Screening for the Perfect Entertainer

My life has been blessed with great clients and party hosts. One of my clients is a large corporation, who trusts me to book entertainers (face painters and balloon artists) into Grand Openings of newly rebranded stores up and down the East Coast. Since I have a large network of painty and twisty peeps, I can usually find an insured, awesome artist through the classes and conventions I have attended in my 17 years as a party entertainer.

But, sometimes I need to find an artist in an area where I don’t have connections with anyone local.

If you are planning an event, what is your “go to” source for finding an entertainer?

Do you post on Facebook to your friends, hoping to get a personal recommendation?

Do you search for “entertainers near me” on Google, YELP, or some other search engine? Do you look in your local business listing or town directory? Do you go to a national database, that advertises that they can find you an entertainer for ANYTHING, ANYWHERE?

Or do you look through that pile of business cards on your desk for the last person you saw at a fair, festival, school carnival, fund raiser, or corporate picnic you attended.

These are all useful strategies, and I can say I have used all of them, especially Facebook referrals to identify entertainers in unfamiliar places.

But, in order to maintain the high reputation (see our recent customer satisfaction results below) that my company is known for, I can’t just hire ANYONE! I need to screen them to make sure they are a good match for my client’s needs. So, I kind of “stalk” their internet presence, to see what I may or may not be getting. After all, they are representing Bella Faccia Painting, and my corporate client when they are on site at the Grand Openings.

Perhaps you might find my “vetting” process helpful as you do your Due diligence on an unknown entertainer.

1) Do they have a web site? Does it feature insurance, certifications, and photos that look current and high quality? Do they have testimonials from REAL clients (not their mother, sister, or aunt Mary).

2) Do they have a Google Business listing…after all it is FREE and offers a way for their customers to rate them after the gig. If they aren’t listed in Google’s directories, how are their clients supposed to find them?

3) Do they have a YELP rating, or reviews on YELP for their category? Again, to get a YELP listing,they need to invest nothing! So why not do it, if they are a legitimate business?

4) Do they have an active and current Facebook BUSINESS page? Do they have a “following” of fun and loyal fans that comment, like and share their posts? Or are the fans on their page all OTHER entertainers, which will often trade “I’ll like your page, if you like mine…” These other entertainers may not even KNOW the person, yet now they are a Fan? That’s weird.

5) Do they have an Instagram account where they show fun smiling faces on the job, as well as their best work…perhaps a portfolio piece or two?

6) If I can’t find them on a Facebook business listing, then is their personal Facebook page clean of political rants, absent of obscenities, and awkward photos of their last social encounter? After all, we are talking about family entertainers here! If I am going to have someone putting makeup on a child’s face, then I want them to also be a decent professional role model in front of children.

So now that I did my due diligence and I feel comfortable reaching out to them personally, I do so by phone or email. For me, prompt responsiveness is REALLY really important, and if they return my phone call or email quickly, or better yet, actually answer the phone themselves, they move to the top of my vetted list.

We believe that our responsiveness to client inquiries has helped earn our great customer satisfaction scores, which appear below.

I am proud to release our customer satisfaction results from surveys in 2018. We not only had near perfect scores AGAIN (8 years running now), but we improved over the previous year, in BOTH locations: New Jersey and Ohio. We are super proud of the work we do on the job, but also in the planning and follow-up. We feel that good planning helps to make for a perfect event, and hope that our customers appreciate our expertise as a “party-partner” to make their event go smoothly.