Finding Community in the Business of things
A rewind of vendor options to handle Dataland’s ticketing needs
Earlier this month Efsun Erkilic, one of Dataland’s founders and the Chief Strategy Officer of the museum, spoke about Data, Storytelling, and the Dynamic Museum to the American Alliance of Museums here in Los Angeles. The lecture and discussion was supported by ACME Ticketing, a staple in the museum and cultural institution domain. ACME is the ticketing platform for Dataland. Slight aside: the museum is not yet open, but slated to open this year. While I was not able to attend the talk, the discussion and coordination leading up to the conference, gave me great perspective on this +2 year partnership.
Partnerships in the context of business boil down to value based transactions. I present something of value to you. You give me something of value in return. This simplistic view, however, does not reveal the intangible qualities of what a partnership fully entails. The personalities, contact, rapport, and goals of each party play a large part in how smoothly (or not) the transaction occurs. For as long as I have been building websites, I stayed within my expertise: the design of the page, the rendering of the components, the performance of the experience, the browser. So, when I started working on Dataland, I was upfront about saying what my expertise was and more importantly what my expertise was not: how to manage and sell a lot of tickets.
In early 2023, Refik Anadol, a founder and artistic director of Dataland, asked me to conduct research into ticketing vendors to support my gap in expertise. The team spent about 3 months interviewing and debating who to partner with before choosing. We then did not even start building the ticketing flow on the website until the following year. Below, is the comparison presentation between the two top choices in ticketing vendors I put together:
When I made this presentation, I anticipated a three year contract. This is the standard initial engagement length for many of these white label services. But, this was an intellectual expectation, not an emotional one. I focused on the capacity for us to customize and tailor the user’s experience of purchasing a ticket on Dataland. I thought about the ticket price implications for the customer. I considered how and where the customer could purchase their ticket. To be blunt, I looked at it like I look at a lot of technologies: a logical transaction. Working with ACME has been much more than their API, customization tools, and volume experience. Each week I meet up with someone on their team and present the state of the website. They listen and along the way provide guidance. Yes, most of it pertains to how their product works. No, their product does not work 100% how Dataland would like to use it. As a partner, however, they are invested in the museum’s success. Their suggestions have as much to do about framing the ticketing experience as distributors as it does about using the ticketing platform. They helped me better imagine the ticketing journey.
In this way, they have filled many gaps in expertise. Their partnership has provided confidence as much as it has tickets. It has given me a new understanding of where business and arts intersect.
I am excited for you to use (and hopefully not really notice) the ticketing experience at Dataland,
—Jono