Hello everyone, hope you all had a great weekend :)
I am super excited to announce that I am joining the wonderful Jenna Whitnall as co-chair of the EU Museums & Attractions community. I’m really looking forward to getting stuck in and working with her to build this group into a useful resource for us all.
A little about me:
My name is Jon Haworth (pronouns he/him) and I work at Tate as the Senior Commercial Systems Manager. My remit covers all our audience-facing technology, so not just Tessitura but also things like ecommerce, email automation, telephony and so on. I’ve been a lifelong techie and arts lover so having a job where I get to play with lots of fun technology in an arts context means I am very much in my happy place! In my spare time I am a bad pianist and a slightly better cook; I love food and wine and going out for dinner with good friends. I’m on LinkedIn and Instagram if you want to connect with me on either of those.
And a little about Tate:
We hold the national collection of art, and across our four galleries in London, Liverpool and St Ives we typically welcome between 8 and 9 million visitors – or at least we did pre-pandemic, but happily the numbers we’re seeing are starting to recover, as I hope everyone else’s are as well. We believe that art is for everyone, and our vision is to serve as artistically adventurous and culturally inclusive galleries for our communities, the UK, and the world. You can find out more about us on our website.
We are quite new to Tessitura, having gone live in July this year, and although we’ve had the fair share of challenges that you’d expect for any major digital transformation project it’s already changing the way we work as an organisation. During our lengthy implementation period I spent a great deal of time chatting with people who were already using it, many of them members of this very community, and I will forever be grateful to them all for sharing their expertise so openly and freely. This unique community aspect of Tessitura was one of the key reasons we selected it in the first place, and as a firm believer that a rising tide lifts all boats I jumped at the opportunity to co-chair this group and contribute back to the community that has already helped me so much – so here I am, and I hope that Jenna and I can grow this into a space where we can all come together to solve our problems and share our successes (and meet up for a beer from time to time!)
Keep an eye out for some info about the next set of meet-ups we’re planning, and in the meantime please do say hi in the comments below, especially if – like me – you’re new to the community. Hope to see you all soon!
Hi Jon, thank you for your message, I missed you at TLCC!
National Museums Scotland are also new to the community, we went live at the end of September! We've only done MVP, which is exhibition ticketing and membership, so moving on to site ticketing (we have 4 sites in total), event ticketing and major giving in 2023. I'm particularly keen to hear how other organisations are managing onboarding staff and encouraging organisational change.
Looking forward to lots of invaluable discussions with others in this group!
Hi Hannah, exciting stuff and congratulations on the go-live! We did a (very large...) MVP ourselves and haven't got to the fundraising/major giving piece yet - perhaps something for further down the line, but I understand this phased rollout is quite a common approach taken by other Tessitura users.
Driving the organisational change and winning hearts and minds is always a challenge with big tech projects - and of course the easiest way to do this is to demonstrate some wins, we've been able to deliver a few of these already and it's so nice to be able to show people that we've unlocked something they've never had before. We've also found that introducing staff to their peers at other organisations has helped build some enthusiasm and excitement about the possibilities for Tessitura and hopefully this group can help your teams make some of those connections.
In terms of onboarding and training your staff, Jenna Whitnall and Sarah Berryman (she/her) did an amazing presentation at TLCC about their approach to this and I'd definitely suggest reaching out to them to pick their brains.
Look forward to meeting you either virtually or in person soon! But in the meantime if you want to chat to a fellow Tessitura newbie feel free to give me a shout
Thanks for the shout out Jon Haworth and congrats on going live Hannah! I'm co-chairing a new community group all about onboarding, upskilling and training, so please do join us at the link below. And don't hesitate to get in touch if you'd like to chat
community.tessituranetwork.com/.../