The opening of a new production, exhibition or attraction offers a chance for your arts and culture team to shine.

But you know that every moment in that spotlight is made possible by hundreds of hours of hard work behind the scenes — work that rarely generates the same level of excitement.

The same principle holds true at Tessitura. New features inevitably garner the most attention. (Don’t worry; there’s an update about the ones we’re working on below. And we hope you’ll join us to preview them in our July webinar.) But less visible infrastructure enhancements are equally critical, ensuring that Tessitura runs efficiently, securely and reliably.

Our Innovation group — which brings together Cloud Services, Product, Security and Engineering — is tasked with striking the right balance between delivering new functionality and making foundational improvements. Both are essential to ensuring Tessitura meets your needs now and in the future.

Enhancing Tessitura's performance

As we look ahead, our long-term vision is clear: We’re building a world where every Tessitura member benefits from our software as a service (SaaS) model. To get there, we’re investing heavily in cloud technology and leveraging its power to accelerate innovation, increase reliability and build flexibility. 

This year, we’re launching two big infrastructure projects. Both reflect our commitment to building a platform that helps you work more efficiently and deliver exceptional service to your customers.

First, we’re updating our SQL database platform. This change brings more stability and reduces downtime during maintenance.

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Second, we’re moving Tessitura Analytics from a self-hosted version of Sisense to Sisense Managed Cloud. Sisense is the leading technology on which Analytics is built. This shift enhances data security and offers faster access to new features.

On other fronts, we continue to enhance performance across our platform. For example, organizations with large amounts of data in sources, transactions and keywords will now experience faster load times. And recent updates to our API have improved response times for online ticket buyers using our e-commerce solution, TNEW. 

Delivering more new features

Since our last update, we’ve made considerable progress on the new features and functionality we plan to release this year.

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Select your own seat for flex packages and digital membership cards

We held Product Discovery sessions earlier this year to refine our development work for flex package select-your-own-seat (SYOS) functionality and digital membership cards. Participants included members from a cross-section of our community. Their feedback was helpful and positive. 

Coding is well underway for SYOS for flex packages. This functionality is currently being tested in our internal TNEW sites. That includes load testing to ensure high performance and adding package and package type products to TNEW admin sites. We’re also working on the new modal window, which will be optimized for mobile devices, that displays the seat map when you add tickets.

We’ve designed three digital membership card templates to ensure you have as much flexibility as possible. They include several configurable options, such as membership name, ID, reciprocal logos and even photos.

Member testing for both features is scheduled for October.

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Streamlined transactions in a browser

We also reached a significant milestone in our journey toward becoming browser-based. Last month, member organizations in North America, the U.K. and Australia successfully completed their first test orders using our simplified transactional path. If you’re using v16, you can explore it in your test environment, too! This initial phase of development covers everything you can do now using QuickSale. Over the next couple of months, we’re working directly with a limited group of members to test the functionality in their production environments — ahead of a full release later this year.

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New out-of-the-box dashboards

With v16, we added the ability to more deeply explore your customer journeys in Analytics. You can visualize not just your customers’ transactions but also their other interactions with you. In the next v16 release, we’re excited to share four new, easy-to-use dashboards that will help you understand customer behavior from the moment you log in. These out-of-the-box tools also allow you to track customer service issues (CSIs) and special activities. 

If you want to see these new features in action, I encourage you to register for our July webinar. We’ll preview them in more detail and answer your questions. And if you’re planning to join us at TLCC Anaheim in-person or virtually, check out the technology keynote and product sessions for more updates. 

Accessing these benefits with v16

Finally, we continue to see more organizations upgrading to v16, with 49% of our total member base now on this latest version. We increasingly hear that the recent upgrade experience surpasses expectations. Members are excited to take advantage of the improvements. Here’s what a few of them have said:

• “We had a wonderful migration day. We felt very supported by Tessitura.”
• “It all went more smoothly and was easier than I anticipated.”
• “It couldn’t have gone better.”
• “We’ve been genuinely thrilled with the experience.”

Remember, you don’t have to navigate the v16 upgrade on your own. When you’re ready, you’ll be assigned a product adoption specialist to work alongside you every step of the way. Your personal v16 concierge will help you create a plan and timeline to reach your upgrade goals. If you’ve not already done so, please get in touch to start a conversation. 

Getting access to v16 is the first step in unlocking all these new features. We continue to strengthen the platform with the enhancements you tell us will bring you the most value. Thanks to your feedback, each v16 release includes several improvements to support your day-to-day work, including top suggestions from the ideas board. Recent releases have added sorting fixes for orders, more accurate contribution dates, contribution totals at a glance and greater efficiency managing constituent notes. All were inspired by your ideas! 

Again, I hope you’ll join us in July to learn more about the work we’re doing to benefit you. And, in the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out if you have feedback or questions.

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