"This is a very big win for the festival"

Interview with Nicolas Sigrist. Photos by gango luege

 

 

What is your organization’s mission?

Lumberjack’s mission is to promote small to medium-sized concerts and cultural events in and around the Lucerne area. In doing so, we give bands more opportunities to perform. It helps musicians, but we also see it as a mission for society: we want to bring that “live” feeling back to bars and pubs.

For example, we recently organized the “There are words bands Festival Lucerne” from 18th-30th October, where bands were playing every night for 14 days at various different bars and venues across Lucerne.

 

What challenge led you to RaiseNow?

For the TAWB Festival, Lumberjack’s approach is to give bands 80% of the entry fees we collect, rather than paying them a fixed fee. The entry fee isn’t fixed either, so people can choose what they want to pay – it’s a sort of “pay what you want” system. This keeps cultural events accessible for everyone. At the same time, we didn’t want to offer free concerts, because it’s important that art and culture are valued. So we decided to introduce the pay what you want principle, which allows everyone to pay whatever their financial situation allows.
We needed a way to collect the funds, and it has to be said that it’s become more and more difficult to do so, simply because nobody seems to carry cash anymore. So it was a natural choice for us to collect the payments using the RaiseNow TWINT QR code solution.

 

How did you find out about the solution?

For this year’s festival kickoff, we met up somewhere that was using RaiseNow TWINT QR codes to collect funds. We thought it was a fantastic idea. We saw how much they’d collected using the solution that evening and decided we’d do the same thing.

 

How quickly were you able to get the solution up and running?

As an association, it's really easy to get started. You just register online and in two or three days your account is ready to go.

 

How exactly do you collect funds at concerts?

We use RaiseNow TWINT QR codes. Since we usually host our events in two different types of venue, we use the codes in two ways:

For locations with a separate concert area, we simply set up a table at the entrance with a QR code stand on it (you can order the stand from RaiseNow). People then just scanned the code to enter.

Other venues only have one room, for example a bar with a stage. In these venues it’s trickier to have a separate area for concert entry, so we instead stuck the RaiseNow QR code stickers to lanyards, hung them around our necks and walked through the crowd with them. People could then scan and pay their chosen amount. This actually created a nice atmosphere and even got a few chuckles since they’d never seen anything like it before.

The biggest challenge we faced was that mobile signal isn’t always the best in concert venues and the connection is slow as a result, so the QR code sometimes took longer to load. Also, scanning the code sometimes proved difficult in the low lighting, so we just used a torch. All in all though, it worked very well.

We tend to use the QR codes without a predefined amount, as these work best for our pay what you want system.

 

Read more after the photos  ↓

Which of the various RaiseNow TWINT QR solutions do you use?

We use TWINT QR Pay, the solution where you receive payments and don’t collect any personal data. At first we thought about collecting data as well to use it later on to maybe send out a newsletter, but in the end it was just about speed – i.e. being able to take payment as quickly as possible so as not to hold anyone up for too long. With Corona it already takes longer than usual at the entrance as we need to check everyone’s COVID passes, so we can’t afford for payments to take very long.

 

Do you still collect cash or do you only use RaiseNow TWINT now?

We still collect cash, for example we still do the classic thing of going round with a hat. But overall I’d say that around 60% of the funds we collect are paid digitally and 40% with cash.
Alongside RaiseNow TWINT and cash, we also offer the option of credit card payments with a mobile terminal from SumUp, but the vast majority of people pay with TWINT rather than credit card.

 

Do you create individual QR codes for each concert or do you always use the same ones?

That was the first festival and our first time using RaiseNow, so we used the same QR code for the whole festival.

 

Do you have any other use cases?

We plan to use RaiseNow TWINT for our own band “Hendricks the Hatmaker” when we organize our gigs. I also see fundraising for our band as another good use case. Or to sell merchandise, for example t-shirts at concerts, in which case we’d use several different QR codes.

 

How do you find working with RaiseNow Hub?

I really like how all the information is displayed clearly and simply. I’ve already spent a lot of time in the backend because we have two weeks of concerts in a row and each band gets an 80% share of the money we collect, so each evening has to be accounted for separately. So I look on a daily basis at how much came in the night before.

 

How did you collect the money before?

We’ve been running these events for eight years without RaiseNow TWINT, but I do see a clear benefit to using the solution. We collected significantly more money than we’d anticipated. The question now is of course what caused that - was it the band, the timing, etc. But it may well be thanks to the option of paying with RaiseNow TWINT, because lots of people are able to pay despite not having any cash on them. In the past, we often got the answer “I can’t give anything because I don’t have any cash, or only large notes”, and now we can simply say “No problem, you can also pay with TWINT or by credit card”, and this way we’re actually covering pretty much all of the concert goers. It’s a great win for the festival.

 

Can you already measure your success with RaiseNow TWINT QR?

The average collection amount this year was around CHF 14, where last year it was still at CHF 12. Of course, the increase is not solely due to TWINT QR, but out of a total income of CHF 8'000, this year CHF 3'200 came through RaiseNow TWINT QR ー that's already 40%.

 

Do you have any more tips for other clubs?

I’d like to highlight once more that RaiseNow TWINT is a fantastic solution for events like ours. The fact that you can print the QR codes and use them however you like makes it super flexible. We were thinking of printing the QR code on our t-shirts next time to make scanning and paying even easier.

Our badges with the QR code were really well received by the crowd, and they actually thought it was pretty funny. In the past when we’ve gone round with the old-fashioned collection, I sometimes felt I was almost being disruptive, along the lines of “sorry for interrupting you during the concert.” It felt much more invasive, whereas with a badge around your neck it’s just funny. It even became a running gag: we always greeted the bands at the beginning and briefly mentioned how we’re collecting funds, and explained that you can also pay with TWINT and held up the lanyard. People always reacted with “oh, how modern” and the whole solution was very positively received. Simply put, it’s good for the bands, the festival and even the atmosphere at the event.
Overall I’d say that from an event organiser’s point of view, using RaiseNow TWINT QR makes a lot of sense.

 

 

Nicolas, we thank you very much for your success story and wish you and your club continued success!