What is Fora

What is Fora?

Fora is a vendor management software. It was built to act as a digital rolodex for the event and marketing industry, with enough project management to make it more than a fancy-looking spreadsheet.

The Problem

When someone wanted to work with me, they’d text, email or DM. Sometimes they’d send a calendar invite, sometimes they wouldn’t. Other times I got a Google Drive link with shoot details and reference looks, or an Excel sheet with a day-by-day schedule. Sometimes I got nothing.

This seemed common throughout the industry. My girlfriend makes event content for a range of brands and has been doing so, successfully, for years. When I asked her if her experience was any different, the answer was no.

When I started poking around more, it seemed that this is how almost everyone works. Excel (or Google Sheets) was the answer nearly 100% of the time. They would also say they kept track of vendors by searching through email, or saving accounts on Instagram (through a screenshot or bookmarking the page - good luck keeping track of that).

It didn’t matter if they were a small event planner as a side hustle, or a large agency with multiple locations and hundreds of event producers. It was always the same. Sure, those larger groups might have some sort of task manager or project manager, but they always said the same thing about keeping track of their vendors: an old spreadsheet.

Why Spreadsheets Fail

Spreadsheets were designed to crunch numbers, build charts, and store numeric data, not hold details about human beings.

• They’re hard to update on mobile.

• They don’t capture portfolio, “sweet spot,” or what someone actually loves doing.

• They go stale: nobody keeps them current, so they stop being useful.

Here are some replies when I asked if it worked for them:

• "We have over 1400 vendors in our company Google Sheet. I don't think I've ever used it."

• "The parameters in these sheets aren't the parameters that matter when you're making a decision. It's about portfolio, sweet spot, what they love doing, what they're not great at. That info is never kept in a spreadsheet"

• “I have an old spreadsheet that I tapped out on a couple of years ago... I tried folders in Gmail that are all dedicated to different types of people in different industries, whether it's photography or catering… I’ve also tried to file it geographically like California venues, Texas venues… it’s just not working."

In sum, it's annoying, it doesn't work on your phone, it's impossible to keep updated, nobody in the company even uses it, and information gets old.

So I built Fora to fix this problem. It is an internal database. It’s a way to keep track of vendors across the company.

Who Fora is for:

For now, Fora is designed for the event and marketing industry. It seems like a natural, focused place to begin. Event planners often work with a large and varied group of vendors, and work with them at a high rate. It also helps that I have done several event shoots, and understand this space a little better than the others listed below.

However, if you work with a rotating cast of professionals, you can add them to Fora. We can easily keep track of their information, their rates, their specialty, their communication preference and more. In essence, we keep track of the things that make them human.

A few examples of industries that can use Fora:

• The event industry

• The marketing industry

• The film and TV industry

• The interior design industry

• The construction industry

How Fora works:

Fora is a simple internal vendor database built for project‑by‑project teams. Three ways to add contacts:

1. Add someone manually: a quick form for the basics

   

2. Add someone via CSV: match our data fields to your spreadsheet and import

   

3. Add someone via invitation or QR code: Send a text or email, or scan your custom code, they do the rest

   

Need to update contact info?

• Send the vendor an invite again, approve them in review, and our system will flag the duplicate and prompt you to merge the data.

  

Once your network is added, you can begin to build a Project. This is where you bring all those segmented groups together to actually get something done.

Planning an upcoming holiday party? Create a project, add a description, set the date, time, and location, and invite vendors. Now you can see who’s working the event, their status (pending → confirmed), each person’s role and call time, and vendor-specific notes. You’re on your way to a well-organized, thought-out event.

What happens if your client asks for a status update, you want to share the status of the event with all your vendors, or you want to build a call sheet so everybody knows what is going on?

I’m glad you asked.

We provide an external, view-only, shareable link. This can be branded with your company name or logo, and you can pick and choose what you want to share in this read-only link. At any point, you can un-publish with one click. How nice is that?

To quote a user during a demo: “Wow, you thought of everything.”

Not yet, but we’re working on it. Hearing that mattered because Fora was built by the people who use it. I've done over 100 calls with event professionals, and a lot of the major features came straight from those conversations.

• Sometimes directly: "this would be great if I could share my call time with vendors instead of building it in Excel."

• Sometimes indirectly: "Is there any way a vendor can add themselves? I hate updating my CRM."

We built Fora around one intentional design principle: make it so easy to use that it becomes a seamless addition to the user’s workflow instead of another software they need to learn, or “deal with.”