Show Your Impact Award
The New York Theatre Experience Wins
On May 11, 2009 Microsoft and and Tech Soup opened the Show Your
Impact Story Contest to elegible nonprofits in the United States and
Canada. Candidates submitted a detailed impact story describing how the
organization has used Microsoft technologies in innovative ways to maximize
or expand the impact it is having on its community. The impact story should
demonstrate how Microsoft technologies have contributed to what the
organization has achieved in specific areas:
On June 26, 2009 Microsoft and Tech Soup announced the three winners, one
for each specified category, on their special
website. NYTE is one
of these winners. You can read NYTE's official entry
here.
Here are the salient points the contest used to describe our Impact
Story:
Optimize Mission Delivery: nytheatre.com
The New York Theatre Experience, (NYTE) uses new and traditional media to
highlight, nurture, promote, and advance the work of thousands of
indie/nonprofit theatre practitioners making groundbreaking and foundational
art in New York City. NYTE has an annual budget under $100K, one full-time
staffer, and an extensive team of nonprofit theatre professionals as
volunteers. The NYTE website,
nytheatre.com, received more than 7 million hits last year from
people coming to learn what is playing in New York theatres, buy tickets,
and read artist interviews and production reviews.
NYTE has optimized the performance of
nytheatre.com through the
implementation of Microsoft technologies to make it easier to manage and
make it more user friendly, displaying a greater breadth of information.
MapPoint allows NYTE to geocode locations of more than 200 venues listed on
nytheatre.com. Their SQL Server/VB 2005 system facilitates the management
and mobilization of volunteers more effectively, most crucially during
FringeNYC when volunteers sign up to review 1500 performances of more than
200 theatre, dance, puppetry, comedy, and dramatic productions over a 17-day
period. The SQL Server database also enables the website's "Trip Planner"
feature to display a customized page showing exactly what shows are playing
during a given period of interest.
The donated Microsoft software has enabled NYTE to optimize their
user-friendly, feature-rich website to more effectively promote the work of
hundreds of nonprofit theatre companies to an audience of 3 million people
annually, and all at no cost to the nonprofit theatres themselves.