Krupanidhi Group of Institutions digitizes campus events with Zoho Backstage
- INDUSTRY Education
- EVENT TYPE In-person, multi-day
The institution
Krupanidhi Group of Institutions has been shaping young minds for nearly four decades. Located in Bengaluru, India, the campus is home to over 10,000 students from 36+ countries and boasts more than 600 faculty members, a perfect cultural melting pot.
Central to campus life is Element7, the institution's flagship annual fest and one of the top college events in India. A multi-day celebration of talent, competition, and culture, the event draws thousands of participants and spectators for live music, DJ nights, ticketed performances, and dozens of competitions, making the logistics quite demanding each year.
The challenge
In the very first year of its operations, Element7 was run as a large-scale ticketed event, and the organizing team quickly discovered how unprepared the systems were for the scale.
Printed tickets were issued, entries were managed manually, and payments happened entirely offline. The result, as Dr. Sam Paul, Director of Krupanidhi Group of Institutions, put it, was “chaos.”
Duplicate tickets caused confusion at entry points. With no online payment mechanism in place, tracking transactions was as difficult as tracking footfall, and post-event financial reconciliation was slow and imprecise.
Operational inefficiencies aside, the most unmistakable tell was the complexity of the attendee journey itself. As the event grew, so did the complexity of attendee management. Students often registered for multiple events spread across different days—from competitions and performances to DJ nights and live shows. Tracking participation across sessions and validating individual entries became increasingly difficult for the organizing team.
Without a centralized system, keeping track of who had attended what was effectively impossible.
"The event went very well, but we couldn't manage the ticketing. We didn't know how many attendees came, what the expenses were—there was no online payment, and this ended up being a big challenge."
The solution
Going into the second year, the team knew things needed to change. After evaluating several platforms, they discovered Zoho Backstage.
What happened next set the tone for every success that followed. The Zoho team configured the event website and payment gateway remotely, keeping pace at every step.
With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, the platform enabled the organizing team to manage the entire setup independently, without relying on an IT team. Once the system was in place, the team gained complete control over registrations, ticketing, pricing, and event operations, making the entire experience significantly more streamlined and hassle-free.
With a mobile app, the team could keep tabs on registrations coming in by the second, adjust ticket pricing mid-event, close off a competition when it reached capacity, or issue a refund for an attendee who couldn't make it—all without calling anyone or waiting on support. The same attendee who had bought tickets for Day 1, Day 2, live music, the DJ night, and 10 individual competitions could be tracked at each touchpoint, with the team able to see exactly where they had and hadn't checked in.
On the ground, student volunteers managed check-in and check-out themselves after a single mock training session. Attendees arrived with only their phones—digital tickets, digital IDs, and digital receipts—with no physical documents required at any stage.
"Everything was at my fingertips. I could stop tickets, change pricing, manage everything instantly […]. I was able to set things up and see what revenue was coming in, what sponsorships were happening—everything was simple."
Zoho Backstage features the Krupanidhi team relied on:
- No-code event website with integrated registration and payment gateway
- Digital ticketing with QR code-based check-in and check-out
- Real-time dashboards for ticket sales, revenue, and attendance accessible from mobile
- On-the-fly pricing adjustments and competition management
- Fully digital attendee experience—tickets, ID, and receipts on mobile
- Simplified cancellation and refund workflows
Benefits and ROI
The shift from manual operations to Zoho Backstage gave the Krupanidhi team something they had never had before: complete visibility over their own event.
From the moment tickets went on sale to the final check-out on the last day of the fest, the team had a live view of everything including registrations, revenue, sponsorship activity, and per-session attendance. Decisions that once required a phone call or a manual count could now be made in seconds from anywhere.
On the ground, operations ran smoothly enough that student volunteers took full ownership of the check-in process after just one or two days of mock training. Attendees, meanwhile, experienced the event entirely through their phones—no printed tickets to lose, no queues to stand in, no paper receipts to keep track of.
The 360-degree view the platform provided also brought a new level of accountability to the event's finances. Revenue figures were visible in real time, refunds could be processed without friction, and post-event reconciliation, once a tedious exercise, became a far simpler task.
"This app had all 360-degree activities—it was very easy for us to function as organizers. Everything is at your fingertips: the entire process, everything that happens across your event, it's all there."
Future plans
What began as a solution to a first-year failure has become, three years on, a fixture. Zoho Backstage is now simply how Krupanidhi runs its events—built into the planning process so naturally that Dr. Sam Paul says he can start setup just one or two weeks before an event and know it will all come together.
Attendees at Element7 have started asking the organizing team how they put it all together—and the institution has been recommending Zoho Backstage to peer institutions and fellow event organizers ever since.
The goal going forward is straightforward: every campus competition, every mega-event, every ticketed experience at Krupanidhi will run on Zoho Backstage.
"I think this is a very cool app. For anybody who wants to set up an event or run a competition, it is simple—you don't need any technical skills. Zoho is now part of our events. Any competition, anything—even if I start just one or two weeks before—I know everything will happen easily. It's so comfortable to set up with Zoho Backstage."