Written by our Marketing Manager, Claire Robinson

The relationship between creative endeavours and analytical data might not be the first thing that springs to mind when people think of arts and culture venues — or even the second or third — but whether you're a performing arts centre, festival, museum or any type of venue with bookable spaces you will have stakeholders who need to understand your organisation and measure its success.

Each field that you fill in or each piece of data that you collect is potentially business intelligence that you can make use of at a later date to measure performance, inform a decision, help you develop a strategy, or simply save you time.

Don't worry, you don't have to be a whizz at Excel formulas or Power BI to harness the power of this data that you are collecting as part of your day-to-day operations: ArtifaxEvent makes it easy.

How to get started 

If you have ArtifaxEvent already you are one step closer to using your business intelligence.

With standard and custom fields, you can capture all the data you need.

• Make sure your colleagues understand the purpose and value of the data you’re asking them to enter, and the importance of entering it consistently
• Augment that data by integrating with other systems (such as box office) to build a fuller picture

Our library of standard reports saves you typing documents to customers, and creating operational reports such as function sheets, What’s On calendars and supplier schedules. That saves time and ensures accuracy.

There are also financial and statistical reports to analyse room and resource usage. The more data you enter over a longer period of time, the more useful the data will become for you as you start to build up an archive of historic data which can help you to spot patterns. Having a year’s worth of resource usage will allow you to spot if there's a resource that you regularly have to outsource in order to meet demand so you know to look into ordering more of that item.

Your data, your way

Wrangling with a master schedule that needs to work for every department? Struggling to pull together data for a board report? If you have a reporting requirement that’s specific to your organisation, our development team can build you a custom report. We can develop reports that pull data from various fields and arrange it in the way that your staff or stakeholders need it. We’ll even help you have different versions for different audiences, so you don’t need to compromise on clarity.

This can not only save hours of admin time and improve the accuracy of shared data, but ensure the data is correctly understood.

If you happen to be a data whizz, you can also extract data as .csv, import directly from Microsoft Excel or use our API to pull data into PowerBI yourself. If you can search for it, you can export it!

Next steps

So, now that I've convinced you of the power of data and hopefully made it seem a little more useful and a bit less tedious, what’s next?

• Think about the data that’s being typed more than once, or copy/pasted. What reports would reduce or remove this?
• Look at the data you're collecting on a regular basis and consider how you could use it to give you some business insight. What's working well for your venue, what isn't? What should you be doing more (or less) of?
• Consider how frequently you would like to receive each report and who in your venue should be receiving them? Our report scheduling feature can automate that for you.
• Speak to one of our Professional Services team to help you figure out how to make the most of the standard features and reports. Our team can also work with you to see if any custom work could help craft the report of your dreams.
• Learn more from our Help Centre. There are articles to read, a reporting webinar that you could watch and a community forum to ask fellow Artifax users which reports they use.
• Attend our next ArtifaxAcademy reporting course. It could save you hours of time which would be well worth a small upfront investment.
• Talk to us about one to one training to show you how to develop and create reports using your own data.

You don’t have ArtifaxEvent? Call us, it will definitely be worth your time!