Welcome to your Choir Genius user guide!

Do any (or some) of the statements below describe your situation?

1. “I need a way to engage and communicate important items such as performance call-time, latest music changes, and due dates for forms/payments to my members, that gets their attention more than email can”

2. “I want to cut down the amount of time I spend on the phone, at rehearsal or on email answering basically the same questions from different people”

3. “I want a way to track attendance ahead of the event, as well as on the day of”

4. “I need a way to store all our repertoire (music and associated files) in one secure place, which also allows me to organize how things get stored”

5. “Our director likes adjusting riser spots/standing charts live at rehearsal. It would be great to have an easy way to create these riser placements/standing charts online and store them for all members to access”

6. “We run more than one ensemble within the organization and need a way to filter the messages, events and music so we can decide when to include which groups”

7. “We have lists of contacts we need to keep organized for our mailing list - sponsors, fans, donors”

8. “I need a quick way to invoice my members their dues and let them have the choice of paying these dues online”

What Does Choir Genius Do for Me?

Our goal at Choir Genius is to streamline the administrative aspects of your choir life, so that you can focus on the music.

To do so, we have provided a few main areas where you can store/manage data, and share them to the right people at the right time.

Members - online user profiles allow members to keep their contact info updated, and you can assign them the right role(s) to determine what they can access in the system. For example, people on your artistic team may be given access to update/load music, or have access to take attendance for members.

Music - An online music library to store digital sheet music, audio files, riser/standing charts, and workshop notes. Once your music library is complete, you can choose to let all your members access all the music stored there, or choose only a select few pieces that you consider to be your “active” repertoire. In addition, if your organization consists of multiple ensembles, our library also allows you to control access by ensemble- this means a chorister/singer will see only those songs on their own ensemble’s repertoire, rather than the full music list for everyone.

For groups that need a more detailed way of tracking how their members are learning their music, there is a Music Learning feature that can be turned on/off for each song.

Calendar - create calendar entries for either repeating events (such as rehearsals) or one-time events (concerts/performances/fundraisers). If needed, you can track Member RSVPs and actual attendance at these events.

How Should I Start?

Great question! :) There is no right way to start. Which features you first try will depend on which administrative needs you deem to be the most pressing for your group.

Here are the first few set-up steps we strongly suggest, based on what most group’s needs are.

• Administrative functions:

  • add users and add calendar events

  • If needed, set up your custom roles (used to separate music, events and messages by ensemble, if your group consists of multiple ensembles)

  • If needed, set up your voice parts

• Music functions:

  • add music and upload file attachments into the music library. If you want to, you can create different categories for the songs you store in the music library.

  • decide on how to share the music; do you plan to give everyone access to the entire music library? Or, will you allow access to certain categories of songs (e.g. Fall Show 2016)?

• Communication function: Choose and set up your communication channels (auto-message, members blogs)

• Adding documents e.g. meeting minutes, bylaws, member expectations, etc.

How Do I Get Help During the Process?

Check this support portal for tutorials that may answer your questions - or try the forums to see what current users are saying.

We also have in-site support that allows you to send messages directly to Support; look for a blue circle on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Are you using a pop up blocker? You’ll want to make sure you allow “intercom”.

I Have Set Up What (I Think) I Need. What’s Next?

The next step depends on how you plan to roll this site out to your general membership. Maybe you want to invite your board and introduce them to the system? You may want to invite a few members at a time, have them test out some of the fetaures and gather feedback. There's no poroblem with jumping in with both feet, either!