Seattle Opera Simplifies Performance Planning with DocuSign eSignature

Founded in 1963, the Seattle Opera Company is one of the leading opera companies in the United States and is especially known for its extraordinary productions of the Wagner operas, including Wagner’s epic Ring. The company has earned recognition for the quality of its productions, which see more than 80,000 attendees each year. The company is known for its community programs as well, and hosts school performances, radio broadcasts, and community engagement initiatives that reach more than 400,000 people of all ages annually. 

Before any performance, Seattle Opera often spends years in advance preparing and planning for a production. Not only does it take time to perfect the logistics of the live performance, but the company needs to complete a lot of paperwork before every opening night. 

For instance, Seattle Opera’s accounting and education departments send and collect signatures on many important forms—from performer and union contracts to parent permission forms prior to field trips. But because both departments were using paper-based, manual workflows for the signing and delivery of agreements, the signing process became complicated, time-consuming and costly. Starting in the education department, the Seattle Opera used DocuSign eSignature to become a paperless organization and then expanded the solution’s more efficient agreement workflows to all of its departments. 

Seattle Opera’s manual agreement processes were slow and inefficient 

The Seattle Opera’s paper-based processes were complex and exceptionally slow, especially when trying to secure contracts with performers from around the world, “We would first send a paper contract to a performer’s agent who would then mail it to the performer, often in a completely different country,” said Marissa Betz-Zall, CPA and CGMA of the Seattle Opera Company. “The performer might sign it or come back with questions and then we’d have to make changes and re-send it. That process could take a month or more.” 

Managing archived paper contracts also proved challenging. When the Seattle Opera begins work on a performance, they send out and collect certain documents, like performer contracts. But once a show is ready to open, those same contracts that were often signed months or years before need to be retrieved, which proved a difficult task for Seattle Opera and their paper contracts. 

Transforming Seattle Opera’s agreements with DocuSign eSignature

Seattle Opera ran an initial trial of DocuSign eSignature in its education department. Almost immediately, the company experienced the ease of use and efficiency that DocuSign eSignature enabled. With DocuSign eSignature, the department can easily and quickly gather signed parent permission forms for children that attend performances on school field trips.   

After a successful roll-out of this initial use case, Seattle Opera’s accounting team adopted the solution. With DocuSign eSignature, the department no longer needed to track and store massive paper files and can now digitally send a set of contracts out to ten or even twenty recipients at a time. DocuSign eSignature also interfaced perfectly with the company’s new accounting software, making it fast to deploy and very easy for the staff to begin using. 

According to Betz-Zall, the results were almost immediate. “With DocuSign, we get completed contracts back in minutes instead of weeks or months. And because it digitally stores them in an internal digital repository, we can track the status of each from start to finish and know exactly where documents are stored, as well as who needs to review and sign them next.” 

The unions that represent many of the performers that work with the Seattle Opera quickly embraced digital documents and eSignature. “They wanted to stop receiving massive packets of paper contracts from us. By going digital, we recover the time they spent scanning, reprinting and managing all those big files of paper,” explained Betz-Zall.  

With DocuSign eSignature, Seattle Opera reimagined every operation 

Since first rolling out DocuSign eSignature in its education department, Seattle Opera has expanded adoption throughout the entire organization and hopes to eventually replace every paper contract with a digital one. They have since started using DocuSign eSignature for more sensitive documents like W-9s. “Because of the solution’s proven security and privacy, we’re expanding our DocuSign usage to HR and using it for documents containing sensitive information like social security numbers and payroll payment details,” explained Betz-Zall. 

Overall, the company is more efficient and spends less time on agreement processes with DocuSign eSignature. Employees no longer have to go to the post office, correct errors on paper documents, or search for misplaced contracts. “By integrating DocuSign we have revamped everything. Every workflow is being upgraded—even if it doesn’t involve electronic signature. Our digital transformation sparked a larger internal change in the way we do things to be more efficient,” said Betz-Zall.