Admiral Theatre Access

Mission Statement: The Admiral Theatre shall be the primary link in the encouragement and development of the cultural, civic and entertainment horizons of the entire West Puget Sound

Question 1: The Before: What was the challenge, issue or problem your organization was facing? Or, what was the opportunity you were not able to take advantage of before you put a technology solution in place?; Answer: Our methods of tracking and organizing labor and expenses for each event as well as billable hours and other data were cumbersome and did not scale with the organization

Question 2: What Microsoft software have you used/are you using in your organization to more effectively engage your beneficiaries, donors and/or volunteers and/or to make a difference in your community?; Answer: Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 (Includes any of the following: Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, OneNote, Outlook, and Word); Other:

Question 3: The After: How have these Microsoft products allowed you to engage your stakeholders more efficiently or effectively to make a difference in your community?; Answer: With a simplified database, we've been able to drastically reduce the hours of management time committed to tracking and recording work, allowing us to focus those employees time in other areas and keep the operational costs down, allowing us to meet the budget while keeping costs down for tickets - which allows more of our less wealthy patrons to afford to see quality performances they would otherwise be unable to experience.

Question 4: What about these products (the features or the way you used them) made them particularly helpful in enabling your organization to expand and improve upon its community impact?; Answer: With MS Access 2007/2010 and other Office suite programs, despite not having any employees with programming skills, we were able to easily develop our own tracking database to effectively eliminate hours of redundant and time-consuming data, using one program to provide an interface for everything from annual budgets, to contract details for our hundreds of contracts, to payroll tracking, to billing for our rental clients, putting all the information every department needs into one easy-to-use interface.

Question 5: Please provide any examples, stories or data that illustrate the difference the use of Microsoft software has enabled you to make (i.e., # of new clients reached, new program added, increased dollars raised, increased volunteers, etc.; Answer: For me personally, MS Access and the database we built in it has reduced the time I spend on tracking payroll, billing for our rental clients, and budgeting for events by approximately 5 hours a week. Other departments have had annual time spent reduced dramatically as we no longer have multiple people having to read through each and every one of the approx. 150 contracts we sign and execute, as a single person can enter all the relevant data into a searchable database and reports can be pulled specifically for each need.

Upload photos or other supporting works/files: ATF Database Final.accdb

ATF Database Back End.accdb

Special directions needed to access your work: As it is a split database, the front end will need to be redirected to link to the back end.

Microsoft Technology For Good Contest