It was really clear, almost immediately, that Tessitura was going to be the best answer for us.

We saw so much potential in Tessitura to not only meet the baseline requirements that we had, but to achieve some things that we had hoped for, being able to go above and beyond in terms of what we could accomplish and understanding our audience better in the multi-faceted ways that they interact with the museum.

We went live just a couple of months ago. So far, we have ticketing for all of our major business areas going smoothly by phone, in person, online, at self-serve kiosks. We've launched membership sales with electronic passes. We've handled school field trip reservations. We've got the fundraising folks using the system. 

“Tessitura's made a real commitment to growth in the museum sector, and it's evident that Tessitura's commitment is shaping changes in functionality that the museum audience in particular needs.”

Managing Scholarship Funding with Tessitura

We are ironing out a workflow to support a customization that Tessitura helped us put in place for scholarship funding flow management, which is really exciting.
It's been a long, painful point of friction in terms of the guest experience and how things work inter-departmentally at the museum: when school field trips receive scholarship funding, and how that's managed. It was paper forms passed between departments and missing information on the day of visit. 

We’ve cleaned all of that up with a process where the request is put directly into the system when the reservation comes in. The funding administrators in education review those requests and can apply the funding directly to the order, have it go out directly through the acknowledgement system as a confirmation, letting the group know that they've received funding. And all of it tracks down against available funding, so they know where they stand at any given moment with the different funds that they're managing and how much they have left to apply. That in and of itself is transformative.
 

Pricing Rules

My favorite thing about Tessitura so far is pricing rules. We have probably 30 pricing rules in place in the system now, doing a variety of things. Our member discounted pricing online is triggered through pricing rules. We have internal buy-out pricing and external buy-out pricing. We have message rules that help reinforce sales instructions for particularly tricky products that have a lot of steps. We have an offer for a particular corporate sponsor for discounted membership vouchers that they're using as part of a community program that's triggered when the owner or initiator on the order is that company. 

So we've just got a lot of neat things that are being triggered automatically through pricing rules that previously, people needed to remember to handle in particular ways through manual processes.

Tessitura's Commitment to Museums

Tessitura's made a real commitment to growth in the museum sector. The growth in that part of the audience has been really amazing, and it's evident that Tessitura's commitment to that is shaping changes in functionality that the museum audience in particular needs. 

And there's a vibrant community [at the conference] of museum users sharing ideas, working on solutions to common problems. We have a shared set of needs, and Tessitura's been really committed to understanding those and responsive to figuring out how to develop the software to fill them. .