Town Hall Seattle Teams Up with Interplay for IT Support
Tech Troubles Slow Down a Coordinated Effort
Town Hall Seattle hosts 425+ radically affordable cultural events with 110,000+ attendees per year, but they’re far more than just a venue. The nonprofit maintains a landmark historic building, plus marketing and production infrastructure for shared community use, helping everyone in the Seattle community take part, be inspired, and use their voice to shape our future.
It takes a great deal of coordinated effort to ensure that all these activities run smoothly, so when Town Hall noticed productivity was lagging due to a backlog of IT requests, they knew they needed a robust IT services provider who would support both their technology and their mission.
Town Hall Finds the Helping Hand They Need
Town Hall’s search for the right provider took a while. As Town Hall leaders interviewed various IT providers, they sometimes felt as if the IT companies they met with were only on a sales visit. But as soon as Town Hall met with Interplay, it was clear they’d found the perfect IT services provider.
“What I felt with [Interplay leaders] Brian and Sean was just immediately, ‘Oh, these guys. They feel like they’re part of our team already,’” explained Mary Cutler, General Manager at Town Hall Seattle. “I just got the feeling that these are real humans who are going to… really start to feel like part of our team.”
Mary’s intuition was correct.
Shelley from Interplay became Town Hall’s primary tech, and she came in every week for six months, getting core IT issues up to date, eliminating Town Hall’s backlog of various accumulated complaints of various sizes, and getting hands-on with three large IT projects: cybersecurity, business continuity, and migration to Office 365.
One day, Mary noticed Shelley updating the eight Surface laptops Town Hall had just received as a donation. “I came in and Shelley had all of them open and was updating every single one of them at once, and I laughed out loud. It was like, “Of course you’re doing them all at once!”
“Just another example of her taking care of all our business,” Mary explained with a laugh.
IT Cooperation That Doesn’t Cost an Arm and a Leg
The biggest benefit Town Hall has experienced since working with Interplay is that staff members can contact Interplay directly without impacting monthly support costs.
“Before [Interplay]… everyone had to send their complaints through me, and I would vet them and send them on to our IT support person” Mary said. “I’m not a technical person… so being able to let everybody do what they need to do and work directly with Interplay has been a game changer for us. Absolutely huge.”
Best of all, as Mary explains, “[Interplay] is absolutely an extension of our staff team, and it never feels like they’re just a vendor. The support they give us is felt every day in our operations. It has really changed our day-to-day quality of office life. It’s a big relief to have them on board.”
