Holland Festival is the largest performing arts festival in the Netherlands. Many different processes run concurrently during the organisation of the festival, from planning performances and collaborating with artists to signing contracts, and from making travel and accommodation arrangements for artists to developing marketing materials. So you can see why it made so much sense to integrate all the information into one platform.

The challenge: coordinating parallel processes

A quick scan showed the festival organisers that documents and processes were often duplicated. A lot of information was stored in multiple systems that were unable to share this data. If the time of one event was changed, people had to change that across various systems. For a festival with more than forty productions and context programming, this created a huge potential for errors.

Choose a platform that fits your needs. Think about the service you need right now, but also about your ambitions for the future.

For this reason, Holland Festival chose a digital platform for CRM. This platform is also used to streamline the processes for customer service, marketing automation, analysis and application development. “Salesforce offers Software-as-a-Service (SAAS), a platform that we can set up in a way that suits us. Imagine one of those green Lego baseplates on which you can build anything you want,” says Norbert.

Optimisation requires a cleanup

Theatre DeSingel in Antwerp inspired Holland Festival to integrate all their operational processes into one system to get a better grip on planning, marketing and the archives. “This process also included the cleanup of four databases,” says Runa. “Previously, we worked with four different systems: SRO for tickets, Copernica to send marketing emails, PerfectView was our CRM system for funds and relations, and Compasity was for customers with limited visiting data, such as people who had bought tickets for Holland Festival performances at a different theatre.” All this information is now accessible in one system, while the original source remains visible.

''The time we spent on deduplicating lots of different lists, we can now spend on other things''
Norbert Bode

''Finally, we analysed the data of approximately 80,000 relations and 70,000 of these have been incorporated in the new system. When processing personal data, you also have to comply with the GDPR. Runa: “For the required permissions we referred to Copernica, the email marketing tool. People in that database had given their permission for us to contact them via email. We transferred this straight into Salesforce. However, you don’t need permission for all emails. It doesn’t apply to service messages concerning ticket purchases, for example. It took us a while to make sure everything was correct but I think we have got this part around 90% in order now.”

Read more about privacy laws in our article GDPR compliance.

Use your digital archive to tell stories

The inclusion of the planning and production part within the CRM provides the organisation with an up-to-date overview as well as a valuable archive. To set this up, the data were linked. Runa: “It basically means linking together the various fields in a database. Things such as title, director, players, and so on. We also have to add fields for metadata related to import and export; for instance what you can and cannot display in what field. Once that has been done, you can use those fields for current events as well as for the archive.”

“Once this step has been taken, we can more easily draw the audience along with the Holland Festival story,” adds Norbert Bode: “When an artist has performed at the festival before, we can add direct links to information about this. This enables us to reveal all sorts of horizontal and vertical connections, and in that way to engage in true storytelling.”

Make your archived stories publicly available to stay relevant and make it easy to find you.

Linking data or stories to other sources, such as Wikipedia or the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid) is the next step for Holland Festival. This is a great way to further enrich these stories. Norbert Bode: “Together with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the VPRO media company and with the assistance of the NTR (Dutch public service broadcaster), we have already provided access to part of our video archive, making it available to the media and education. This makes us more relevant, too.”

Tips for process innovation

Norbert: “Make sure you have established clear end goals. What do you hope to achieve? There are so many possibilities and as you are working on this project you will discover all sorts of other interesting and valuable things. This is when it is important to try and stay focused so that you don’t run out of budget all of a sudden.” Measurable goals to check your progress are also very helpful. “People with a good technical understanding are essential,” says Norbert, “and you need them to get others on board too.”

Various suppliers to the cultural sector offer system solutions. First, make a list of things for which you can and want to use this system. You can do this together with other organisations, particularly if it concerns options for standardisation, data exchange within the chain and links to other collections.

This article was produced in collaboration with Norbert Bode and Runa Stam of Holland Festival.

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