Edinburgh Swing Dance Society: from printouts to checking dancers in on a phone

Edinburgh Swing Dance Society (ESDS) is the oldest and largest swing dance organisation in Edinburgh. It celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2026 and serves around 125 dancers a term, running six teaching terms of roughly six Thursday nights each, plus five to eight socials and workshops a year. Tristan started dancing in 2018 and began organising in 2022, initially to help the society recover after COVID.

"I love the speed, improvisation of Swing and Tap and the flexibility and creativity of Jazz. Dancing for me is community and connection. We've lost too much of both over the last few decades and I want to do my bit to build them back up."

What was life like before DanceCloud?

ESDS had been selling tickets for its larger events on DanceCloud since 2014, but classes and smaller ticket types were still run by hand. They used spreadsheets for ticketing and lead/follow balancing, Stripe for payments. It was slow, and it did not survive contact with a busy event.

"I remember long printouts of personal information being annotated with many dubious exceptions and stuffed into the bottom of a bag, presenting a nightmare for both data entry and privacy."

The cost of that showed up later, in what the society could no longer account for.

"Our society's records are missing whole terms from that time, and our institutional knowledge prior to our use of DanceCloud is a collection of anecdotes."

Why did you move everything across?

Since the pandemic, ESDS has moved towards full adoption of the platform. When Tristan took over in 2022, several ticket types were still sold off the platform, and the reasons were ours to fix. Some dancers were worried about privacy and having to pay online instead of cash on the door. Plus there was a concern around the organisational overhead of using DanceCloud for smaller classes.

For ESDS dancers, familiarity built up as they met DanceCloud at other swing events in Edinburgh and elsewhere in the UK. The remaining blocker was the overhead of running a weekly class through the platform, which the Point of Sale (door management) feature addressed when it launched in 2025. ESDS moved to 100% DanceCloud ticketing in 2026.

Which features do you rely on most?

Asked what they'd hate to lose, Tristan starts with what isn't there:

"Where others clamour for your attention and up-sell you at every swipe, DanceCloud gives you exactly and only what you need to sell tickets for a dance event."

Export matters for a society with three decades of history, because it lets ESDS hold its DanceCloud records alongside the material that predates them.

"The ability to export everything allows us to blend DanceCloud's records with our pre-DanceCloud information easily…"

Point of Sale lets any volunteer check people in from their own phone, with every device staying in sync.

"The ability of volunteers to pull out their phones and turn one registration desk into three or four fully synchronised ones in an instant has been very useful for clearing rushes and getting our classes started on time."

What's different now?

"Since we started using DanceCloud, we lose far less information about our past events, we're able to keep our dancers' personal information secure, we're much less dependent on any one individual, device or document being present for an event to work, we're no longer drowning in ticketing exceptions, and we can check people in far faster than before."

One account also follows a dancer around the country, so registering with another organiser doesn't mean starting again.

"Without DanceCloud, I'd still be stuck texting individual volunteers asking for explanations of smudged handwritten notes in the margins of lists about to enter the shredder. With DanceCloud, I'm able to effortlessly create and sell tickets for an event, understand our society's experience since COVID, to forecast our future attendance and budget, and to plan accordingly for the next 30 years of Swing dance."

What happens when you need help?

Christopher, who founded DanceCloud, teaches with York Lindy, a community-run group of a similar shape to ESDS. Several features in the platform started as ESDS requests, worked through directly with him.

"Whenever we've asked for help, we've received a considered and effective answer within 48-72 hours."

"We have confidence that [Christopher’s] background and interests are aligned with ours, and we find it simple and easy to communicate our needs."

Would you recommend DanceCloud?

"In a world drowning in ad-driven, data-reselling bloatware, DanceCloud is a refreshing vision of what software as a service should be. No ads; straightforward monetisation; small, rapidly loading pages; cross-platform; and above all, simple."

"Once you need to sell tickets to more than 10 or so people in a night, you need a platform like DanceCloud, and you will find no simpler one on the market for running dance events."

Photo credit: photos by evren.gunaydin and provided by ESDS.