Case Study: How zkipster helps Irish Arts Center create an atmosphere of Irish hospitality at its events

Irish Arts Center is located in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City.

It is a home for artists and audiences of all backgrounds who share a passion or appreciation for the evolving arts and culture of contemporary Ireland and Irish America. In 2021, almost 50 years after it was first founded in 1972, Irish Arts Center moved into a state-of-the-art new facility. Here it provides audiences with emotionally and intellectually engaging experiences in an environment of Irish hospitality.

Irish Arts Center first came across zkipster through an agency partner and was so impressed they officially incorporated the system into their tech stack in 2022. At first the Center used zkipster to streamline event check-in, before expanding their usage to embrace additional features and tools.

zkipster powers all the Center’s fundraising events, including its flagship annual Fall Gala. The most recent gala, held in October 2022 at Chelsea Piers, was extra special, celebrating 50 years of the Irish Arts Center, honoring international recording star Ed Sheeran, and raising a grand total of $2.5m.

Having zkipster was a game changer for us! It was such an incredible tool to have in hand before the event, we loved it!

Brian Ralston | Associate Director of Development Operations & Database Administrator | Irish Arts Center

Other event highlights include a Women in Irish Arts luncheon, a golf fundraiser and a Show Your Love donor event, typically held around Valentine’s Day.

The event planning challenge

• Create an environment of Irish hospitality and welcome from the moment guests arrive at an Irish Arts Center event. 
• Maintain detailed guest data to inform prospecting, research, cultivation and moves management for developing donors.

The zkipster solution

• Record specific details in guest lists and seating charts to ensure a personalized welcome and a seamless event experience for guests. 
• Utilize Custom fields and Guest Relationships to capture nuanced information about attendees.
• Use the zkipster app for rapid, reliable, and user-friendly event check-in.

As Associate Director of Development Operations and Database Administrator, Brian Ralston brings a data-driven perspective to overseeing the Irish Arts Center zkipster account, saying:

I really appreciate the import CSV and the wide variety of fields I can import in zkipster. It’s important to me that I can perform those kinds of actions and not have to manually click around a user interface.

Brian Ralston | Associate Director of Development Operations & Database Administrator | Irish Arts Center

Custom fields

Irish Arts Center guest lists contain a wealth of useful detail, with Brian using Custom fields in zkipster to capture important data:

• For the Fall Gala, specific Custom color fields are used to denote if guests have VIP status and access or general access. 

• Custom fields indicating the ticket number (tickets are issued by an external platform) and the host ID (the name of the person who made the ticket purchase) are utilized at ticketed events.

• The Notes field is used to make a note of any other important guest data.

• Custom fields are easy to select, via check boxes and dropdown menus, and can have colors assigned to them for easy identification. The fields are also visible in guest profiles on the zkipster app at check-in, so welcome staff and hosts can look after guests accordingly from the moment they arrive.

Seating

• The Center’s Fall Gala and Women in Irish Arts luncheon operate similarly, in that they are seated events where guests are assigned tables. For the golfing event, an extra layer of detail is added when seating charts are created in zkipster: each guest’s table number also tells them the golf hole they will tee off from. As Brian notes, “At golf fundraisers everyone can’t just start at the first hole, so we assign everyone to a specific hole and then assign the hole as a table in zkipster.” 

• Color is also utilized smartly at seated events like the golf tournament and luncheon. zkipster Seating colors are used to identify each guest’s ticket level.

Guest Relationships

• Irish Arts Center utilizes the Guest Relationships tool in zkipster to clearly group guests; associating table guests with the table host or ticket holder and relating guests to their golf partners, for example. It is also used to note plus ones and capture more precise information about them, sometimes generating completely new leads in the process.

• Guest Relationships gives staff the ability to immediately see who else is in a guest’s party and check in all guests simultaneously. Having this information available at a glance, in the zkipster app on iPad, makes check-in “super easy”, seamless and personalized.

Check-in

• Having a swift and frictionless check-in is crucial for Irish Arts Center, particularly at its larger events, and the zkipster check-in app is a powerful tool for the team. Brian said: “We have 650 guests to check in at our gala, so there have to be MINIMAL issues. We can’t spend more than a few seconds trying to find someone in the system. We ask for their last name, search for it in the zkipster app and BOOM, their entire group pops up. We make sure everyone is there and then check them all in. Easy!” 

• Irish Arts Center uses volunteers to welcome guests and run check-in. At the annual Gala a team of 16 will share eight iPads, while at smaller events a team of four will share two iPads. When it comes to training volunteers, Brian noted that: 

The zkipster UI is relatively intuitive, so not much training is necessary. I print out a one pager for everyone, and we do a quick training session an hour before everyone is supposed to arrive.

Brian Ralston | Associate Director of Development Operations & Database Administrator | Irish Arts Center

Next steps

•  Irish Arts Center does not currently use check-in messages or Guest Facesheets in zkipster, but would love to in future. 

All images ⓒ Irish Arts Center