Be ambitious

 As a mid-scale producing theatre which also hosts touring shows, the New Wolsey is always looking at ways of working smarter. In 2008 we applied to Arts Council England's AmbITion scheme to improve our key systems, to reduce the duplication of work and enhance our relationship with our audiences. We had systems for booking events into venues and systems for selling tickets, as well as websites and social media: for the most part, these didn’t talk to each other. We wanted better integration, to enable us to collect more information, and to have to enter it only once. This involved a thorough assessment of our systems, website and finance software.

 We prioritised our customer-facing activities, placing particular emphasis on getting the right ticketing and marketing solutions and getting website companies on board. After consulting throughout the organisation and working with our AmbITion consultant we drew up lists of requirements. Central to each system was the ability to interact/ interface/ integrate with all the others.

We entered into a competitive procurement process to look at the range of solutions the costs: it’s a fairly straightforward process until you realise that what you want hasn’t been done on this scale before, or is out of your price range. We decided to forget about the detailed functionality of the different systems (to some extent) and look at the companies behind them. We looked at centralising our various contact databases and chose our ticketing system to be the single source of customer data. This drew us to work with PatronBase, which couldn’t quite meet all of our future requirements, but offered us an affordable solution coupled with a “can do” attitude. Working together we were able to create 90% of what we were after within a relatively short space of time. Our focus then turned to the website, for which we chose Tincan. This has worked very well with PatronBase to create an integrated system for the customer database and events importation. Finally we got Artifax on board for venue management. Events can be imported into PatronBase, and then onto the website. We’re still developing the systems, but there are noticeable positive impacts across the organisation – and overall, ticket sales are up!