History

OffstageArts was developed in response to the needs of José Mateo Ballet Theatre, a growing non-profit ballet organization with a $1.5M annual budget. The ballet maintains multiple business operations including a performance company, a school, and a student company. Overlapping sets of constituents include parents, students, teachers, dancers, individual and corporate donors, and others. Regularly scheduled activities involve operation of a school, over 50 yearly performances of the professional company, a variety of special events, and an annual Nutcracker season that includes over 200 children in the cast.

When OffstageArts was first proposed in 2000, the ballet had recently moved into its own space and was beginning a period of new growth; however, its information technology was clearly inadequate. Word processors and spreadsheets served disparate functions for which they were not well suited, including running a school, billing customers and managing ticket sales. Data collected from each activity were separate and not integrated, with precious staff time devoted to manual data entry. A simple Access database was being used to store a rudimentary address list, but that was also clearly inadequate for the 25,000+ names in the database. Limited staff resources were routinely wasted struggling with these systems, rather than focusing on customer relations and organizational development. This inadequate technology not only hurt current operations, it hampered future growth.

It was clear that the ballet needed to move beyond a patchwork of quick-fix tools to an integrated database system that would maximizes synergies within the organization --- donor development, marketing, school and ticket sales. While it was possible to find existing systems that did one or two of these things, nothing existed that would integrate all operations together in a cohesive manner; and since they were all proprietary, it was not possible to extend, improve or integrate them to fit the ballet's needs. Custom database development using existing technology was also out of the question, due to limited programmer resources available and the high cost of existing proprietary database platforms.

Since that time, high-quality free software database platforms have become readily available, along with new programming methodologies (Holyoke Framework) that dramatically decrease the cost of application development. Implementation of OffstageArts began in 2005. The ballet migrated its donor development to OffstageArts in 2006, providing a welcome boost in productivity and improved marketing firepower. School operations were moved to OffstageArts in 2007, allowing student data to be easily integrated into marketing campaigns for the first time.

With significant functionality in place, focus in 2008 shifted to a balance between continued development of the codebase and nascant development of the user base. In order to ensure that OffstageArts was ready for mass deployment and to better understand the consulting process and costs required, it was deployed at a small number of additional organizations: currently Discover Roxbury and the Yale Figure Skating Club are coming on-line; Stop the Wars Coalition is not far behind. Work continues to develop the codebase, and to find technical partners interestd in furthering the development and deployment of OffstageArts.