Info 631 – Information Technology Integration Group Project
Project Proposal
Non-Profit Theater Company Management Software
Sam Chenkin; Chris Grabosky; Neal Magnotta; John Misczak; Leslie Wetzel
Dr. Peter Grillo
1/28/2010
Info 631 Project Proposal
Contents
Overview .................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Arts Revival......................................................................................................................................................... 2
Problem Statement .......................................................................................................................................... 2
Proposal 1 – Tessitura Software (COTS) ...................................................................................................... 4
Proposal 2 – SABOArts™ (SaaS)....................................................................................................................... 5
Proposal 3 – Custom Built Software .............................................................................................................. 6
Sam Chenkin;Chris Grabosky;Neal Magnotta;John Misczak;Leslie Wetzel 1
Info 631 Project Proposal
Overview
Arts Revival
Several enthusiasts of performing arts and other like-minded individuals formed Arts
Revival in 2003 to restore a once beautiful theater that has fallen on rough times.
Arts Revival currently has a mix of full-time, part-time and volunteer employees with a
board of directors overseeing all operations and making management and financial
decisions. A full-time theater manager oversees the care, scheduling of theatre resources,
and maintenance of the theater. A full-time technical director oversees the construction of
sets and maintenance of all theatre equipment including stage, lighting and sound
equipment. A part-time costume designer oversees all equipment in the costume shop and
tracks costumes in storage facilities below the theater. A box office manager is responsible
for scheduling volunteers for box office sales and administering all ticket sales. A part-time
event supervisor and stage manager helps coordinate events within the theater and will
help manage performing arts productions. The original board of five donors also volunteers
time and money and has formed a board of trustees to help make decisions for the benefit
of the theater.
Arts Revival has been gaining recognition in the Philadelphia Performing Arts community
and is looking to further develop and increase its branding and recognition in the industry.
A recently hired director of expansion was employed to help redevelop the image of the
theater and better integrate the theater into the culture of Philadelphians. A marketing
director is assisting the director of expansion in formulating new marketing strategies for
the theater and its productions. The company is also hoping to bring its financial planning
in-house and is actively seeking a director of finance.
Although the organization was formed only several years ago, with a growing audience
base of 25,000 patrons last year the financial forecast for Arts Survival is promising. Last
year the company earned $1 million in revenue, with approximately forty percent from
charitable funding and sixty percent from ticket sales. The company spent approximately
$980,000 in expenses with $730,000 used towards program services, $220,000 utilized for
administrative and general expenditures and $50,000 used for fundraising.
Problem Statement
With the renovations of the theater building recently completed to offer a multi-level 424-
person capacity, Arts Revival is now looking to further develop its audience, funding and
marketing campaigns. The past season had an approximate attendance rate of 42%, an
increase of 3% from the prior year. Arts Revival hopes to increase viewership more rapidly
in its future.
Sam Chenkin;Chris Grabosky;Neal Magnotta;John Misczak;Leslie Wetzel 2
Info 631 Project Proposal
Before renovations to the house, the theater charged a General Admission fee, and seating
was first come, first served. Now as the theater is increasing in reputation and capabilities,
the Board of Directors would like to offer a tiered ticket pricing structure. Arts Revival
would like to implement a tiered ticketing structure. Ideally, seats closer to the stage would
be priced higher , while mezzanine level seating is offered at lower prices.
Additionally, Arts Survival is looking to track its patron attendance statistics, and further
develop targeted marketing and fundraising campaigns towards individuals and groups.
Extensive audience information would enable Arts Revival to track audience development
metrics, which are critical to any new and upcoming theater. Arts Revival, like most
performing arts theaters, relies on charitable contributions and grants. If the company is
able to track its audience retention rates, repeat audience members, and the success of its
targeted marketing approaches, the organization can successfully position itself to attract
new funding and more well-known performers, which will aid in increasing attendance
rates.
Most of the previously mentioned improvements focus on the theater’s box office, which
controls ticket printing, ticket ordering, and can facilitate audience tracking for marketing
and fund raising activities. Arts Revival has hired our consulting company, GRAD
Consulting, to research and conduct a technical and financial analysis of all relevant
solutions for box office management, ticketing and customer relationship management
functions.
Sam Chenkin;Chris Grabosky;Neal Magnotta;John Misczak;Leslie Wetzel 3
Info 631 Project Proposal
Proposal 1 – Tessitura Software (COTS)
In order to address the needs of Arts Revival, GRAD Consulting began to research existing
commercial, off-the-shelf software solutions that other organizations have already
employed. After looking at several different products, we ultimately decided on Tessitura
Software, an enterprise software system designed for arts and cultural organizations.
Tessitura has all of the features that Arts Revival is looking for, including support for
ticketing, subscriptions, and box office transactions, a complete customer relationship
management (CRM) module, functionality to integrate marketing and fundraising activities,
sophisticated analysis tools, and support for the Arts Revival website.
Additionally, Tessitura uses a single database for all information, thus allowing employees
of Arts Revival to track and manage every piece of information about its performances,
employees, customers, and partners in one location. Furthermore, Tessitura supports
multiple venues and companies, so Arts Revival can manage its productions that occur as
part of a tour or partnership with other arts organizations. These features make Tessitura
unique among software products in this area, as many other systems have multiple, non-
integrated databases that offer a convoluted view of the organization’s information assets.
One of the more appealing aspects of Tessitura is the web application program interface
(API) that is included in the software package. It allows Arts Revival to use their existing
website as well as any website they may develop in the future as a frontend to operations
that would normally be done in-house in the software package. The web API does not
include any sort of fee for online transactions, so Arts Revival will be able to keep all of the
revenue from ticket sales and charges under their own roof.
Furthermore, Tessitura will assist Arts Revival in one of the more critical aspects of any
show or performance: marketing. Instead of having a single option or module for
“marketing” that all information must be shoehorned into, Tessitura has marketing
features implemented throughout the software, allowing the organization using the
software to leverage different aspects of their customer relations in their own unique way.
An employee can send a marketing material to an individual customer (say, for a birthday
or loyalty promotion) or to an entire customer type, such as corporate accounts.
Lastly, Tessitura solves the revenue reporting problem that plagues many other theater
and performance management systems. Tessitura comes with over 180 reports to allow
privileged users to glean any piece of information about their organization and its
performances. Additionally, these reports can have parameters added, removed, or
modified to allow for simpler or more complex reports that can be served to any level of
the organization. Arts Revival can also specify its own custom reports that are tailored to
their personal needs when they need to drill down to a certain level of detail.
Sam Chenkin;Chris Grabosky;Neal Magnotta;John Misczak;Leslie Wetzel 4
Info 631 Project Proposal
Proposal 2 – SABOArts™ (SaaS)
The trend in information systems today is towards a hosted software as a service (SaaS)
model. Instead of maintaining local IT resources, organizations are increasingly turning to
specialized solutions maintained “in the cloud.” Organizations pay a monthly or yearly fee –
generally per license – for such service. In this way, organizations can spread the costs of
an implementation over the lifetime of the product rather than securing a large up-front
investment followed by smaller but often unpredictable maintenance costs. Other benefits
include the reduction of local IT resources and quality of service agreements.
However, there are financial ramifications for nonprofits attempting to implement SaaS
solutions. Arts Revival has planned to fund-raise at least half of the implementation costs of
a new ticketing system. The organization is likely to face difficulty raising money for
ongoing operational costs, of which software as a service subscription fees would add to,
compared with the large one-time investment costs of a locally hosted solution.
After examining a number of cloud-based SaaS solutions, GRAD consulting has identified a
best-of-class product. SABOArts, created by SeatAdvisor, is a customizable web-based box
office management system tailored to single-venue theatre organizations. This solution will
allow Arts Revival to sell tickets online, in the theatre, and by phone within several weeks
of purchase and with minimal up-front costs, allowing for larger profits.
SABO Arts provides the fastest, most tightly integrated solution for an SaaS option.
SeatAdvisor provides merchant account tools, ticket scanners, ticket services, and point of
sale devices that seamlessly integrate with its products. All services can be provided
without in-house technical expertise.
Besides the aforementioned financial drawbacks, SABOArts is not particularly tailored to
the nonprofit world. Donor management is not included, although the system does
integrate with BlackBaud e-tapestry, a nonprofit-targeted product that provides many
donor management tools. Also, SABOArts does not support multiple venues, which may
affect Arts Revival in their future dealings with other theater companies
SaaS solutions bring into question the ownership of data. Data hosted in these cloud-based
solutions is not easily accessible. Any organization implementing SABOArts, or any other
SaaS solution, must be content with the provided reporting tools and a lack of migration
capabilities.
Sam Chenkin;Chris Grabosky;Neal Magnotta;John Misczak;Leslie Wetzel 5
Info 631 Project Proposal
Proposal 3 – Custom Built Software
Another alternate solution is custom built software to serve the needs of Arts Revival. Due
to limited budgets of theater groups like Arts Revival, keeping a full time development staff
is unlikely. As a result, many of the theater groups in the area would need to pool resources
to accomplish this solution.
To save time and money, an obvious compromise with a fully custom solution is the
integration of several different free or open source software solutions. Many of these
software programs currently exist such as Fusion Ticket, a web-based software solution
which allows customers to reserve or purchase tickets online and allows Arts Revival to
manage seating. However this software in itself does not meet all of the theater’s needs,
including a CRM solution or further analysis of trends in ticket purchases. This means a
small development team would need to take open source ticket management software and
integrate it with open source CRM solutions and analysis tools.
The result of all the integration is a software solution that will meet the needs of Arts
Revival as well as surrounding theater companies. Because this solution is fully web based,
this means smaller local theater companies can share the same web portal to the software,
resulting in less duplication of efforts and wasted resources.
This solution also has the added benefit of being more customized. While many COTS
solutions allow for “customization”, it is not to the degree of custom software or open
source software. Because Arts Revival would have all of the source code, the organization
could modify any aspect of the software initially or at any time in the future.
Sam Chenkin;Chris Grabosky;Neal Magnotta;John Misczak;Leslie Wetzel 6