Next year, Proctors Collaborative and Troy Savings Bank Music Hall will migrate to a new, shared ticketing and patron platform. This will also impact several organizations that perform at these venues.
The change will go live for Proctors Theatre, Capital Repertory Theatre, Universal Preservation Hall — the trio under the Proctors Collaborative umbrella — Troy Music Hall, Albany Pro Musica, Schenectady-Saratoga Symphony Orchestra and Opera Saratoga on Jan. 12. They will operate on Tessitura, a widely-used nonprofit arts management platform.
The consortium is switching from Arts Manager, which some participating venues had been using for nearly two decades, because another company, Spektrix, recently bought Arts Manager, said Phillip Morris, CEO of Proctors. Under Spektrix, the venues wouldn’t have access to key services, such as auto-billing. Morris also worried the company would be at risk of another acquisition in the future, putting staff through the labor-intensive burden of switching platforms twice in a short period of time.
After extensive research for a Spektrix alternative, Tessitura emerged the winner for Proctors Collaborative and Troy Music Hall. Though Tessitura is about 10 times more expensive than Arts Manager, Morris said, the partnership with Troy Music Hall made it financially feasible.
The new Capital Region network of Tessitura users is not dissimilar to the organizations’ arrangement under the Arts Manager platform, Morris said. Under that, venues and organizations operated as sublicensees of Arts Manager through Proctors Collaborative, many of which are migrating to this new system. If more arts and cultural groups want to sublicense Tessitura through this new Proctors and Troy Music Hall partnership, the opportunity is there, Morris said.
Jon Elbaum, executive director of Troy Music Hall, said the transfer should be “pretty seamless” for patrons. Current account holders will receive emailed instructions on how to activate their Tessitura account, and any existing subscriptions, tickets and recurring donations will automatically transfer. Under Tessitura, patrons will use one login for all venues and organizations. Elbaum predicts the overall ease of the new online interface will be a welcomed change.
“(Arts Manager) is a pretty clunky platform, from a user experience, and it makes the process of buying tickets or donating or doing much of anything a little more burdensome than it really should be,” he said.
In addition to its patron services, Tessitura is a popular platform among nonprofits because of its library of data reports. This will be particularly important for donations, which are “a key to survival” for nonprofits, Elbaum said, especially amid declining philanthropic giving and restrictions to federal grant-giving.
“While we did something together before with ticketing, no one knew it,” Morris said. “Now we’re doing something together (with Tessitura). We’re proud to say out loud the four cities with four important performing groups are collaborating.”
Correction: A previous version of this story had the incorrect launch date for the new platform.
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