Opera Theatre of St. Louis is an award-winning theatre using Tallyfy to ensure their content approval checks and other core processes are done accurately, consistently and on time.
Timothy O’Leary
Immediate Past General Director
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
As the general director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, I have a deep interest in ensuring that all of our print publications meet the highest standards of aesthetics, professionalism, and accuracy without sacrificing timeliness. Thanks to Tallyfy, we have completely revamped our process for generating our flagship print materials, such as the printed program books for our opera season, which contain thousands of pieces of crucial information about our artists, our donors, our season, and our company.
The previous, outdated system involved routing multiple rounds of hard-copy print-outs from department to department for updates and review, creating constant bottlenecks, duplication of labor, inefficient communication, and errors. Now we use a streamlined and efficient online simultaneous collaboration system with immediate accountability and oversight.
In just one year, Tallyfy has become a powerful tool for our company, and we are eager to continue expanding the areas in which this technology can improve our procedures and make complex tasks more efficient – and ensure that we consistently achieve excellent results.
Anh Le
Assistant Director of Marketing
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
What was the core problem you wanted to solve?
As the editor of our annual 160-page program book, I am always looking for ways to bring efficiency to our copywriting, design, review, and approval process. When I first came to Opera Theatre, this internal process still relied upon a system of paper folders that were handed from office to office, and I spent much of my time tracking down the location of each folder so as to move the project along. It was time to find a new system! My key goals were to increase the accountability of each person who touched the program book process, and to allow for simultaneous review rather than a sequential (and therefore often delayed) chain reaction.
Which specific improvements have you seen with Tallyfy? What specific features did you like most?
Tallyfy has fulfilled both of those goals admirably in just one year, and I do not doubt that we will become even more efficient as we grow into this technology. Thanks to Tallyfy’s system of master processes, I can start routing multiple documents much more quickly than with print outs. Thanks to Tallyfy’s overview-at-a-glance interface, I can instantly take note of which projects, pages, or steps are currently on track or behind schedule. And thanks to the handy Tallyfy inbox, my colleagues can easily review and power through any tasks they have been assigned. After switching to Tallyfy, routing documents and layouts went from taking over a week to taking just 2-3 days.
Add to this the ability to leave comment threads, to attach links to other collaboration tools like Google Docs, to collect feedback and opinions within each step, and to flag crucial problems, and you have a software that is fully capable of bringing a massive project from conception to finish.
Routing multiple documents is far quicker and there’s immediate accountability and oversight
In up to 3 sentences, how would you describe Tallyfy to others?
Tallyfy is a system for automating any processes that you might run on a frequent or even daily basis. It is the digital implementation of the idea that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you start a project. There is particular value in Tallyfy for cross-departmental, large group projects where communication and deadlines are absolutely essential.
How could Tallyfy improve?
Tallyfy is a growing product – this points to one of the wonderful things about Tallyfy: as soon as you ask them for a new or improved feature, they add it to a checklist. I have already seen significant improvements in Tallyfy even though we have been using it less than a year, and many of those improvements are ones I personally requested!
Would you recommend Tallyfy to others?
I would recommend Tallyfy to those looking to run the same procedures over and over again. This is not a task management software in the same way as Trello, Asana, Todoist, or many of the other applications currently out there it’s for repeatable operations that every successful business has. This is a (for lack of a more technical term) mass-process-on-repeat software. I highly recommend it to those who churn out print project after print project, or those who run the same type of business steps over and over again, but not necessarily to those who need a high level of customization and flexibility on individual runs of a master process. For example, I would not use this to simply assign to-do tasks or one-off projects to a team.
