The Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) is Australia’s premier Indigenous art fair, showcasing the best of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander art and cultures. CIAF is committed to strengthening and celebrating Indigenous cultures and society, creating professional development opportunities for artists and facilitating cultural exchange between artists and visitors.
While CIAF continues to showcase the very best and most vibrant creative output from Indigenous Queensland artists and communities, CIAF General Manager, Darrell Harris, identified a transparency gap, internally, which arose from a lack of a collaborative enterprise.
“The need for project management software was quite evident. Everyone here is very capable and works very hard, but we did not have any software that encompassed and intertwined each person’s role, so that we could track where each member of the team was at. And so, I identified that there was a need for more transparency and accountability across our projects.” Darrell says.
SurePact’s software was the missing piece of the puzzle and has allowed CIAF to unlock its full potential and enable true collaboration and transparency. In particular, CIAF uses SurePact’s grant management module to manage all lifecycle stages of grant delivery, with full accessibility and visibility – centrally housing all contracts, documents and information related to a grant in one location with a robust audit trail.
“As an organisation, we rely on grants to facilitate everything we do. So, inputting those grants into SurePact, giving an overview of organisation in one place, and a high-level understanding of which milestones need to be hit and when, has been very beneficial,” CIAF Lead Project Officer Megsi O’Toole says.
CIAF is also in the initial stages of using SurePact’s project management and contract delivery modules to ensure transparency, accountability and compliance across the organisation, which Ms. O’Toole identifies as the most important component of SurePact for CIAF.
“Internally, all of our staff have access to SurePact, and are currently using it to track their projects on a daily basis. From the perspective of the staff, what has been most beneficial is being able to manage workloads. The software is transparent and tangible, you can see exactly what people are working on, giving the team an insight into other staff members workloads – and being able to offer assistance where needed. So, even in just the first month that we have been using SurePact, it has really helped to clarify people’s roles.” Megsi says.
“Closer to the event, we will invite our PR, marketing team, artists, performers, security team, and external contractors to use SurePact to collaborate, as well as key stakeholders like the Cairns Convention Centre and Cairns Regional Council.
“SurePact’s functionality is simple, but there is a depth of features. We are still discovering all the things it can do for us. Such as the Asset Management register to track completed artworks that we have commissioned. Once you understand what the system needs you to do to move forward, it is very easy.”
With intelligent and customisable workflows, built-in analytics and real-time reporting dashboards, SurePact is helping CIAF to streamline all project activities in one place ahead of this year’s CIAF event (to be held from 10-19 November 2021).
“To bring that collaboration in together, to have everyone working on the one platform, has been beneficial for us,” she says.
