Green Box cut administrative work by 10 hours a month with event venue management software

At a Glance

Organization: Green Box | Green Mountain Falls, Colorado

Type: Nonprofit arts organization

Use case: Event scheduling, venue and project management, inventory, team coordination

Previous tools: Paper binders, Google Calendar, Outlook, Dropbox

Key result: 10 hours saved per month; single source of truth for all events and spaces

Overview: A Community Arts Hub in the Colorado Rockies

Nestled in the mountains West of Colorado Springs, Green Mountain Falls is a small town likely to appear in a nature photography book. Synonymous with this quiet and pristine town is Green Box, a nonprofit organization providing year-round arts-focused programming to the surrounding community. 

Green Box operates as an “open campus”: a 180-person indoor performance space, multiple public art installations, artist residencies, open studios, and student field trips. And every year, the town is lit up by its hallmark two-week summer Arts Festival, a multi-disciplinary event featuring performances, exhibitions, camps, conversations, and parties that draws up to ten thousand attendees. 

The Challenge: Paper Binders, Five Tools, and a Coordination Problem

As Green Box grew, its operational complexity grew with it — but its toolset didn’t. The organization ran its sophisticated multi-day arts festival and year-round programming on a patchwork of disconnected systems. 

“We used paper binders, Google Calendar, Outlook, and Dropbox,” said Anna Faye Hunter, Green Box’s Director of Engagement and Communications. 

Green Box’s fragmented tool stack created several coordination issues between administrative and production teams. The most painful example was the printed production schedule: changes were a manual, time-consuming process that required updating, reprinting, and re-taping physical copies to the wall. 

“We used printed copies of production schedules that were taped to a wall. Whenever we made any changes, we’d have to update all the papers and reprint them,” Hunter explained. 

The same issue occurred with inventory. Confirming whether a piece of equipment was available for an event could take weeks of back-and-forth emails. 

“We’d go back and forth, back and forth, sometimes it could literally take weeks. It was a huge pain,” said Anne Stewart, Green Box’s Management Associate.  

These time and operational inefficiencies were major hidden costs for their small team. Every hour spent reconciling calendars or chasing inventory status was time not spent on programming or community relationships that define Green Box’s mission. 

The Solution: From Five Tools to One: How Green Box Uses ShoSoft

Green Box needed event management software that could serve as a single source of truth for its calendar, spaces, and inventory, and do it at a price that made sense for a nonprofit organization. After evaluating their options, they chose ShoSoft. 

“We started using ShoSoft to have communication between our production and admin teams, and to remove the need for emails,” Stewart explained. 

But since then, ShoSoft has become their single source of truth. Every event — from a student field trip to a festival performance — lives on one calendar, visible to the entire team in real time.The coordination failures that came from siloed tools have been replaced by a shared view that keeps production and admin aligned without a single email.  

ShoSoft’s project management features have also become central to their annual festival planning. Tasks are assigned, tracked, and visible across the team, eliminating printed checklists and physical binders. 

“We use the activities and tasks a lot, and like how we can send them to everyone,” Hunter remarked. 

ShoSoft’s file attachments on tasks also mean that run-of-show documents and production notes all live where the relevant task lives, not in a separate Dropbox folder or email thread. The team opens ShoSoft, finds the event, and has everything they need. 

The Results: 10 Hours Back Per Month and a Team That Can Focus on Its Mission

Since switching to ShoSoft, Green Box has recovered approximately 10 hours per month that were previously used for document updating, cross-tool coordination, and inventory confirmation. For a small nonprofit team, that’s a meaningful return. 

Most importantly, however, adopting ShoSoft has freed Green Box to focus on what it’s there to do: deliver meaningful arts programming to its community.

Ready to transform your venue like Green Box? Schedule a demo with our team today.

Image credit: Jeff Kearney