Feasibility study call for quotations

Newcastle Theatre Royal Trust, on behalf of Newcastle Gateshead Cultural Venues (NGCV), is seeking to appoint suitably qualified consultants to carry out research to explore the feasibility, options, opportunities, challenges and costs of a unified NGCV CRM, ticketing and What’s On system. 

The consultant is required to produce a feasibility report, taking into account the considerations listed and including clear recommendations for the partnership outlined in the Call for Written Quotations.

Click here to download the Call for Written Quotations

The brief has been circulated to recommended consultants who have specialisms in this area, but any others wishing to apply are free to do so.

Deadline for submissions: 12 noon 31^st October 2017

To discuss the tender in advance of submission, contact Philip Bernays Philip.bernays@theatreroyal.co.uk

Summary of the brief

There were over 3.8 million attendances at our venues in 2015/16, according to our most recent independent  Economic Impact Assessment.  Research by MHM in 2015 related to The Insider project, showed that we held 473,000 unique addresses across our databases, with a reach to 1.2m people. 

Coupled with the increasing potential of technology, we feel that as a critical mass of cultural infrastructure in a geographically compact area, with a long history of effective collaboration, there could be significant opportunities to grow audiences, improve engagement and meet our cultural, social and business objectives, as well as making ourselves and the cultural ecology of the city and city region more sustainable and stronger. 

In terms of the next stage in our audience development and public engagement journey, we feel that there is potential in building on our strengths, shared learning and collectivism and exploring:

• technological solutions to acting smarter by working together more closely and joining up systems
• capture, sharing and using data in a much more effective and useful way for ourselves and audiences – for joint marketing and cross promotion, segmented communications and fundraising and growing audiences through trusted recommendation, breaking down barriers to accessing different types of offer and cross pollination of audiences through deeper understanding
• having a clear and easy to use online public interface and a simple access point for our audiences and participants to have an easy, logical and well supported customer journey to enable them to feel able engage with more of the cultural offer and increase their frequency and range of engagement

Bearing these in mind, three strands are apparent, which we would like consultants to produce a feasibility study for, ensuring that there is clarity around the potential, added value, opportunities and challenges of these three strands and how they might be complementary and meet our needs:

• A central CRM database for NGCV that can be used for customer engagement, research and fundraising
• A single Box Office system that runs all ticketing and data capture needs of NGCV or shared approach
• A comprehensive online “what’s on” guide for NewcastleGateshead, by default for NGCV members but capable of including many other events and attractions

We understand that this may be one completely integrated system, or a series of standalone systems that talked to each other.  There is a need to recognise that all our organisations already have their own CRM systems, some also have ticketing systems and we all have our own websites and communications and marketing teams. 

We envisage that the feasibility study would provide a series of recommendations, options and a specification and/or business case for what approach would be the most useful and bring the most added value.  Should there be strong feasibility for a particular option, the intention would be to seek further investment.

This work is funded by Arts Council England and NGCV member contributions, on the understanding that there will be learning to share with other areas in England and the potential for a transferable model for other geographic partnerships or consortia.