Bringing concerts, memberships, and newsletters together, the Lethbridge Folk Club story

The Lethbridge Folk Club has presented live music in Lethbridge, Alberta, since 1979. It’s now in its 47th season. A team of 39 people, including a nine-person board, runs the club, which has more than 100 paying members and over 1,000 people on its mailing list.

“We’re very much an event-by-event sort of group,” says Phil Rosenzweig, the club’s President. “For each concert we have to pay artist fees and sound costs and venue costs.”

In July 2026, the club moved its concerts, season passes, memberships, and newsletters onto Zeffy. Since then, it has raised CA$17,748, most of it from ticket sales.

Before Zeffy, the club’s tools lived in different places. Payments went through Square. Memberships were tracked in an Excel spreadsheet. Newsletters were plain emails sent to the list in that spreadsheet, and files sat in Google Workspace.

“We had little bits of different components of what we used in different places,” says Phil. “Nothing was together in one place.”

Bringing it all together in Zeffy

A board member told Phil about Zeffy. He started with event tickets. Once those were running, he found memberships, donations, and newsletters were already in the same account.

“Email communications are very well managed,” says Phil. “Newsletters, easy to do.”

Today the club sells single tickets, season passes, and memberships on Zeffy, plus coffee and club merch through an online shop. It also takes donations for programs like its Porchfest Musician Fund. The ticket form is embedded right on the club’s website. The club also advertises Zeffy tickets on its Facebook page with considerable success and uses QR codes on its concert posters to bring people directly to a campaign.

“Being able to embed the Zeffy form directly on our website has helped a lot, because people see the order form right there,” says Phil. “They don’t have to click on a link to take them somewhere else.”

Dropping transaction fees mattered too. Phil estimates the club was paying about $1,100 a year in Microsoft and Square fees.

“We’re not a huge organization,” says Phil. “To us, that’s considerable savings.”

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Concert nights and newsletters

On concert nights, the club prints QR codes on its tickets and checks people in with Zeffy’s check-in tool. Extra tickets sell at the door with Tap to Pay. Season passes have become a good source of revenue, so the money comes in before each show. Concerts also grow the club’s community. “We find that many concertgoers also donate or become members,” says Phil.

Ticket buyers and members now sit in one contact list in Zeffy. “Much easier to send emails to selected categories,” says Phil. Between shows, the club has sent 17 email campaigns through Zeffy’s email tool since July, with 6,216 deliveries. This fall it also ran a 2027 membership renewal campaign, and members are starting to renew.

“We send more professional newsletters out and we can tailor our emails a lot better than we ever had before,” says Phil. “So that’s a big improvement for us.” He adds, “The more you use it, the more familiar you get with it, the easier it is to use.”

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Sharing Zeffy with other arts groups

Phil also led a session on Zeffy for other arts groups at the Alberta Touring Alliance Showcase.

“Once you’ve had a chance to work with the program, it’s easy to use and adaptable,” says Phil. “Zeffy is willing to review improvements and add feature wish list items.”

• CA$17,748 raised since July 2026

• CA$887 saved since choosing Zeffy

• 17 email campaigns and 6,216 deliveries since July

• 146 ticket buyers and donors

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“If you’re using multiple platforms, this puts everything together for you and it makes things a lot easier,” says Phil.