The Metropolitan Opera Laffont Competition

The Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont Competition: A Bird’s Eye View 

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The Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont Competition is one of the most prestigious and largest music competitions in the world. The competition is designed to discover promising young opera singers and assist in the development of their careers, and is sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera National Council, including members and hundreds of volunteers from over 50 districts across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Some of today’s greatest singers got their start in the auditions, including Renée Fleming, Susan Graham, Stephanie Blythe, Eric Owens, Lawrence Brownlee, Lisette Oropesa, Jamie Barton, Michael Fabiano, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Ryan Speedo Green, and Nadine Sierra.

The Laffont competition spans a total of 9 months, with almost 1,000 applicants submitting their audition materials each year including their headshots, video clips, CVs, repertoire lists and professional experience. From that applicant pool, over 850 contestants were selected to compete in District rounds, which then lead to Regional Competition events, and finally the Semi-Final and Grand Finals held in New York City at the Metropolitan Opera House. 

Managing application submissions, the consideration process, auditions and communications

With the incredible amount of time and difficulty in sorting through this mountain of information, as well as the pressures of COVID, The Laffont competition organizers looked to find a solution that would allow them to step away from the analog solutions of excel spreadsheets, thousands of email threads, and pen & paper solutions of understanding and tracking the competition lifecycle for each of these promising young artists and the volunteers that supported these events nation-wide. Among the most immediate needs for the Competition were the following:

Give a streamlined way for prospective applicants to learn about and apply for the opportunity.

A secure, shared workspace that would work on any web browser through which competition organizers, volunteers, and adjudicators could sort through the submitted applications (Video clips, resumes, repertoire lists, headshots, etc…) of every contestant.

Track & share notes and comments with team members nationwide about each contestant throughout the 9-month competition process.

Work with easy-to-use interface users that would allow the organizers and applicants to interface directly with each other and communicate required updates on application status, repertoire requests, and edits to young artist submissions.

A streamlined way for districts and regions to process application fee payments, receive donations, and charge ticket fees for each competition event.

A cohesive way for organizers and volunteers of the over 50 districts (who are a median age of 60+) to see upcoming district competitors, schedule audition times, generate standard branded program notes, judge books, repertoire lists, and other relevant documents.

Effortlessly generate standard branded program notes, judge books, repertoire lists, and share & export any relevant information necessary for the appropriate party including media, links, resources, and financial reports.

How Resonance Addressed each of these needs

1. Give a streamlined way for prospective applicants to learn about and apply for the opportunity.

Resonance Solution: The Hiring Manager

The Resonance Opportunity Hub, Hiring Manager, and Application Portal

Resonance provides a seamless way through which employers and organizations can create and manage job listings directly from their Resonance portal. Through the listing manager, the Laffont competition organizers were able to create the application form, set requirements, fees, provide comprehensive competition information, and see their listings populate in real-time on the Resonance Opportunity Hub.

What’s even better, Resonance automatically pulls standard information (pictures, CVs, contact info, etc...) directly from each Resonance user profile allowing for a streamlined submission process for the applicant and allowing the competition organizers to only ask for fields on the application that are specific to their needs in the competition.

2. A secure, shared workspace that would work on any web browser through which competition organizers, volunteers, and adjudicators could sort through the submitted applications (Video clips, resumes, repertoire lists, headshots, etc…) of every contestant.

Can wading through 1,000 applications actually be fun (or at least easier)?

With almost 1,000 submissions each year, wading through materials for each contestant is a time-consuming and meticulous process. In previous years, the competition organizers would manually import each field of the applicants submission into a spreadsheet and then laboriously click on each video link, resume file, headshot image, aria list, and other required documents so they could digitally keep track of each young artist’s submission.

On top of that, any time there was missing material in a submission they would be required to send an email to the applicant asking them to send an updated CV, Headshot, document, or repertoire list that would often result in dozens of back and forth conversations daily between Laffont organizers and contestants.

Consideration can (and should) be a breeze - The Resonance People Manager

Resonance solved this by automatically providing a curated applicant list that collated the submitted materials of each applicant formatted for quick and easy consumption. 

Every bucket of information was easily laid out in tabs on the applicant profile in the Resonance Hiring Portal. All video links were embedded and accessible directly in the feed, allowing the organizers to listen to every video submission, look at their resume, and see their documents without having to click out of the portal or download files.

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They were also able to filter & sort through applicants by submission status, application date, age, location, and other custom parameters to easily understand exactly where they were in the consideration process.

3. Track & share notes, status updates, and comments with team members nationwide about each contestant throughout the 9-month competition process.

One Note Samba

Any notes and comments were shareable across the workspace and made collaboration and decision making much faster than through the traditional means of multiple email and SMS threads. Laffont team members were able to quickly shoot questions to each other and collaborate directly on the platform. What’s more, all comments and notes were easily exportable for archival purposes allowing them to store important information in any way they saw fit.

4. Work with an easy-to-use interface for non-technical users that would allow the organizers and applicants to interface directly with each other and communicate required updates on application status, repertoire requests, and edits to young artist submissions.

Communications made easy (Resonance Communications Center)

Once they had gone through all of the applicant's information, they were able to assign a status of accepted, rejected, missing materials, or update materials request, that would trigger an automatic email message to be sent to the applicant about their application status. 

Applicants could then log into their Resonance Dashboard and edit their submission accordingly or view their current status, without the need to write an email or followup with multiple text threads or phone calls. For more information on how we can solve your communication needs, head over to our page about our Communications Center.

5. A streamlined way for districts and regions to process application fee payments, receive donations, and charge ticket fees for each competition event.

Title and Registration, Please (Payment System & Data Manager)

Once the applicants that had been accepted as contestants for the competition were notified, they were tasked with selecting a district and paying the required registration fee.

To accomplish this they simply had to access their personalized Resonance dashboard and follow the on screen action items to pick a district and pay their fee in one screen. If a district was filled to capacity due, they were automatically shown only those districts that were still available.

In the past, each district in the competition was responsible for collecting application fees which resulted in a nightmare of tracking funds, collecting checks, protecting financial information, distributing funds to the correct bank accounts, and reporting their earnings to the Laffont Competition Directors. 

Move over Pay“pal” and “Quick”books

Resonance’s integrated payment system allowed all funds to be automatically received then distributed to the relevant district, as well as gave each district organizer as well as the Laffont Director’s a real-time, bird’s eye view of when and where each fee was collected and distributed. In the event that a refund needed to be issued, our payment system easily returned the funds to the bank account of the contestant and all parties were automatically notified and their portal dashboards updated.

This ethos extended to how districts handled donations, ticket fees, and other financial information. Rather than keeping track of their financials on pen and paper, each district only had to visit one place to manage all aspects of competition business, rather than use a host of disparate and unconnected services.

6. A cohesive way for organizers and volunteers of the over 50 districts (who are a median age of 60+) to see upcoming district competitors, share files & information, and schedule audition times

Herding Cats ( Event & Data Manager)

In the past, contestants and district volunteers would communicate one-to-one exclusively through emails or phone calls. This extended to how they assigned contestants their audition time slots, provided relevant location information, documents, and instructions, and coordinated on chosen performance repertoire and accompanists for their competition event. As is often the case using these methods, there were often dozens of back and forth conversations, unclear information, forgotten updates, and missing materials leading up to the competition event.

Time is on my side

The Resonance Event Management System allowed the District managers to easily add details about a location, link it to specific competition events, and share detailed information directly with the Laffont contestants through a shared portal along with automatically generated emails to each contestant. Through their shared portal, the managers, volunteers, and young artists were able to easily find and access event-specific media (Driving directions, venue requirements, accompanist contact info, PDFs, district videos, promotional images, etc…) without the hassle of hundreds of separate emails, countless missed messages, and answering the same questions again and again. 

District organizers were also able to configure the audition schedule, see exactly what a young artist’s audition repertoire was at any time, take into account their audition slot time preference, and whether they would be providing their own accompanist.

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Conversely, contestants were able to update their audition repertoire, headshots, documents directly in the Resonance portal and have it automatically update the Districts information.

8. Effortlessly generate standard branded program notes, judge books, repertoire lists, and share & export any relevant information necessary for the appropriate party including media, links, resources, and financial reports.

‍Resonance Document Generator

In the past the programs for each district were not standardized and often created using a variety of services including MSword, Adobe Acrobat, and other analog methods. This cost the Laffont directors, volunteers, and contestants hundreds of hours in busy-work, leading to a swath of different program types, judge handbooks, volunteer manuals, and event PDFs, that often did not accurately reflect the most up-to-date information on the day of the competition event.

Why run when you can fly 

We solved this issue by providing an incredibly easy way to generate beautiful, branded documents in seconds that leveraged all of the constantly changing data in their portal. The Laffont organizers were able to design within Resonance a plethora of different documents without ever having to open MSWord or Adobe Acrobat. This included standardized concert programs, judge books, contestant bios, repertoire lists, and more available to every Laffont district.

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What’s more, these digital documents were constantly updated in real-time whenever a new change was made by a contestant or event organizer. Whenever they needed to, they could press a button and have a new, print-ready document generated in a few seconds with all of the new information accounted for.

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Needless to say, this kind of on-the-fly document generation and information exporting capability alleviated an enormous amount of stress from volunteers who could now focus their efforts on more important work rather than the mundane task of sitting in front of computers and reprinting updated programs the day of an event.

Conclusion

As you can see, The Laffont Competition’s use of Resonance completely transformed the way they managed their operations, and gave them a bird’s eye view for the first time of every aspect of their organization nationwide, and saved their volunteers thousands of hours and countless headaches.

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We’re in the business of transforming business relationships for the creative industry. If you’re an organization that deals with any of the above issues in your day to day activities, we want to speak with you. Schedule a demo today and find out how we can be your window to the creative world.

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