challenges of managing audition requests and communications in multiple systems.
A versatile audition scheduler allows faculty to create and fill audition slots for their respective program(s) or put artists in control to handle their own audition scheduling. Looking to schedule auditions after your program’s prescreening step? Your organization can set up auditions at any stage of the application cycle.
Whether you have faculty managing various programs, or applicants interested in multiple disciplines, an audition scheduler keeps everyone organized and informed at every turn.
Audition Schedulers: Features to Look For
Not all audition software is created equal. When it comes to researching and selecting your program’s audition scheduling tool, you want a solution that meets your needs, not just your wallet. One that addresses multiple operations across your organization and is intuitively designed end-to-end for your prospective artists and dedicated staff.
To identify the best audition scheduling tool, consider one with the following features:
Easy-to-Use Interface: For artists, scheduling the audition for the program of their dreams should be a breeze. They’re busy individuals who can’t afford to spend countless clicks maneuvering through a website or app to schedule an audition. Your audition scheduler should provide a clean, intuitive, and seamless experience for artists no matter where they are. After all, their primary focus is preparing for the performance that determines their fate in your program.
Secure Payment Processing: If your program requires applicants to pay a fee of any kind, you should be equipped to collect payment through your platform. Ensure your solution is supported by a trusted and secured payment gateway, is PCI compliant, and accepts common forms of payment, such as credit and debit cards.
Application Manager: Make managing applications and auditions easier for your staff with a solution that does it all. Maximize a platform that allows your team to efficiently access, organize and manage artists’ applications from submission to selection without navigating multiple systems.
Customizable Adjudication Tools: Easily review applicants and auditions with an adjudication process tailored to your program experience. Configure rubrics based on programs and audition stages for a more thorough and equitable evaluation and selection process.
Secure Messaging Platform: Keep communications between applicants private, consistent, and safeguarded with a secure messaging platform only they can access. Ask follow-up questions or send audition updates to one artist or multiple applicants with individual and bulk messaging.
Accessible Auditions: As arts programs re-evaluate auditioning practices post-pandemic, many are embracing the accessibility of offering in-person AND virtual auditions. The selected audition scheduling tool should accommodate scheduling for both audition formats. In doing so, you increase artist reach and show applicants your program is not limited by physical boundaries.
Once you know what to look for in the ideal audition scheduling tool, it’s time to find the digital solution that’s right for your program.
A Closer Look at Acceptd’s Audition Scheduling Tool
The answer lies within Acceptd’s application and audition platform. The all-encompassing solution made exclusively for arts organizations allows you to manage every step of your program’s application process from submission to selection in one centralized place. So, there’s no need to work across multiple systems.
Whether your program is currently conducting in-person auditions or considering adapting a live virtual model, Acceptd’s audition scheduling tool is already ahead of the curve so you can offer both formats and utilize the same scheduler.
Sitting in on an audition or reviewing materials? Your adjudication tools are accessible so you can easily evaluate applicants wherever you are. Safely manage applications, audition materials, communications, and payments all within a feature-rich system your organization and applicants can easily navigate and undoubtedly trust.
Wrapping Up
Gearing up for your program’s next audition cycle doesn’t have to feel like another overwhelming task on your to-do list. Investing in the right audition scheduling tool can remedy the challenges your performing arts program and applicants previously faced.
Eliminate the hassle of navigating multiple, antiquated systems and elevate your program with audition scheduling software that streamlines operations and expands artist reach and program visibility.
Want to learn more about leveraging digital tools to attract the right talent to your program? Check out these Acceptd resources:
Acceptd Arts Insights: Behind the Scenes- Shifting an Entire Program Online: Ready to elevate your operations and talent pool? Learn how a virtual shift transformed The Songbook Academic.
AuditionRoom: Looking to expand your applicant reach this audition season? Discover talent from around the world by hosting virtual live auditions.
3 Ways Colleges Can Recruit for Free: In today’s digital world, connecting with potential applicants can be a challenge. Learn how to find balance and meet talent where they are.
