The Background

The Kaiser Permanente Educational Theatre of Northern California inspires children and teens, through interactive plays and skits, to make informed decisions about their health and wellness. This traveling troupe holds more than 150 performances a year, teaching themes such as healthy eating, conflict resolution, peer pressure, early adolescence, and social responsibility through music, humor, dance, and dialogue.

The Beezwax Solution

To better reflect and connect to its audience, the theatre group regularly holds auditions to cast young performers/educators. Behind the curtain, there’s a lot of work and a lot of data to manage. To better handle all of the auditions, callbacks, and interviews, Kaiser asked Beezwax to rebuild their Auditions system, a custom software solution built using the FileMaker platform. The Beezwax team worked hard to understand the needs of audition coordinators and actors, and rebuild the Auditions solution to improve functionality for every user.

The new Auditions system now allows actors to apply for auditions via a web form; if an actor applied in the past, the Auditions database has the smarts to match their new application to their historical profile. It even helps build an actor’s audition package – a 5- to 8-page PDF including headshot, resume, video, and historical notes. For even smoother workflow, the Auditions tool exports each PDF to a secure shared drive, so team members who don’t use FileMaker can access and print packages before each audition, callback, and interview. The audition coordinators use the system to schedule these activities for every actor, and also log assessment notes for each actor directly into the audition packet.

And, that’s (the workflow and data behind) showbiz!

KP Educational Theatre’s rebuilt Auditions system now fits better into the audition coordinators’ workflow, helps performers audition, and eliminates a great deal of manual data entry that was previously needed to organize the audition packages. Planned enhancements are designed to enable audition coordinators to email actors with feedback and follow-on appointments, as well as manage auditions, callbacks, and interviews by using the application through their iPads.