Richard Tammar, Senior Director of Digital Strategy at Travel Portland, shares how Cruncho Events transformed their event management system and helped streamline the way they engage with visitors.

“Our old system was fine, but it was engineered for a different use case. Development had stalled, feature requests went unanswered, and costs kept rising. It was like living in a small, outdated house with a growing family—we were making it work, but it wasn’t ideal.”

Richard Tammar

Senior Director of Digital Strategy at Travel Portland

‍Challenge: A flexible system

Travel Portland’s vibrant event scene is a major draw for visitors—especially those coming from nearby cities. Travel Portland maintains the city’s most comprehensive events calendar, publishing over 5,000 events annually, resulting in more than 1 million page views. But their legacy system wasn’t keeping up.
Travel Portland needed a more flexible, future-ready solution that could scale with their needs.

‍The Vision: A smarter, more connected event ecosystem

Travel Portland’s long-term vision is to create a smarter, more connected event ecosystem that not only promotes tourism but also serves the city’s residents and partners more effectively. By leveraging Cruncho Events, Travel Portland is evolving from simply publishing event listings to orchestrating a dynamic, data-driven platform that powers discovery, drives engagement, and strengthens relationships with venues, producers, and regional organizations.

“Cruncho was a company that not only understood our business, but seemed actively engaged in improving it!”

Richard Tammar

Senior Director of Digital Strategy at Travel Portland

‍Solution: A dynamic Event Manager

The Event Manager provided Travel Portland with a comprehensive platform that:

• Event producers can pull in rich content—photos, videos, social feeds—directly from Facebook to enhance their listings.

• The data feed ingestion replaces manual data entry, eliminating the tedious “review, copy, and paste” routine.
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• Streamlines data sharing and collaboration with partner organizations, enabling scalable event syndication across networks.


Since the transition to Cruncho in November 2024, Travelportland’s event calendar has thrived, with impressive stats:
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• Over 250 active event organizers onboarded.
• More than 1500 events published.
• Between 400 - 600 events live at any given time, ensuring there’s always something exciting on the horizon.

“Perhaps others will say the feature set or the pricing, but I was particularly impressed with the dynamism, enthusiasm and responsiveness of Cruncho's team. It’s genuinely a pleasure working with Cruncho, and I definitely can’t say the same about all of our vendors!”

Richard Tammar

Senior Director of Digital Strategy at Travel Portland

‍Results: Transforming Event Management and Visitor Engagement

The collaboration between Travel Portland and Cruncho resulted in a significantly more efficient and scalable event management process. Cruncho’s platform enabled automation of event data collection, replacing manual input with feeds from key venues, and enhanced event listings with multimedia and social integration. Looking ahead, Travel Portland sees immense potential in what’s to come. With Cruncho’s forward-thinking approach, this partnership is set to grow in bold and unexpected ways, reshaping how experiences are created and shared.

“I am most excited about the possibilities the platform offers to better manage the flow of data.”

Richard Tammar

Senior Director of Digital Strategy at Travel Portland