Crowd Engage - Interested?

Hi James,

Yes - we'd definitely be interested in finding out more!

Best,

Sarah

Thanks everyone, great to know. Not quite sure what the e-ticket module will be when it is released in Tessitura. If it did allow for bespoke messaging as well as the delivery of the ticket to mobile like Crowd Engage, it could be the answer for many of us by the looks. I'll let you know here if Crowd Engage come back with anything following this.

Hello all - 

I wanted to pop my nose into this thread and let you know that we at Tessitura, and myself particularly, love hearing of companies you are considering engaging with, and while Crowd Engage is not something that has yet to cross my radar, it is now on the list to investigate. At the same time, we're hearing your questions about Mobile Ticketing and I've reached out to Nara Zitner, Product Owner for TNEW, to help get some clarity around this for you. One thing that might quickly assist is that Mobile Ticketing is currently accessed through our TNEW product and requires version 15.1.6 of Tessitura and v7 of TNEW, so if you have a custom website, this may not be the answer you seek. It is a separate product from our Print at Home tickets, and does not require that you use PAH (in fact, you should use one or the other, but not both). For more information, please do check out our documentation which does step through the process from planning through implementation.

Our answers about Crowd Engage may not be immediate, as we're both at the annual Global Team Summit next week and this may take some time to investigate, so please be patient while we see what we can pull together for you.

James, if you do have things to report back, please do so and we can all benefit from your investigation!

Cheers,

Heather

Note: Edited to fix my dyslexic version from 15.6.1 to the correct 15.1.6

Hi Grae,

In terms of my awareness of the difference. Crowd Engage would push the e-ticket to the mobile phone number registered on the constituent account on the day of the performance, or at a time suitable to the organisation, I believe that is flexible by show.

It also can push bespoke messaging to go with it, which would need investigation as to how that would work with Tessitura, but for us at SW would be useful to communicate on the day in different ways to customers that isn't a pre-show event reminder. The e-ticket is then stored in an apple or android wallet.

Crowd Engage also has the capacity to upsell at the point of that message thing's pre-show, post show or interval drinks, or other products you may wish to highlight.

As far as I'm aware the e-ticket option for Mobile would require logging in to your Tessitura account from a customers perspective. So Crowd Engage if successfully integrated in the way it does with other CRM systems, would remove the need for the customer to login first and access their e-ticket.

(We currently push e-tickets as our preferred method online, but we do not scan tickets, and we encounter quite a few customers who are unable to find their e-tickets, don't realise they have selected e-tickets, or have booked them so far in advance it is quite the challenge to find in their email inbox)

Hoping to get more information on this so that a more informed comparison is available to all.

Thanks,

James

Hello James et al -

It's been a little while since I responded with a resounding "Yes! We have heard of the interest with Crowd Engage" and commited to reaching out to speak to them regarding integration possibilities. The world has changed a lot since February - who would have ever guessed! While it might have taken us a bit longer to have the conversation with the current pandemic, it did finally happen.

I (and others) had a lovely chat with Hugh, the one-man creator, developer, marketer, and support band that is behind Crowd Engage and thought both he and his product were quite impressive and something that we definitely want to keep our eye on moving forward! For the current state of being, both sides agreed that Crowd Engage was not quite ready to hit our full ecosystem and integration world as a partner. However, as I said, we liked what we saw with the product and have no hesitations around Hugh and Crowd Engage working directly with our members to integrate using our API. Hugh seemed to be excited about exploring this with some of our members, so I would encourage those interested to continue the conversation with him.

We'd love to see this become a mature product with on-going development resources and robust support which we can then potentially offer to our 700+ members without flooding current capacity. Please feel free to drop me a line (or respond here) and let me know if anyone proceeds forward with a relationship with Crowd Engage as we'd love to keep our fingers on this pulse.

Hope you are all safe and healthy in what feels like week 287592 of this pandemic.

Cheers,

Heather

Hi Heather,

Thank you very much for coming back to us on this. I can imagine there is a lot going on for you so thanks for making the time to speak with Hugh.

We are still very interested in CrowdEngage. But I think without knowing if it is something that could working as full integration with Tessitura and the possible impact and costs that might come with it, we'd be hesitant to commit, particularly in the current climate. So it might be worth a further discussion further down the line when we and perhaps other venues are in a position to focus and give this the time it needs? (Our current thinking is to move to e-tickets as potentially our only ticketing dispatch method and going cashless - so functionality like this would be very attractive with that in mind).

I shall be keeping in contact with Hugh as I think it is a good product and perhaps if a group of venues were keen to work together to integrate and share the workload and cost perhaps that would be something we would be able to consider a bit further down the line. Would that be a possible option do you know Heather?

If anybody else has thoughts please do reach out or add to the discussion.

Thanks again,

James

Hi James - 

I was really happy to talk to Hugh, and like I said, I think he has a product that is worth keeping an eye on. I would love to be able to eventually officially offer it to our community once it was ready to take on our full community from a business model perspective.

In speaking to Hugh at Crowd Engage, it sounded like an integration with Tessitura would mostly be on Hugh's side using our API and not a huge lift or cost for any member to take on - more of a sponsorship and hand holding into the network. I'd imagine if an organization had some savvier API users that could help Hugh navigate through the API, that might be all that he'd need. I could be wrong about that, so take that with a grain of salt, but that was the impression I got from talking to him.

It's a bit chicken and egg when it comes to our ecosystem and official partners, I realize this. If someone has a product and the support that our members are happy with, then that leads to more leverage for them to be a part of the ecosystem, and yet how do they get that maturity and growth without Tessitura's official stamp of approval? Since we serve over 700 organizations in 10 countries, we do try to hold partners to certain standards of development, support and operational stability. While I might, as a member, be much more willing to throw in with a one-shop person that I felt good about (full disclosure, I totally did this as a member), as product owner I am beholden to you as a member to make sure the choices we support and stamp are the best for the community at large. There's a bit of industry stamina that we expect and I really sincerely hope we see that from Crowd Engage. So the door is definitely not closed on the conversation by any means.

Hope that helps clarify and perhaps spur some innovation and relations out there in the member pool!

Cheers,

Heather