Janie Dickerson
Why do arts organisations choose Spektrix, and why do they stay? Ahead, the qualities that set Spektrix apart and how we make a difference for our users.
Spektrix is the fastest growing CRM and ticketing solution for theatres and arts events across the US and Canada, attracting around 60 new user organisations every year. Organisations who choose Spektrix see the vast potential they can unlock with a modern, agile CRM that connects a powerful box office solution with marketing, fundraising and reporting. Spektrix empowers teams to increase revenue and engage audiences.
Our users invest in us, and we invest in our users
Once arts organisations choose Spektrix, they stay with Spektrix - we even have users who have been with us since we launched back in 2008. Our users choose to stay with Spektrix because they know that collective improvement is built into our values.
We’re constantly expanding our features to make our solution better and better and building our support offering to be even more robust. We do all this while staying true to our mission of supporting the sector and its audiences. When it’s time to renew contracts or review CRM providers, our users recognise that we’re still the right choice to grow insights, revenue and loyalty.
Spektrix brings together leaders and communications teams from theatres, concert halls, production companies, visitor attractions and more, creating a dynamic community built around mutual success. Because our success is driven by that of the organisations we work with, it’s in our interests to provide the features and service that help the sector to thrive. As the Spektrix community grows, we grow our team and infrastructure to ensure the quality of our users’ experience always stays ahead of the curve.
Meeting your needs through service, technology and sector support
We’re always growing to stay ahead of your needs. In 2023 alone, we’ve released flexible season pass functionality, enhanced the accessibility of our purchase pathways, and we’ve also introduced two-way integrations for payments and data sharing. And because we're a cloud-based software, when these features are released, they update on every one of our user’s systems automatically – with no extra charges and no manual updating required.
When it comes to software development, Spektrix takes an approach that balances both the long and short term interests of our users.
“We’re focused on ensuring that we can still provide the best possible solution for our clients in 20-30 years’ time. That’s why we’re investing in our system architecture now - so we maintain a strong, stable framework from which to keep building the features that will help the organisations we work with thrive. Our growing engineering team gives us the capacity to complete that vital work, and at the same time to focus on providing a continuous pipeline of improvements to accessibility, communications, payments and more. That way, the organisations we work with enjoy both immediate benefits and long term security, knowing we’re invested in their lasting success.”
-Jason Efstathiou, Director of Software Engineering at Spektrix
Between the events we host, the conferences we attend, and our training, support, and consultation services, we stay in regular communication with our users and the state of the arts sector. We take advantage of these opportunities to gather feedback and stay tapped into our users’ needs, and use this context to guide our prioritization of feature development.
Empowering users through high quality service
Beyond the quality of our technology, our best-in-class support offering makes Spektrix stand out among our peers. We have a robust sector-facing team full of experts in fundraising, ticketing, marketing, training, web integrations, customer service and more. With Spektrix, support doesn’t stop when your system goes live. Our sector-facing team supports you through implementation and beyond, monitoring our users’ success and guiding them towards events, training, and enrichment opportunities. Our in-house support team responds to user support requests and also offers consultancy to help you achieve every strategic goal.
Many of our clients employ lots of seasonal staff and need to be able to quickly train these folks on the Spektrix system. Others face high turnover rates and need to efficiently train many new staff members. To meet this need, we launched a digital on-demand training program. Our on-demand training empowers anyone to build essential Spektrix skills at any time. From new staff members to users who are looking for a refresher, these videos provide comprehensive guidance on essential skills within the system. They also make learning more accessible than ever, providing users the option to use captioning, change the replay speed, and to absorb the training at a pace that’s right for them.
In addition to our on-demand training, we have a dedicated training staff which handles more complex training requests and coaches users on a 1:1 basis. By marrying convenient accessibility with the ability to handle complexity, we’re able to meet our users’ training needs now better than ever.
Robust, tailored technology developed with and for our users
Our software lives on Microsoft Azure, a cloud-based platform giving us the ability to scale our system infinitely to support your busiest days. Eight parallel engineering teams give us the expertise to maintain that capacity at the same time as improving user experience, futureproofing underlying processes, and developing major new features, which are automatically rolled out to every user.
We’re committed to prioritising feature development based on our users’ needs and collaborating with users to design new features to be as useful and intuitive as possible. As a response to user feedback, we prioritised the development of flexible passes, which enable patrons to purchase tickets upfront for multiple events across the season and redeem them at later times. As we developed this feature, we worked closely with our users to ensure we built out the functionality to be as intuitive and useful as possible.
“[Spektrix was] really receptive to my feedback. What I always want to have is a frictionless experience for the patron. It’s definitely a simpler checkout process for them, and buying in multiples is way simpler, so there were some big wins on that side.”
- Jeanna Vella, Director of Marketing and Data Analytics at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company
Supporting arts, culture and entertainment organisations through connection
With 18,000+ Spektrix users worldwide, we regularly bring our community together to share expertise, engage with our team, and learn from partners and peers. Our user community includes theatres, touring companies, music venues and community arts organisations across the UK and Ireland, bringing together a fast-growing network of arts professionals at every stage of their careers.
Our robust events programme offers opportunities to connect with and learn from other Spektrix users. We host regular webinars and digital roundtables throughout the year that share a range of practical and strategic content, and make past webinars accessible on-demand to all. We also bring our yearly in-person event series, Spektrix Hubs, to cities across North America. All of our events are provided at no additional cost to our users: Spektrix is all-inclusive, and that means everything from our software and support to in-person events comes with your subscription.
“Attending the Spektrix Hub was a great opportunity to connect with colleagues across the industry and share working methods and best practices.”
- Spektrix Hubs 2023 attendee
Spektrix also empowers you to combine our powerful ticketing, marketing, CRM and fundraising tools with a wide range of integrated partner products which enable you to achieve even more. Our API and other integration tools enable a wide range of partners to integrate with us, which means that many service providers, from dynamic pricing and digital membership tools to ethical ticket resellers, are able to seamlessly connect with Spektrix. If you’d like to learn more about the partners we work with, check out our Partner Directory, which helps guide users to the partner products that best meet their specific needs.
Our users at Music Theatre Wichita knew their outdated pricing model needed an upgrade. They worked with our partners at TRG Arts to rescale their house and increase ticket revenue. Managing Director Angela Cassette reflected on how much efficiency the streamlined the process of working with Spektrix and TRG Arts brought to her team:
“What we had to do before we had Spektrix was so hard, and so labor intensive, because the data that TRG Arts wanted from us was impossible to get out of our previous system. We just got to a point where we could not continue to function. Now we can get the data we want at our fingertips.”
-Angela Cassette, Managing Director at Music Theatre Wichita
Spektrix for your organisation
From the free resources we make accessible to anyone like our Ticket Sales Dashboard, to the insights we share publicly through our Knowledge Library, to our open-access training, Spektrix is committed to being a true partner to the arts and culture sector.
Think Spektrix might be right for you and ready to learn more? Book a demo with our team to explore how Spektrix can meet your needs. This is a free, no obligation opportunity to discuss what a partnership between Spektrix and your organisation could look like. Even if it won’t be a while until your contract with an existing system is up, please feel welcome to get in touch.
Janie Dickerson (she/her) is an Account Executive at Spektrix