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How SimpleCrew Helped Blackspy Marketing Scale Their Business Through Organization and Accountability

BlackSpy Promotes Concerts at Red Rocks

Industry:

Grassroots Marketing

Challenge:

Manual tracking caused Jon more problems than it solved. He didn’t feel fully confident in taking on more campaign work without a way to easily track everything.

Solution:

SimpleCrew photo reporting lets Jon give progress reports to the band’s management.

Result:

Blackspy Marketing has successfully transitioned from all manual tracking to 100 percent through SimpleCrew.

Company:

Blackspy Marketing is a full-service street team and grassroots marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. They design and manage grassroots marketing for hundreds of street team campaigns across the United States for bands, festivals and events.

Blackspy runs promotional campaigns for clients including Live Nation Colorado, The String Cheese Incident, Umphrey’s McGee, Greensky Bluegrass and one-off events for Cirque Du Soleil, Burton US Open, Colorado Symphony & more.

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Our accountability structure was different before we found SimpleCrew. We would track progress in photo albums, spreadsheets, and other means of organization
Jon Eisenberg
Owner of Blackspy Marketing
Jon Eisenberg

The Challenge

Blackspy needed to improve how they tracked and reported progress of their street team and grassroots campaigns while also scaling their organization.

The growing company relied heavily on manual tracking through spreadsheets, emails, Facebook groups and text messages, and the constant scrambling to find photos slowed campaigns to a crawl.

Jon Eisenberg, Blackspy’s Founder, found SimpleCrew to help shift their strategy.

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Through working with bands playing at venues across the country, we quickly realized it was a challenge to organize accountability and have it presentable to the band’s management.

Once we were able to utilize SimpleCrew for all of our campaigns, it just became thenorm. Now, before we add anybody to our street teams, we ask if they have a smartphone, because if they don’t, they won’t be able to use SimpleCrew, so they’re not a good fit.”

The Solution

After talking with the SimpleCrew co-founders, Alan VanToai and Mike McCabe, Jon knew SimpleCrew could help Blackspy take on more campaign work while streamlining marketing operations and having an easy system to hold street team members accountable while promoting.

Jon and his teams got to work promoting and tracking progress in SimpleCrew, and quickly realized how much easier it made it to scale the operation. He was able to accept more work from bigger clients like The String Cheese Incident, Greensky Bluegrass, Umphrey’s McGee and bring on marketing coordinators to oversee the hundreds of campaigns within the SimpleCrew app.

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After teaming up with Live Nation Colorado, we were easily promoting another 60 shows per month. Having that much influx of work was one of the reasons why it makes sense to have a system like SimpleCrew. We're consistent throughout every campaign.

This learning format allowed staff to quickly and easily access resources in the areas most applicable to their need.

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When you’re managing a 100- to 150-person team around the country, there’s gotta be systems. Without systems it’s not gonna work. The SimpleCrew system is so integral to music festivals because there’s so many moving parts around the country, whether it’s regional or national.

The Result

As a result of implementing SimpleCrew, Blackspy Marketing has successfully transitioned from all manual tracking to 100 percent through SimpleCrew.

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“I really appreciate the total number of uploads versus the total number of people in a campaign. That’s something that we take into consideration. Having a system where I can just quickly glance at a campaign is very helpful since we’re always moving on to the next project

Jon emphasized the importance of having these systems of accountability and organization for music festivals, events and concerts when managing 100 to 150 person teams across the country.

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SimpleCrew has been a catalyst to our success. It has 100% helped us scale our business.