Do not index
Do not index
Frieze London 2013. Photograph by Ms Linda Nylind, courtesy of Frieze.
As a technology-driven company, building software for the art world, we have had the privilege of collaborating closely with our clients, understanding their unique challenges and crafting innovative solutions to meet their evolving needs.
Building technology is difficult and requires continuous refinement. By working with them hand in hand, instead of simply offering them what we thought they needed, we have listened to their concerns and tailored solutions that addressed their specific pain points. The joy of witnessing our technology being utilised to its full potential has been immensely rewarding, as well as witnessing firsthand the positive impact it brought to the art fairs landscape.
We are excited to share some examples of how customer feedback and client collaboration has been instrumental in shaping our solutions. These instances illustrate how our collaborative approach speeds up development and gets it in the hands of our users.
Independent Art Fair and Gallery Portals
Currently used by 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair and Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair
The Problem: Independent Art Fair had raised the point with the ARTSVP team that it was a complicated and process to invite exhibitors guests. Each exhibitor was allowed to submit a number of guest to invite but some were reluctant to pass over client details (GDPR concerns) to the fair while it was also tricky for the exhibitors to find out who could actually attend.
Solution: We worked with the team at Independent to create gallery portals. These gallery portals were built to allow the fair to provide an allocation of invites that each gallery could distribute themselves. The portals also allowed Independent to see which galleries had sent out invites and when bookings were made see which gallery each originated from.
Further updates: Feedback from the initial use of portals has led to several updates including the ability for the galleries to send the invites from the portals and see when guests have check in at the fair. We are also implementing notifications when bookings are made and guests arrive.
(NB - As of September 2023 - Gallery portals are out of beta and these updates are live)
Future fair and booking source tracking
The problem: Future Fairs were interested to know what source ticket sales were coming from. This could help them monitor their marketing and see which partners delivered the best value.
Solution: By adapting invite links to allow multi-use invites with tags, Future Fairs could create different links to the public booking pages for instagram, newsletter campaigns and partners. All bookings would then inherit this tag and could be filtered to see which link the bookings originated from.
Frieze Events team and Sending invites from specific people
Problem: Frieze told us they’d would like some invites to appear to be from specific people working for Frieze rather than just “Frieze Events”. Open rates of these invite emails would be higher depending on who had sent the invite in some cases. Without any changes to ARTSVP the events team at Frieze would have to do lots of uploading and downloading of lists, followed by mail-merge in other software. This all took a lot of time.
Solution: After several feedback calls to identify the specific requirements we launched the ability to change the from name the sent invites come from when they arrive in someones inbox. In addition we discovered that there was also a desire to set different reply to email addresses for different events so the ability to add in the reply to email each time invites were sent was also added.
Collectible and local payment methods
The Problem: Collectible, based in Belgium enlightened us to the fact that locals are used to making online purchases through Bancontact. Adding the ability to accept payments would in theory increase online ticket sales.
The Solution: Luckily for Collectible as ARTSVP handles payments through Stripe, were were able to simply allow additional payment methods for Collectible’s account in just a few clicks. Nice to have easy updates now and again. If you want to see payment methods Stripe support just check the docs here.
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