Tessitura Reviews

Tessitura was built with performing arts organizations in mind. It is a completely flexible program to mold and shape to any performing arts center big or small. The customer service is outstanding and tons of resources are available in order to learn more about the program. If you have the opportunity, the tessitura conference every year is one heck of a place to meet all the developers and they really give you the time of day to sit and work out any issues you may have. Did I mention their customer service is awesome?

Silly to say, the program is only as useful as the amount of info you put in it. With that said, it's a large learning curve for someone who doesn't know or want to use the program. Some tasks can be tedious (like building accounts and entering new information), but the long term benefit is undeniable. Each tool does take a little bit to learn, and you do have to get used to some of the lingo in the program, but Tessitura does make sure you have all the resources at your fingertips when you need it included in the annual fee.

I manage all my corporate partnership sales via Tessitura. It makes it a seamless experience if say I have clients come from that company, I can associate them with the profile and keep my moves management all in one central location.

About the software? The multitude of ways to view, export, and analyze data.

About Tessitura in general? The Network! You're so connected to thousands of your peers.

Requires a significant amount of training to use properly.

Integrates with several third-parties that we use, such as Wordfly (to automate email reminders and post-visit thank you emails) and TodayTix to promote, sell, and host lotteries.

Sharing custom reports amongst other member organizations.

History for each constituent to track relationships to our organization. Ease of access to scheduling our season groups attending our festival. The upsides of creating special events that started the history of tracking our on campus special events. I appreciate the reports to track how many individuals we serve in our different price types and special promotions.

This has been the most helpful for tracking our attendance for Indigenous Peoples Day and reporting back to for our grant funded projects.

It is not currently providing culturally responsive qualitative reporting our organization could better utilize in being a more welcoming environment. I dislike that currently with our constituents for programming there isn’t a way to make communication with our users unless we utilize an outside server such as world fly.

I dislike that currently there isn’t a solid method of keeping records of these individuals communications. For grant specific reporting it would be better utilized to scan in documentation of emails, positive reviews etc. to keep on hand for future use and better project management.

Do consider using tessitura, with all the updates they continuously work for their users it is a very catered organization to each user. For season programming, tracking and broad based campaign usage it is necessary for non profit usage.

We are solving how we are tracking off campus events, such as community outreach and engagements. We had only previously tracked special on campus events and have been losing out on helpful data for our org with not recording our outreach efforts.

Another current problem is not tracking how long our members in each constituency have been active. In order to have a better rewards and benefit system it would be necessary to record benchmarks of involvement, how many groups each individual has brought to the festival, contacts referenced etc. because of this there is currently no room for tracking progress and developing our current program. This is a problem for our specific program because we have more institutional knowledge than recorded in tessitura leaving our leaders as single points of failure.

Provides a true 360 view of constituents

Not the slickest interface, but powerful

Tessitura allows us a true 360 view of our constituents, aggregating information about their buying behaviors, charitable contributions, likes and preferences, and interactions with our organization. It allows departments who focus on different particulars of constituent relationships (for example, fundraising) to use information gleaned by other departments (like marketing or the box office) to better tailor, and by extension, improve our interactions with our patrons.

The benefits include better returns of marketing and fundraising campaigns, better donor retention, and improved information across the organization that makes data-driven decision making more than a buzzword.

During the current COVID-19 crisis, Tessitura (and its easy integrations with 3rd party vendors) has made it easy to keep our constituents informed about cancellations and closures, process refunds, accept donations, and fundraise on behalf of the organization in a very targeted way. I can't imagine the mess we'd be in if we didn't have the one-stop-shop that is Tessitura to help us manage virtually every aspect of our business during this time.

It has also allowed us to easily work from home during this period and served as a vital conduit of information for staff internally--I can easily see the work of my colleagues through things like plan steps, communications logs, and donation histories.

I've worked at other organizations who use other CRMs, including custom-built solutions, and Tessitura is hands-down, the best solution I've seen.

Very intuitive. The community aspect helps create connections to better understand the application and the arts and culture industry. Great customer service and sets up clients for success.

The biggest feature lacking was stewardship - fundraising events and named spaces, endowments, etc.

Speak to other Tessitura users in the community.

Tessitura was a great balance of canned and customized content, which helped my personal growth working in the industry and with similar products.

Tess is a powerful ticketing software that offers great security and also helps with arts marketing efforts. It's easy to customize and so every arts organization can make Tess their own. It works seamlessly with scanners and printers so it's very easy to work with house management.

Tess is not very user-friendly, and it's not SaaS-based. It isn't always really clear what all its capabilities are. It's next to impossible to stop a batch from printing after you send it through. There is no in-app training, and in fact, training can be difficult to get and to find. Box office is not a difficult job, but Tessitura can make it more stressful because there are no help files and it's not very intuitive.

This is probably the best software for large arts organizations. It may be more than you need if you're a small house or don't do many season subscriptions. It shines with season ticket sales and donation tracking. However, it is very technical and you need to have a Tessitura administrator on staff just to use it. I have wished for a couple of years that it could be a SaaS-based program with built-in help files since it is not very user-friendly.

We used Tessitura as the agent of a large professional regional theatre. The theatre company had a full-time box office as well (for season sales, exchanges, etc.) and we did exchanges, and POS, not dealing with season sales. They were open during the day and we were open at the theatre and during the day. It was easy to see a patron's activity and which agent helped with each transaction, whether they were in the box office or in in the administrative office. It was easy to find and reprint lost tickets, which was a huge issue. Using the Tessitura scanners, we could keep track of seating and know at any given moment how many people had entered the house.

I love Tessitura's robust array of reports. I love that many parts of the software are customizable. I love that it's tailored to arts orgs, so I can find what I need quickly. I also love that lots of other marketing software brands integrate with Tessitura - like WordFly, Behavior Infuser, Survey Monkey, and more.

It took years and years and years for TNEW to get SYOS on mobile, which I find pretty unacceptable. Now that TNEW7 has SYOS on mobile, however, the upgrade process from Tessitura v12.5 to v14.1 has been pretty tough for my org. Given that lots of the orgs using Tessi are small arts shops, I can't imagine this is an easy process for them, either.

ALWAYS hire a database administrator! We don't have one, and it's hellish to make changes and customize the software.

We love tracking our marketing efforts in Tessitura. Integrating our email software with the CRM has helped us with reporting statistics about email to our board.

It's an extremely detailed database for customer information including payments and payment schedules, ticket history, contributions/donations, customer service issues etc. It is very secure and we are able to keep track of credit card entry safely. It's also highly useful for communicating about issues throughout the organization and makes record-keeping very easy.

It has a steep learning curve and takes a while to fully understand (if at all). It definitely is one of the most detailed programs I've ever used in an organization but it's a very good thing.

It's efficient in keeping track of customer information including service issues, donations, purchase history etc. It helps communication flow easily between all departments in the organization so that customer issues are resolved quickly.

The seemingly customized pieces make it perfect for any ticketing or development department. In group sales we really could use the out of the box format to set up our order process and not interfere with other areas.

We are not crazy with how tessitura deals with reporting on group type. This adds extra work and isnt the best. Our stats program also should report on fees and this does not.

really do your research on the transition and make sure your accounts will look the right way.

we originally used ticketmaster and this was the worst.

The ability it makes purchases quicker. Support is quick to get things done

Could use specific feature to help make lists more accurate

This program makes it easier on us when purchasing tickets for guests