Beyond the First Edition

Congratulations on finishing up your first edition using SparqFest! We hope the festival was a great success! SparqFest is designed with the knowledge that you really, really do not want to be thinking about the festival in the first few weeks after the close of your festival. We therefore have automated the transition to the “off-season” for you. I...

Release Notes

v2024.01.01.01 - January 1, 2024 New features: We no longer automatically create submission categories when importing submissions: If the submission categories in a spreadsheet have no match in SparqFest, a warning is issued You should be setting up submission categories before your first import Submission categories may now define different screene...

The Dashboard

The SparqFest Dashboard is your “home page” in the Staff Portal. Prior to the April 2023 release (v2023.04.12.01), we had a very rudimentary dashboard with reporting spread throughout the Staff Portal. With this update, the dashboard has become a single location for checking in your festival's online operations, identifying critical actions that nee...

Security and Privacy

At SparqFest, we have put a lot of work into both data security and privacy.  The core areas of focus are: Enabling you to adhere to various data sovereignty and privacy laws Giving users maximal control over their own data Ensuring the integrity of e-commerce transactions and making sure we are not a vector of attack on anyone's financial or passwo...

Search Engine Optimization

Over time, SparqFest can help you raise the profile of your festival in search engines through its smart search engine optimization (SEO). This article describes what we do from a search engine perspective and how you and you creators can take advantage of it. Our SEO is a Benefit to Your Creators It's easy to focus on the benefits of what SparqFest...

Times and Time Zones

Your public web site is available online to the entire world and often contains a mix of times for online events and in-person events as well as dates without times attached and full times. SparqFest manages all times so that they are presented in a format that makes the most sense for each specified audience member in the context in which they are ...

Cloud Synchronization

Cloud Synchronization Requires an Add-on Purchase Because of the bandwidth costs we incur for this feature, access to it requires that you have a subscription specifically licensed for cloud synchronization. The feature is available under every subscription level at a small additional cost. If you have not licensed this feature, you will see a padlo...

Marketing Email Integration

If you use a tool like Mailchimp to manage your contacts and communications for marketing and promotional purposes, you can configure SparqFest to send any contacts who register with us up to that tool. Marketing emails vs transactional emails SparqFest manages its own transactional emails (emails relating to the core function of the festival). We d...

Social Media Integration

When you first configure your festival, one of the configuration tabs is for “Marketing” and includes fields for entering a variety of social media handles. We also ask for social media handles for your selections and venues. None of this basic configuration is what we consider “social media integration”. We can't post to your accounts, follow users...

Collaboration Tools

If your festival team uses collaboration tools like Slack, SparqFest can keep your entire team up to date on everything happening inside SparqFest. You have a wide set of options on how you configure our collaboration integration, but the basic idea is that when something happens in SparqFest, we tell a channel in your collaboration tool about it. A...