Hello from your new co-chair!

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!