With the cultural sector facing ever more difficult trading conditions, it becomes even more important to understand their audiences and communicate with them clearly and proactively.

To do that efficiently, cultural organisations need to have really good, up-to-date data about who their audiences are, and how they have interacted with them in the recent past. Having good digital platforms also makes it easier.

There can be few organisations who don’t know this, but for many, making the leap from theory to practice can be difficult. Further, the skills required to produce brilliant creative output and the skills involved in data analytics, gathering digital requirements and procuring data-driven platforms such as a CRM rarely overlap and when budgets are tight, it’s easy to put off investing in a data platform.

That’s why we’re delighted to have worked with Punchdrunk Enrichment recently to help them understand the data they have, the data they need and how they might go about procuring data platforms that meet their needs.

The Challenge

The impetus for Punchdrunk Enrichment, a charity creating transformational theatre for education community and family audiences, was their move in early 2023 to new premises in Wembley and a consequent need to focus on audiences in a new geographical location. While they had a sizeable database of audiences and supporters, they weren’t sure how much of it was relevant to their current needs, and they were reasonably certain their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform needed upgrading, and it needed to integrate better with other digital tools such as their email platform, their finance software and their ambitions for a ticketing system.

The Approach

Our approach to helping Punchdrunk Enrichment was to start by recognising that their data is one of their fundamental business assets. We worked with them to understand the full range of their activities and from there, work out what data they needed and whether the data they currently had was useful to them.

Understanding what activities they carried out also helped us define what they needed a CRM to do, and who needed to have access to it. That enabled us to look at what CRM systems are available and narrow the many hundreds of systems available to a shortlist that met their needs and which were in their budget.

What next?

Punchdrunk Enrichment is now working through our recommendations, and we’re on hand to answer any follow-up questions they may have. We enjoyed working with them, and it appears that the reverse is also true as Polly Barker, their Head of Development said:

"It was a pleasure working with Richard and the whole team. Their thoughtful process has enabled us to re-evaluate our data management in the context of what our charity needs going forward, with clear steps and aims in mind."

If you’re an arts organisation that needs help with data in any way, or procuring technical platforms please don’t hesitate to get in touch as we can help you work out what data you need, how to make it work for you and advise on software platforms that make using digital a pleasure, not a chore.