Even before COVID-19 wholly disrupted our industry, Kristin Darrow questioned whether the term “ticketing” truly represented what we do every day with venues, performers, and fans. To her, one of the performing arts industry’s true leaders who has championed the intersection of technology and the arts for more than two decades, there is much more to the job.
“I always think it’s interesting that our industry continues to use the term ‘ticketing’ for what has become essentially end-to-end customer service. Ticketing is about connecting people to experiences they love,” says Darrow, who shaped the digital blueprint for nonprofit venues and organizations for 15 years as the Chief Product Officer at Tessitura Network, maker of a unified CRM solution that powers more than 700 of the top arts and culture organizations across the world.
A year of pandemic-induced cancellations and pivots has only reinforced Darrow’s notion. More than ever, Darrow believes that there’s a clear formula for success in ticketing:
right person + right experience + right price = happy ticketed customer (and venue/artist)
As ticketed performances come back and the coronavirus continues to present logistical obstacles, she says the most significant challenges will largely remain the same: Creating compelling experiences audiences want to attend, identifying product-market fit, nailing the price point and discount strategy, and customer service that hits the mark. The difference is now there are new forces impacting how we chart our courses.
Darrow was instrumental in connecting True Tickets with Tessitura’s amazing network to offer enhanced and secure contactless digital ticketing to hundreds of leading arts organizations across the globe. I spoke with Kristin to hear her perspectives on how the pandemic will impact and influence the future of ticketing and live events.
With re-opening becoming a reality for many, what are some of the common safety steps you’re seeing across member venues?
I am amazed at the innovations venues and institutions have come up with to allow their communities to safely convene.
There have been entire shifts in in-person gathering protocol — sure, lots of events moved outdoors where possible but lots of nuances have emerged around flexible use of timed admission to create natural traffic flow with social distance built in, like creative uses of plexiglass “bubbles” on wheels to keep on-the-go docents in museums in front of visitors but safe as they led tours.
And of course, contactless everything. No one wants to touch anything physically so being able to come into a venue and get through the admission door quickly, with digital tickets on their mobile and without having to be face to face with another human — that’s been critical. As vaccines are thankfully becoming widely available, tracking vaccine status is also something admission systems and venue staff will be ready to handle.
What’s the most important change the pandemic has brought?
So many things have advanced forward with technology adoption and fast evolution in this past year. And we’re never going back. But the bellwether was the massive shift to online/streamed events of all types. And with that shift, unions, artists, curators, publishers, venues — they have all had to shift policy and definition as well. We are still years away from knowing the true impact of the pandemic’s accelerated tech adoption in terms of how we think about “attending a concert” or “going to the museum.” I think there will be much more acknowledgment of online/ asynchronous content as a powerful channel that deepens and expands the in-person experience.
We are going to want to gather in person, always. This lightbulb moment around tech and virtual for the collective arts and culture sector will not change that. The online experience is simply reaching a moment where it can start to live up to its potential.
Will the new diversity stick around?
That widening of content has opened up audience appeal. Couple that with digital delivery’s removal of geographic boundaries and venues are drawing new, more diverse audiences than at any time pre-COVID.
It is hard to overstate what a critical juncture this is for venues, artists, and unions as they decide how much of this new digital reality to embrace for 2021 and beyond. That means venue leaders are doing a lot of data modeling around capacity planning, pricing and discount strategy, and production costs for digital vs. in-person.
That has led to a lot of soul searching about mission. We will see a whole new slate of creativity and event offerings coming out of this.
How has your background prepared you for these new challenges?
I “grew up” in the symphony world. I was one of the first ecommerce managers for a major American orchestra in the early 2000s, so I’ve always been at the intersection of art and tech.
It’s with extreme love that I say it was time for some significant evolution to the event experience. It was time for some loosening of creative constraint for the artists and staff doing the work that is hitting the stage and the gallery walls. It was time for some serious embracing of the enormous technology revolution that has happened in the past 15 years and the breaking down of long-standing roadblocks to digital distribution.
What’s your hope for the future of live performing arts?
I’m most excited and most hopeful about the blurring of boundaries on what we (audience and institution alike) think of as “an event.” For the first time, really, in a few centuries.
I hope what that means is that artists and venues have more freedom to experiment. Experiment with audience participation, with event format, duration, definition. I love the lo-fi production quality (selfie videos, impromptu streams from the rehearsal space) that has been so prevalent in 2020. It makes the arts seem more accessible. I hope that the super glossy production values we all were used to before the pandemic had us hunkering down and getting real with each other do not impede raw creativity and the exciting immediacy of the creative process. To me, that’s there the magic happens as a lover of the arts.
There has already been so much amazing innovation in arts and culture despite the insane challenges of the past year. I see incredible evolution at work in the industry and know it will rise more connected to purpose, perhaps with revised structure and mission statements. More connected to the audience, perhaps with a wider lens on connection and inclusivity. All of that is super exciting to me.
To stay up to date with Kristin Darrow’s thoughts on the future of ticketing, follow her on Twitter (@krdwerd) and LinkedIn (@kristindarrow).