Hello and Welcome from your new Co-Chairs!

Hello to all EU/UK Museums and Attractions Community Members!

Thank you for reading this short message. We just wanted to write a quick note to say hello and introduce ourselves as your new Community Co-Chairs for this group. Having joined the Tessitura community as Members during the tumultuous final months of 2020, we are thrilled to finally be in a position to more meaningfully engage with this supportive community of peers, and keen to put some momentum behind reinvigorating this group in the next few months so that you can all come to rely on this as a community hub to come to with whatever it is that is keeping you busy and challenged in future years.

 For now, we just want to leave you with a short introduction, but please do watch this space for further updates in the coming weeks about the initial meetings we’d like to set up and hopefully have you join. A short introduction from each of us below:

 Jenna Whitnall- Head of Ticketing, Royal Collection Trust

 As Head of Ticketing, my remit is a mix of technology, sales, customer service, and people management. At Royal Collection Trust we help facilitate the admissions to all the residents currently inhabited by Her Majesty the Queen including Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, Palace of Holyroodhouse, two Queen’s Galleries (which have no permanent collection but showcase special exhibitions throughout the year) as well as several other smaller sites. In addition to managing the Tessitura database within our organisation, my team also looks after all of the admissions front of house, acts as the central hub to service all bookings coming through the website, and we run a 20-seat contact centre which provides telephone and email customer service for the whole business. My Tessitura journey started back in 2017 when I worked with my fantastic ex-colleagues at the Science Museum Group to help implement Tessitura as a CRM system across their museums, and I was able to continue that journey when, from 2018 I returned to work at RCT and we started our implementation for Tessitura as our ticketing system. For a bit of info about me personally, I’m a Canadian ex-pat living in Southeast London for over a decade with my husband. I’m a huge consumer of all things arts and culture—theatre, music, dance, museums, lectures, zoo, haunted houses…you name it. I’m also an obsessive foodie and an avid traveller. I am thrilled to be stepping into this role as Co-Chair for this community and can’t wait to meet all of you virtually and/or in person in the coming months!

Chris Hallworth- Senior Business Applications and Infrastructure Manager, Royal Collection Trust

My role places me in charge of Royal Collection Trust’s commercial and business applications, seeking ways to improve, streamline and most importantly innovate. Rather than take a purely “technical” approach I believe understanding our users and their requirements is vital to improvement and so I remain immersed in specific uses of Tessitura and our processes as a part of my everyday. Over 10 years ago I started as a temporary member of or ticket sales team and I pride myself on understanding the practical applications of Tessitura for our team even though I have now moved on to a different role. In addition to ticket sales I look after systems for several other areas of our business-- Retail, Website, Picture Library and others. I see Tessitura as being at the heart of a more integrated approach to our applications. As a qualified PM I am often involved in our customisations, upgrades and installations and am looking forward to hearing more about the work you have all done in this area too. Outside of work my favourite sport in horse racing and the thing I enjoy the most is travelling. I look forward to sharing learning in this group with colleagues from across Europe. Nice to meet you!

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In the next few weeks we will be trying to pull together our first few meetings and set up a timeline for the months ahead so people can block dates in calendars. Watch this space and don't forget to subscribe to the email digest for updates. We are hoping to start things off with a few topic-specific sessions with some expert presenters from the community and then pull together a group discussion to see what the best direction of travel might be moving forward.

For now, we'd love it if you could introduce yourself in the comments below, and tell us a few things you'd like to get from this community group, or a few specific areas of interest for you and your organisations so we can keep them in mind for future meetings.

See you soon!

Jenna and Chris