Local Platform: For Entrepreneurs

The DoStuff Local Platform allows entrepreneurs to quickly and easily build a business around “What To Do” in their town.

Local print media has traditionally owned this space, but they haven’t effectively moved to the web and mobile. DoStuff Media saw this opportunity in Austin, and has spent the last three years building the technology and business platform necessary to make Do512.com the leading online entertainment guide in town.

Now, we are excited about finding partners in other cities that can leverage what we have built and learned in their own companies.

  • There’s no technical background necessary, because we host and manage the service
  • The best candidate for a city will be an individual (or team) that has 40 hours/week to dedicate, is actively involved in the entertainment scene and has a strong sales background

Some key features and benefits of the DoStuff Local Platform:

Complete Customization

Not only can the look and feel of the site be customized to fit you and your city, the content and organization will also be a reflection. For example: Do512.com is dominated by the live music scene in Austin. Your site may be more about Art & Culture, Clubbing, Drink Specials, Networking Events, or whatever fits.

Easy Event Aggregation

We will work with you to identify the best sources for event information, and build tools to help gather the most complete event data in your city. After the data is aggregated, we have tools that allow you to quickly curate everything to make sure the information is up to snuff. The entire process takes 10 hours a week to manage 1500 events in Austin.

Audio & Video for 30,000 Bands

Not to mention Images, descriptions, links and more for them too.  All of this will be automatically included on your site, and the platform includes easy tools to add info for new bands as they play your city.

All-Star Reviews & Recommendations

The platform makes it easy to aggregate all the reviews and recommendations of other local media (Weeklies, Dailies, Radio Stations, Bloggers & more). This helps build the loyalty of bloggers, and makes it so your users don’t have to visit 20 different sites to make sure they aren’t missing out on what’s best to do.

The DoStuff Local Algorithm

Events are ranked by our algorithm rather than an editorial process. This will save you time and give your users a better picture of what’s best to do. The criteria used in the algorithm are always changing but they take into account All-Star & user recommendations, past popularity of the event, band and/or venue, and some secret sauce.

Building Community

Everything in the platform is built to create community around the entertainment options in your city. Users can create accounts that lets them easily share what they are up to with their friends and keep up with what their friends are doing.

Facebook Connect

Your visitors can choose to login to all of the functionality available on the platform with their Facebook account.

  • They are more likely to sign up because they don’t need to create a new account just for your site
  • They are able to see which of their Facebook friends are also using your site, and/or in specific events or articles
  • All of a visitors actions on the site can easily be posted to all of their friends – driving more traffic and engagement back to your site.

Tools and Consulting for Growing Traffic

DoStuff has learned a lot about growing traffic and has built a number of tools into the platform to help build your audience: Ticket Giveaways, RSVPs & many more

Content Syndication

Since you’ll have the best event content and functionality in your city, the platform includes tools to share (and profit from) it off of your site. Do512 uses these tools to get 2-3 times the traffic off-site as on Do512.com:

  • A robust Facebook Application that allows users and venues to share what they are up to. See example
  • Widgets to display user, band & venue calendars on Myspace, blogs, or their own site
  • The ability to recreate the entire site on a partner’s site.
  • APIs that allow you to open up all of your data to 3rd party developers should you want to

You can charge for these tools, have it carry your advertising, or just do it to build your brand.

Mobile

Now more than ever it’s important to reach people when they are on the go. The DoStuff platform makes this easy with a version of your site optimized for use on mobile devices (see http://i.Do512.com for example). Your advertisers will love the ability to put offers in front of someone as they are deciding on the next bar to hit.

Email Newsletter Publishing

The platform makes it easy to create good looking HTML email newsletters based on the top events for a day, week, etc.  AND all the tools for registration, RSVPs and other contests will help you build you list of subscribers.

Advertising Tools

Advertising will be the primary source of revenue, so we have spent a lot of time building the best tools in the business to support it. In addition to making it easy to create and manage ads specific to the needs of venues, events, bars, bands, etc – we have tools to create and manage custom campaigns for larger brand advertisers like beer or liquor companies.

At the core of all the advertising tools, we have built in tracking that allows you to show a measurable return on investment to your advertisers. Once you have someone advertising, they are unlikely to quit, and we will provide you the training and support to get them working with you in the first place.

Read some testimonials to see how happy you can make advertisers.

More…

The ability to be alerted when your favorite bands come to town, photo slide shows for party pics, tools for aggregating entertainment related news stories, export data for use in print.

…And Always Adding More

We are constantly working to improve the platform. Through testing changes to the user interface, adding features, integrating with new social networks, and more you can be assured that your site will never become stale.