Case Study: Venue Dashboard for Band On The Wall
Background
Band On The Wall in Manchester is one of the UK’s oldest and most storied music venues, originally founded as the George & Dragon pub in 1803 and located in the heart of Manchester’s historic Northern Quarter. Its unique name derives from the 1930s, when a stage was built halfway up the wall for musicians, creating the famed “band on the wall” spectacle. Over the decades, it became renowned for its vibrant live music scene—hosting jazz, international artists, and launching Manchester’s post-punk movement, with legends like Buzzcocks, The Fall, and Joy Division performing early gigs there. After an extensive £3.5m transformation completed in the 2020s, Band On The Wall now operates as a contemporary, inclusive venue owned by Inner City Music Ltd, continuing its legacy as a showcase for diverse music and cultural heritage, both in-house and across the UK
The Challenge
There are well documented crises within the grassroots music venue sector which has led to a large number of closures in recent years. As a long standing, and one of the UK's most experienced and respected independent venue operators and national promoters of cultural music, Inner City Music believe that some of this is down to a lack of available resource to develop robust analytical tools, and an inability to share and to learn from the data. This makes the sector vulnerable to rapid changes in market trends and, along with an inability to develop dynamic financial systems to manage cash flow, is a significant challenge for the sector.
The DataTherapy Solution
Band on the Wall and DataTherapy collaborated to build the Venue Dashboard around the common workflows required within any venue setting using the Claris FileMaker platform. It is designed to be simple, intuitive and easy to use. The system supports all the pre-event planning, including advancing, production and marketing and funnels all the operational information into a single package required for the on the night delivery.
Key features include:
All event specific emails are generated within the database and provide a fully auditable record of what has been issued by who and when. With all the industry standard deal types built into a pre-designed set of scripts, building budgets for each event is quick and easy, whether the show is a rental, split or guarantee. Actual spend is booked in through simple resource booking templates matched against fully editable tables of nominal codes to suit any individual business. After show financial analysis and the issuing of settlements is easy, with a wide range of reports exported into Excel. All standard file formats can be stored within the database, linked to specific event records, including images, excel, word and pdf document types, making hosting externally issued documents easy. The CMS module is also designed to communicate with any Wordpress based website using JSON/REST.
ROI:
The designed system makes the entire organisation more efficient and able to manage and control all aspects of the business, providing general improvements in efficiency and return, including but not limited to:-
• The system issues all internal and external emails automatically, issuing contracts and confirmations to external clients and on-sales, ticket information and event notifications internally, saving significant admin time and maximising booker time to keep maintaining a full and busy diary, improving event frequency levels by an anticipated 8%.
• Via the API link with Sparkpost, all mailings are generated directly within the database, saving some £400 per month on mailchimp costs, and at least half a day a week on marketing emailer set up time.
• The automated issuing of settlements through an integration with Scribe has saved the team at least a half day per week within the finance team.
• The JSON connection with the website allows for a consistency of data all the way through from initial event bookings to the purchase of tickets by the public.
• The connecting of audience data, including purchase profile (such as a tendency towards early or late ticket purchasing) and genre interest allows for highly targeted marketing to our customer base, increasing average attendance by almost 11%.
Summary
The Venue Dashboard provides a powerful CRM uniquely focused around venue management incorporating Band on the Wall’s 30 years of experience in producing events. The app provides a ‘Golden Source’ of all ticketing data, linking customers to shows, genres and most importantly purchase profiles.
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