Customer Story
How CultureFest Saw 800% Growth and Saved 100+ Hours with Eventeny
Highlights:
Grew attendance 800% in three years, from 600 attendees to 7,500Grew from 60 to more than 100 vendors in one year100 hours saved per festival by replacing spreadsheets and scattered emails with one platform
A one-woman show behind a growing festival
Cathy Anna has spent more than 30 years building brands and producing events across North Carolina. Three years ago, a local nonprofit in Oxford, North Carolina asked her to take over CultureFest NC.
The festival had been running for three years and drawing 600 to 800 attendees, but the nonprofit no longer had the bandwidth to keep it going.
Cathy said yes. She had already been running other events on PlanningPod, and she knew right away it wouldn't hold up for a festival.
"I would not have any hair left if I had to do this by hand and with spreadsheets,you know, the old-fashioned way of doing things, or trying to use a software like PlanningPod that just simply is not equipped to do a festival like you guys are."
Cathy Anna, Founder, The Cathy Anna Collective, on trying to run CultureFest on PlanningPod
Before Eventeny:
A festival outgrowing its systems
Before she found Eventeny, Cathy researched a long list of event software looking for something built to handle a real festival, not just a single event.
She set up a meeting with Eventeny's growth team, who walked her through the platform and convinced her to make the switch. Three years later, she still credits that meeting for a lot of what CultureFest has become.
The solution:
One live map instead of a stack of spreadsheets
Cathy moved every vendor conversation into Eventeny, replacing a flood of individual emails with one shared thread.
From there, she started using the platform's mapping tool to lay out the festival grounds, dragging vendor booths into place instead of hand-drawing a map and copying it onto a spreadsheet.
Vendors get their spot on the map about two weeks before the festival, so any complaints about a booth location get resolved before load-in day instead of during it. CultureFest's website also runs on Eventeny, so vendors, attendees, and performers pull their information from one page instead of a patchwork of sites.
"The mapping and the layouts, having all of this in one place, it's the Holy Grail for an event planner. I don't know of any other software that does what you do."
Cathy Anna, Founder, The Cathy Anna Collective
"800% was our growth within three years, which is just unheard of. It's just not normal... I think Eventeny is a big part of why we were able to do that, because it combines everything that I'm trying to do."
Cathy Anna, Founder, The Cathy Anna Collective
The impact:
800% growth and 100 hours back
Since Cathy took over, CultureFest NC's attendance has grown from 600 to 800 attendees to 7,100, an 800% increase in three years. Vendor participation grew too, from about 60 vendors to more than 100 this year.
CultureFest also works closely with local safety officials. The sheriff's department, local police, and fire department plan barricades and road closures off the same event map Cathy uses to run the festival.
Cathy has also become an advocate for Eventeny beyond her own festival: two other organizations in her county, the Oxford Bee Jubilee and the Granville Gardeners, switched to the platform on her recommendation.
Why Cathy Anna keeps building with Eventeny
For Cathy, Eventeny is the operational backbone for a festival that now draws more than 7,000 people and 100 vendors, run with a team of one.
What keeps her coming back is that Eventeny takes feedback from organizers seriously. When Cathy asked Eventeny to change the default booth size from 50-by-50 to 10-by-10, and to make bulk adding booths and seats possible, the product team built both. Both shipped this year.
"If I ever have an issue, I call Natalie. Natalie takes care of me."