Gary Halliday explains how the Firechaser user forum is enabling Southbank Centre to save money and improve the quality of what it delivers online
In recent years the web has become a greater source of engagement between arts organisations and their audiences. Visitors now expect to be able to select their own seats, make a donation, buy a membership and print their own tickets all in the one seamless transaction. For arts organisations this presents a number of issues: web development doesn’t come cheap and neither do the resources to manage it.
Traditionally arts organisations have worked separately, in silos, spending a huge amount of time, and money, developing functionality for their websites. More often than not these functions are very similar and are developed by the same companies who are hired to recreate the functions from scratch multiple times. It’s not hard to see this demonstrated. Just choose to book an event on a few sites and notice how similar the ‘select your own seat’ functions actually are. Some sites will offer the ability to see the view of the stage, some will tell you how many steps you need to walk up and some will highlight which seats have a restricted view. All of these functions were developed separately for the different requirements presented by each organisation, but wouldn’t it be better for audiences if they were offered all of these features?
Born from this need was the Firechaser user forum, a group of arts organisations which get together to share the requirements gathering and the cost of web development. There are several projects currently being discussed by the forum and these are prioritised by the member organisations. Each member of the forum is a representative from an arts organisation that uses Tessitura as its ticketing and CRM software, which means that the functionality only has to be developed once and can be shared. Nobody is committed to paying for a project as it may not be relevant for them; for instance, online direct debit wouldn’t be of much use if you don’t sell memberships.
The forum allows us to save money and improve the quality of what we deliver online, by working together to fund and develop future functionality. At a recent meeting we discussed the development of an online waiting room for busy sales periods, something that we all need at particular times. As each of the member organisations are of different sizes and disciplines the requirements vary across the group. A large contemporary music venue was looking for something quick that automatically allocated seats to customers, whereas at Southbank Centre we were looking for something that allowed customers to select multiple events and then select their own seats. Interestingly the option to automatically seat customers would work in some cases; similarly selecting multiple events in one transaction would work for another venue.
Evidently this collaborative approach is going to benefit not just the organisations involved, in terms of cost and resource, but also the audiences that use our websites. In times when budgets are tight the forum will allow us to deliver functionality that we would not normally be able to afford, or, in some cases, have ever thought of.