Tessitura has always been shaped through a culture of listening. 

We’re a member‑owned nonprofit. Because of that, our priorities always begin with our member organizations. And our leadership team continually reflects on the feedback we hear from members around the globe. 

Member input comes through community forums and gatherings, regular conversations with our team, annual surveys and conferences. In the cooperative venture of the Tessitura community, your work is to provide feedback; ours is to act on it. We also closely follow the broader arts and culture industry, as well as the technology sector, to stay ahead of trends. 

But most of all, your input fuels us. Because of it, we’re investing in our technology more than ever before. In planning for this calendar year, we synthesized what we’ve been hearing from our members. Four key themes emerge as your pressing needs, and these translate to our four priorities for 2026. 

We know cultural organizations are being asked to:

1. Accomplish more with less

With structural and financial challenges across every region we serve, organizations are being asked to hit ambitious targets with limited staff. You’ve told us this means Tessitura needs to be both powerful and intuitive. We’re developing solutions that increase your effectiveness while also improving your day-to-day experience with Tessitura.

2. Use data to build customer relationships

In a choppy economic market, organizations must work harder than ever to find and retain donors and ticket buyers. Building and maintaining loyalty is more critical than ever. You’ve shared that while you love the power of our analytics tools, you want more help making sense of the data. We’re releasing new capabilities to help surface new insights.

3. Strengthen revenue streams

Diversification matters more than ever. In today’s world, cultural organizations cannot rely on a single major revenue line. Just like a balanced diet, having strength across fundraising, ticketing, membership, education and other streams allows for far greater resilience in turbulent times. We’re focused on supporting you in building and expanding these revenue streams.

4. Provide seamless e‑commerce experiences

You’ve told us you want delightful, low‑friction digital experiences for your customers. We’re continuing work on our flexible e-commerce platform to make every interaction even more seamless.

Tessitura’s technology evolution

Underpinning all these priorities is Tessitura’s major technology evolution. Over the past five years, we’ve invested tens of millions of dollars in the Tessitura platform. We’ve improved payments, the user interface and infrastructure. The number of new capabilities continues to increase. And we have grown our innovation team by 300%. 

We now have the largest and most capable innovation team in Tessitura’s history. That means we can release more capabilities, faster, across our entire platform. We expect 2026 to be our biggest year yet.

Strengthening our cloud infrastructure

A major part of this evolution has been our cloud infrastructure. We’ve achieved 99.99% uptime for the past two years, and we continue to strengthen our resilience. We are:

• Making significant enhancements to our cloud database infrastructure. That’s increasing horsepower and improving throughput for high-demand moments like big on-sales. 
• Upgrading our Tessitura Analytics infrastructure. This lays the groundwork for more AI-centered insights and analytics power.
• Continuously improving our cybersecurity posture to keep our systems, and your data, safe.

Tessitura Merchant Services

Another major pillar of our technology transformation is Tessitura Merchant Services, built on the next-generation platform of payment powerhouse Adyen. Merchant Services is convenient for your customers and continually gains new capabilities. And unlike our previous third-party payment providers, it’s supported directly by Tessitura’s expert, responsive team.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve seen that members who adopt Merchant Services along with our fraud prevention recommendations see dramatic reductions in chargebacks and associated costs. Some fun statistics:

• Visa and Mastercard suggest a goal of no more than one chargeback in every 200 transactions. 
• Tessitura Merchant Services takes that to an average of one chargeback in 1,400 transactions. 
• When you turn on 3D Secure, that number drops to one chargeback in nearly 2,000 transactions. That’s 10x better than the industry target. 

 Tessitura Merchant Services with 3D Secure reduces chargebacks to one in nearly 2,000 transactions — 10x better than the industry target.

Tessitura v16: The future of our technology platform

All of these investments support our most impactful shift yet: Tessitura Version 16, the future of our technology platform. With v16’s new interface, many teams now use Tessitura entirely through the browser. And we’re adding more features in every release. Version 16 delivers frequent updates and new capabilities: New browser screens, dashboards, portfolio enhancements, in‑app guides, and other features are released throughout the year.

More and more features are being built natively into the v16 platform. Mobile wallet ticketing and digital membership cards, for example, used to require custom code or third-party tools. Now those are core functionality, along with membership benefits tracking, round-up contributions and add-to-calendar links. 

Supporting arts and culture organizations for the long haul

Our huge investment in innovation is making an impact. Our cloud enhancements, interface transformation, game-changing payment platform and ever-growing feature set all demonstrate the scale of our commitment.

We’ve reworked our product roadmap to better support our accelerated innovation. We’re also launching an advisory council to guide our product strategy. This blog post from our VP of Product, Debra Weissman, describes those initiatives and shares highlights of what we’re working on.

We are helping organizations accomplish more with less through browser‑based tools, automation, and guided experiences. Our improvements to analytics, AI and integrations support data‑driven decision‑making. We’re strengthening revenue through memberships, payments and compliance features. And we’re helping you deliver seamless, accessible customer experiences. As always, we’re dedicated to being the partner our members need in changing times.