How Washington National Cathedral Streamlined Event Management

A venue with a lot going on

Washington National Cathedral hosts an unusually wide range of activity. Alongside regular worship services, which can draw up to 3,000 attendees, the Cathedral runs weddings, funerals, galas, corporate receptions, public lectures, concerts, and group tours throughout the year. During busy periods like Holy Week or spring tourist season, multiple large events can take place on the same day across dozens of spaces.

All of this is coordinated by Dosha LaRosa, Director of Calendar and A/V Management, who needed a platform flexible enough to accommodate that variety without requiring a different tool for every event type.

"We needed something much more flexible to accommodate all the different things we do — because we can get software that covered concerts, we can get software that did this, but we couldn't get software that did all of those things. This one kind of checked all the boxes."

The challenge of managing at scale

Before implementing, event production information was compiled manually in Word documents and distributed by email. Data entry was largely one-by-one, and staff in departments like facilities and security had no easy way to access the calendar independently. Information was spread across multiple platforms, and keeping everyone aligned required constant back-and-forth.

"We used to create Word documents, gather information from everyone, put it in one doc, then pass it out again. Now other departments can just go in and add their information without us having to ask them. Before it was sifting through emails trying to figure out who said what, when."

Building a central system

After researching available options, Dosha chose Encore Pro Venue for its flexibility and customization. Working through a structured onboarding process with the team, she built out a system now used across around ten departments, including Guest and Event Management, Audio, Video, Facilities, Security, Worship, and the Cathedral's auxiliary Virginia Mae Center.

Practical improvements have included:

• Centralized event information- production details, staffing, and resources all held in one place rather than across documents and inboxes
• Broader team access- departments that previously had no calendar visibility, including facilities and security, can now check schedules independently on mobile
• Faster data entry- custom data views and write-back functionality reduced what was once hundreds of individual manual entries to a single bulk operation
• Integrations with existing tools- live connections with the Cathedral's ticketing and web publishing systems keep information consistent across platforms

"I managed to get our facilities team, our housekeeping team — people who never really checked the calendar before — and they're like, 'this is great, we can see all the stuff that's happening.' If I can win over the facilities team, I call that a big win."

Growing into the platform

With close to a full year of event data now in Yesplan by Encore Pro, the Cathedral is starting to benefit from having a reliable record of how events actually run, useful context as planning cycles repeat. Departments are still getting up to speed, and areas like budget tracking and additional integrations are on the roadmap for the coming year.

For Dosha, the biggest day-to-day difference has been efficiency, less time spent gathering and re-entering information, and more visibility for everyone involved in delivering events.

"We're almost through a full calendar year of the platform and we have all of that information now. A lot of what happened here was 'what did we do last year?' and then it was up to us to search and figure it out. Now it's all just there."

Learn more about Encore Pro venue management tools or request a demo to see how Yesplan can work for your venue.