The Cleveland Orchestra

Overview:

            The Cleveland Orchestra employs roughly 105 musicians and 120 staff members, including: administration, marketing, development/fundraising, administration staff, finance, and facilities.  Out of these 120 computer users, only four are in Information Technology.  The Information Technology department of the Cleveland Orchestra supports activities at both Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra, and Blossom Music Center.  Box office activities are conducted at both locations, however only seasonally at Blossom.

            In addition to box office, fundraising activities are conducted and maintained by the Information Technology department.  Box office and fundraising activities are the two revenue generating arms of the Cleveland Orchestra. Each of these applications were being maintained by two separate systems each with their own independent database.  There was no sharing of information between the two systems and a large number of ancillary spreadsheets and access databases were being kept track of outside of those two systems.  The Orchestra had no single place to look for their customer information; thus causing the Cleveland Orchestra had to look for a new way to better server their patrons.

Situation:

            In order to keep track of patron information as well as money generated, the Cleveland Orchestra was using two, distinct systems to track data.  The first was a box office/marketing application.  This system kept track of not only patron information such as names, addresses, and phone numbers, but also the amount of tickets sold and the projected revenue.  The second system was the development/fundraising application which also separately tracked patron information as well as donations made to the Cleveland Orchestra.

            There was no means of sharing information between the two systems.  Each system had its own database containing its own patron and revenue information.  According to David Vivino, manager of Information Systems, "We really had no one place to look for patron . . . information.  We were also looking at a customer from a fundraising aspect or a ticket buying aspect so there was a separation there and it did not allow us to serve our patrons in a perfect way."

            Further complicating issues the Cleveland Orchestra was facing, in early 2000 the hardware vendor for their ticketing system decided to no longer support the system on which the ticketing system ran.  In addition, the software vendor that supported the ticketing system decided to sell out.  This left the Cleveland Orchestra with absolutely no software or hardware support for the ticketing application.  "Couple that with the fact that we had two separate database systems made us decide to look for another solution," says Vivino. "What we found was a system called Tessitura which many of the other arts organizations, such as ourselves, were looking at as well.  Many of the arts organizations like orchestras and ballets and so forth were also on the ticketing application that we were on and were looking for another solution."

            Tessitura was originally developed by the New York Metropolitan Opera to combine ticketing and marketing functions with development and fundraising functions into one database solution running under SQL Server.  "We looked at this product back in 2000/2001 and Tessitura was just becoming an organization of its own to support their product and so we decided to not get involved at that time; however, in the late 2004, early 2005 timeframe we decided it was time to move off our old platforms and enter into this new database system . . . where we can easily manage our patrons," David Vivino says.

Solution:

            In July, the Information Technology department of the Cleveland Orchestra decided to embark upon the project to consolidate their two separate databases into one.  In order to successfully begin this project, the IT department needed training in SQL Server 2000.  The Cleveland Orchestra decided to turn to Solutient Corporation of Ohio for help and assistance.  The IS manager David Vivino states, "...we had no SQL 2000 experience so, at the time, we went to Solutient Corporation of Ohio because we knew they were Microsoft certified trainers.  We had some past training from Solutient before, so we came to a couple of courses at Solutient and soon after that we signed a contract with Tessitura, placed an order for our servers, and so forth."  Because of the success the Cleveland Orchestra had with their training at Solutient, the Orchestra knew they needed to perform some infrastructure changes to enable the Tessitura system to run properly and they turned back to Solutient for their assistance.

            Gary Rabung, Vice President of Solutient, trained the members of IT for the Cleveland Orchestra in, what was at the time, SQL Server 2000.  Because the Cleveland Orchestra felt comfortable with Rabung's knowledge of SQL Server 2000, they approached Solutient to assist with the consolidation.  "Not being well versed in SQL 2000, we needed to bring Gary in to assist us with that.  What that involved was creating mappings of all of the data in each database to determine how that information would be mapped onto the Tessitura tables.  This is where Gary excelled," says Vivino going into more detail about Gary's role for the Tessitura project.  "The information not only had to be mapped over to the new database, but also had to be massaged.  There were different address standards and different address formats in each of the different databases that had to be merged together.  The data had to be modified to determine which address took precedence.  There were a lot of rules that were built into the whole converging routine and Gary incorporated these rules into the conversion programs and then was able to load the final database records into Tessitura."  In addition to getting assistance from Gary Rabung, the Cleveland Orchestra also used the knowledge and expertise of Solutient's Shawn Baltzer.  Baltzer was tasked with configuring the firewall and migrating the existing system to Microsoft Windows 2003 as well as converting Exchange 5.5 to 2003.

"It was an exciting project really because we were coming off of two completely separate systems, two separate database technologies, and we had customers in each with different information.  We had customers in one system, the ticketing system, with ticketing history and the same customer in the fundraising system with donation history so we had different information for each patron living in different databases and we needed to bring them over into one database.  There was a large effort to evaluate the information that we had living in these two databases and then bring them together, forming one patron in Tessitura with all the ticketing history and donation history in it," states an enthusiastic Vivino.  Proper evaluation of patron information in each of the systems was key to making the conversion successful.  Once the patron information was evaluated, the IT department then needed to decide how to map that data over onto the new Tessitura application. 

This process began in August and the Cleveland Orchestra was able to go live with ticketing and box office applications in January.  In the end 250,000 patron records were converted.  "Even though it was several months of work, it was a fast conversion considering the amount of data we had to convert," states Vivino.

The timeline was relatively short and required a lot of time, effort, and energy to complete.  After the implementation of the box office application, the members of the IT department at the Cleveland Orchestra concentrated on the remainder of information from the development/fundraising system.  The goal of running the development or fundraising system live in July required the same steps as the box office and ticketing application.  Record presidency had to be determined converting patron and customer numbers into the system, building and documenting rules for the conversion, and then programming those rules into converging routines.  David Vivino explains the process best, "We converted all of the data from August of ‘05 to January of ‘06 and we had basically condensed into one patron record . . . with all their ticketing information behind it, so we could go live with ticketing in January and then we went back and dragged all of the fundraising information from the old fundraising system and loaded that information into Tessitura on the patron record so we could go live with fundraising in July of ‘06."

The live dates were picked very cautiously.  "We couldn't afford to allow other things to come in to interrupt that whole process and compromise that January date.  There were things that were left behind and dealt with after the conversion," states Vivino.  January was the best time to convert the ticketing application and July, in the middle of summer, was the best time to convert the fundraising application.  This was for many reasons, one being the end of the Orchestra's fiscal year is in June.  Having both applications up and running live in July gave the Orchestra's new fiscal year a fresh start.

Especially, for a conversion of this magnitude, it went very smooth and the timeline it took to complete the conversion went much faster than for most other organizations.  "For the conversion that we did, I can't recall anyone else having such a smooth conversion coming from two completely separate databases that were already running into Tessitura at such a fast pace as we did.  Many organizations took twelve to eighteen months to implement this kind of conversion," recalls Vivino. "Others had some problems with conversions.  Some of the smaller organizations decided just to manually enter information directly into the new system and not try to actually convert data into it."  The Cleveland Orchestra was rather successful in overcoming the grueling task of converting data and figuring out what the end result was going to be for the separate departments in the organization.

All of the dates in the timeline for this conversion project were successfully hit and the Cleveland Orchestra was very happy.  The assistance of Solutient Corporation of Ohio contributed greatly to the success of the project.  David Vivino remarks, "Surprisingly a project of this magnitude, A.) a lot of them fail completely and B.) many of them are pushed back or are late or timelines have to be adjusted.  Everybody was very surprised and very happy that we were able to meet our deadlines on a project of this magnitude.  This project had a lot of visibility throughout the organization and throughout our senior staff and board members as well.  It was the largest undertaking that I can recall that the organization did and we were happy that Solutient was there for us to assist through this."

Benefits:

            With their new Tessitura database, the Cleveland Orchestra now has one place to keep customer information and data.  "The one good thing about this new system now is we have one place where we're keeping customer and patron data," says Vivino.  This has several specific benefits.

Better Serve Patrons:

By having one database, the box office and the development/fundraising departments are able to stay on the same page.  Each of the departments is seeing the same patron data.  Since both of the departments are using the same data, this information is more accurate and fewer errors are in the database.  The few errors or mistakes that do occur in the patron data are easier to spot and correct. 

A further benefit is the improved communication between the Orchestra and its patrons.  Unlike in the earlier system, the departments, more specifically the box office and the development/fundraising departments, are able to see cross information.  If a patron is on the phone with a box office employee, that patron is able to get information about not only ticket sales, but their donation history.  At any one given time a single patron's entire history or relationship with the Orchestra can be displayed.  As better stated by David Vivino, "Each of the departments, or all of the departments, can talk to the patron about their entire relationship with the Orchestra, not only their relationship with that particular department.  It makes for a much better relationship with the patron."

Before implementation of the Tessitura database, each department could only help the patron in what that specific department dealt with.  The only information each department could see was that information that was specifically theirs, increase time to resolve issues and severely fragmenting communication between departments.  Patrons were only able to get specific information by contacting that particular department.  "It was a very fragmented relationship the patron had with the Orchestra.  Now it's much smoother and all of our people can see everything about the patron, which makes for a better relationship," states Vivino.

Live Ticketing on Website:

            In addition, Tessitura is integrated with the Orchestra's website.  This allows the patrons and customers to directly connect to the Orchestra's box office. It helps the customers receive easier access to purchasing tickets, and making greater use of the Cleveland Orchestra's website.   In previous years, before the implementation of Tessitura, when a patron would purchase tickets from the Orchestra's website an exact seat confirmation could not be immediately given.  "In the past you had to buy tickets, you weren't told exactly which seat you were going to be in, and your request was then emailed to the box office which then fulfilled your seat and sent you the tickets."  It was a rather tedious process and did not adequately serve the patrons.

Now, however, ticket purchasing occurs on the website in real time.  By having one database of information in Tessitura, patrons are able to visit the website and buy tickets directly out of the Orchestra's inventory for the shows.  Patrons know exactly which seat or seats they have purchased directly at the time of sale. "...now you're looking at the exact seats you're going to get online and you're buying your tickets right online in the database itself."  Not only does this live ticketing application allow for greater customer satisfaction, but it more accurately accounts for ticket/box office sales.

New Knowledge:

Over the course of the five months during which the implementation process occurred, the IT department at the Cleveland Orchestra was able to expand its knowledge and skills.  David Vivino states, "The entire way we were going to operate the new system had to be learned and defined and communicated to the rest of the organization because the new system has certain rules built into it and certain ways of doing things that none of us were familiar with before and we had to first understand how the new system worked and figure out how we were going to use the new system and that was a whole nother part of the project besides just converting old data into the system, how are we going to run this system, who's responsible for what, how do the quote on quote master files get set up, all of that information needed to be decided upon.  That needed to be learned, the data needed to be converted, people needed to be trained on how to use the system, and we had a January of ‘06 target date."

In order to successfully run and manage the system, nearly all of the computer users of the Cleveland Orchestra needed to be taught how to use the system. Members of the Information Technology department needed to be trained in SQL Server before the conversion process could begin.  Overall, the entire Cleveland Orchestra gained new knowledge of updated technology.

In conclusion, David Vivino states: "As we went through the process of testing the conversion programs and testing our conversion rules, seeing it all flow through the rules into the programming and into the new database, and then running our tests on the new database to make sure we got everything over there in the proper format so that we didn't forget anything, it was all a very interesting and rewarding process to see it eventually all come through to the end where we're actually running live at the first of the year in January.  Definitely we'd do it again."

The Cleveland Orchestra and the roughly 120 computer users are very happy with the Tessitura.  The system is much better than the old and allows for more time to be spent helping the patrons of the Orchestra.  David Vivino expressed his overall enjoyment of the conversion: "I can honestly say that I'm glad we came to the Microsoft courses that were offered by Solutient because that's how we found the excellent consultants that we've been using for the past couple of years on this project and others."