For those who don’t know, the National Association of Campus Activities (NACA) is an extensive network of college campus activity boards, musicians, lecturers, comedians and so much more. Several weekends each year they meet up for regional conferences (and one national) to book shows at college campuses all over the country. Sonicbids has been hard at work building features into our artist and promoter accounts to take the “block booking” process that NACA pioneered onto the web. It was great to experience the method first-hand at the NACA West conference in Ontario, California this past weekend.

The block booking process is a unique way to book bands. To me, it’s part stock market and part team building exercise. From what I saw, the results are typically win-win: bands line up a string of dates in a region, and schools get a lower performance pricetag for working together. Knowing booking agents, self-represented artists, and colleges will be able to continue this process outside of a block booking meeting through Sonicbids got me pretty amped. Everyone seems to be so efficient for the couple days during this conference; I can’t imagine what they will be able to do year round.

Working in Member Relations, it’s always great to put a face to a name. I got to meet, in person, with over thirty schools and forty agents/self-represented artists over the long weekend. I recognized some folks from prior phone conversations or email correspondences (shout outs to Jeff from Audience Innovations and Chris from Engine Room Recordings), and there were some who were not familiar with Sonicbids at all. I think once the accounts were affiliated and I could show off how the new features interacted with the conference, people left our table feeling all the more confident and empowered.

I encourage any NACA members who haven’t checked out the tutorials at www.sonicbids.com/NACA08 to do so! And to talk with me or any of the other Member Relations reps at our support center if you have any questions about how to fully utilize your Sonicbids account.

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