Customer Success Story: City of Yucaipa Community Events

Type of Events: Fall festival, country music festival, holiday festivals
Attendance: 5000-10,000+
Number of booths: 50-100+
Venue: City parks and main streets
Affiliations: California Park and Recreation Society, CalFest

Overview: The City of Yucaipa’s (California) Community Services Department puts on 5 large festivals per year in addition to year-round programming and also managing a performing arts center. Their event attendance ranges from a few thousand attendees to more than 10,000, and their vendor populations range from managing a few dozen to over 100 at their largest events.  The city agency implemented EventHub as a means to streamline event management, specifically around vendor communication, logistics, and mapping, for their 2023 and 2024 events.

Key Takeaways TL/DR

  • EventHub’s customizable by-vendor-type digital applications and built-in credit card payments reduced hours upon hours of manual labor.
  • EventHub system messaging along with the order portal for vendors easily communicated owed requirements and load-in logistics to event partners
  • Interactive festival map allowed organizers to collect vendor space preferences and easily make assignments and edit the map in real-time.
  • City leveraged the platform to increase vendor fees WHILE ADDING many vendors for Autumnfest, resulting in DOUBLING VENDOR REVENUE versus previous year

The Challenge: Managing Several Large Vendor Events in a Short Window with a Small Team

Elise Campbell, Comminity Services Coordinator for City of Yucaipa, and her team sought a way to get off of paper vendor applications and binders, and reduce the time spent going back and forth with vendors and constantly making map updates in photoshop. They produce 5 large vendor-heavy events per year, with three happening in the fall just a few weeks apart. They also coordinate with a local Chamber of Commerce executive who needed access to collaborate on several of the events. After meeting EventHub at the annual CalFest conference and revisiting the team at CPRS a couple of months later, they decided it was the platform they needed for their signature events, to bring their systems up to date and create efficiencies in their event production efforts.

EventHub Software Implementation

Management Tool-Suite

The team, with vendor management primarily overseen by Elise, immediately felt the productivity bump. By shifting to digital applications and built-in credit card payment collection, they saved many hours of paperwork collection, sorting, review, and payment chasing.

Interactive Floor Plan

“EventHub’s interactive mapping is probably my favorite overall feature – we LOVE it!” The city’s graphics team provided a slick attendee-friendly map, which EventHub converted into a layered interactive and click-and-drag editable booth floor plan for the festival. They were then able to accept booth preferences through the map within applications, make real-time edits like adding, deleting, resizing, and rearranging booths, and easily make space assignments from a built-in cheat sheet of unassigned vendors. 

In addition to the back-of-house functionality, vendors were able to fill out digital booth profiles and attendees were able to scan QR codes onsite to navigate the event, browse food trucks and vendors, and locate their favorite local vendor partners.

Event Marketplace and Future Opportunities

EventHub’s marketplace helped the city to find several new vendors- both food and retail, for their festival, helping to grow  demand which supported their necessary increase in vendors fees. The city is excited to add more experiential and sponsorship opportunities to the platform for future events to better capture opportunities from the hundreds of experiential agency bookers, and thousands of national brands, regional and local businesses seeking event partnerships from the platform.

Platform Cost Versus ROI

The platform wasn’t budgeted for this year, but the team felt the value added was worth finding the money to make it happen. “We were able to double our vendor revenue from Autumn Fest, bringing in nearly $20,000 total! It’s well worth the investment.” In terms of ROI, that additional $10,000 was against a $1,500 all-in investment for the management tool-suite, marketplace access, and interactive map build and support. Factoring in the time savings, that’s easily a 6:1 return on investment!

Results and Conclusion

In summary, Elise used EventHub to greatly streamline vendor management. She was able to grow the vendor population while increasing fees, and find new vendors via the marketplace, leading her to double vendor revenue for Autumnfest. The interactive maps made managing booth layouts and space assignments easy and also provided attendees a great way to find their favorite retail vendors and food options.

“I just don’t know where we’d be without EventHub,” summarizes Elise.

CLICK HERE to request a demo via Zoom walk-through on how EventHub can help your trade show, festival, or expo. For additional customer success stories, visit our Testimonials section.

Featured Customer

Elise Campbell, Community Services Coordinator, City of Yucaipa, California