How to Automate Spektrix

Spektrix holds the audience, not just the seat map

Spektrix is the ticketing and CRM platform behind a large part of the arts sector: theatres and performing arts centres, concert halls and opera companies, museums, festivals, touring companies and commercial producers, across the UK and Ireland, North America and Australasia.

The reason it is one system rather than three is the way these organisations are funded. The person who books a Tuesday matinee is the same person who might take a season subscription, become a member, bring a school group and eventually leave a legacy. Split the ticketing from the fundraising and you split that person in half, and the development office ends up making an ask the week after the box office annoyed them.

So ticketing, memberships, donations and email all sit against one customer record. A fundraiser sees what somebody booked. A marketer sees what somebody gave. That single view is the product, and it is why a venue tolerates the pain of moving systems to get it.

Tickets get sold in places the box office cannot see

The trouble is that an arts organisation does not control most of the systems that decide its week.

Sales for a run happen through agents and third-party sellers as well as your own site, and their numbers arrive as a report on somebody else's portal, on somebody else's schedule. A co-produced show settles through the producer. A group booking comes in through a coordinator who works for a school.

The money side is worse. Grant applications and their reporting deadlines live on funder portals that send no reminder anybody sees. Trusts publish what they have funded, and somebody in development is supposed to be reading it. Sponsorship invoices sit in the accounts system. Contracts wait for signature somewhere else again.

All of it is checking, none of it is difficult, and every bit of it competes with an on-sale, a press night and a team of four.

Spektrix

One number for tonight Sales held by agents and third-party sellers, read from their own reporting screens and added to the Spektrix figure so the count is one figure.

Funding dates raised early Application deadlines and grant reporting dates watched on the funders' own portals, surfaced months out rather than the week before.

Listings checked before press night What the local what's-on pages say about your dates, prices and access performances, next to what your own site says.

Automated emails reach the customers Spektrix already knows

Spektrix automates a great deal of the audience relationship, and an organisation should have all of it running before it looks further afield.

Automated email programs fire on customer behaviour rather than a list somebody exported: pre-show and post-show emails, donor thank-yous, birthday messages, reattendance campaigns and abandoned basket reminders, with send-time optimisation and dynamic content inside the message. Segmentation works across ticketing and giving together, so a list can be built from what somebody booked and what they gave in the same query. Reporting ships with more than forty standard reports covering attendance, campaign performance and the fundraising pipeline. The Dotdigital integration carries the email side with data flowing both ways, so engagement writes back to the customer record. The API and web integration put booking, donating and account access on your own site.

That is a well-covered relationship with the audience, and it is all built on transactions Spektrix processed itself.

The agent's allocation is not in there. Neither is the funder's portal, the listings page, the press, or the trust whose grants are published once a year. Those belong to other organisations, and no arts CRM is going to be handed access to them.

A funding deadline can find the development office first

No arts CRM will ever be handed a funder's login. A development office already has one, and the calendar stops depending on who happened to remember.

Funder portals watched for open rounds, application deadlines and the reporting dates attached to grants already awarded, raised months out rather than the week they fall due. A daily total that includes the agents and the third-party sellers, read off each of their own reporting screens and added to the Spektrix number, so tonight's count is one figure instead of four.

Then the things that sit in public and never get checked. Whether the listings sites and the local what's-on pages carry the right dates, prices and access performances for the run. What else opened in town on your press night. New reviews and press mentions for a production while there is still a run left to sell into. Whether a trust has published a funding round that fits the education programme.

Nothing there writes to a customer record or makes an ask. Anything addressed to a donor, a subscriber or a school gets drafted with the booking and giving history already in it, then read and sent by the person whose relationship it actually is.

An arts organisation cannot hire someone to open tabs

Marketing and development teams in this sector are small, and the work above is exactly what gets dropped the week a show is in tech.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens Spektrix the way your box office does, opens a funder's portal, an agent's reporting site or a listings page beside it, and leaves one list with the events and the deadlines attached.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and a workflow can be locked to an explicit list of domains. You can watch a run and stop it. Anything addressed to a customer or a donor waits for a person to send it.

Each workflow below names the sites it opens.