Frequently Asked Questions

There are currently three pre-set Segmentations: 

• Basic Segmentation: this splits your ticket bookers into five simple segments depending on how many times they’ve visited, and over how many years.
• RFV: this ranks all of your customers by a combination of their Recency (how long ago they last visited), Frequency (how often they visit), and Value (how much they’ve spent on tickets and donated to you). The Segmentation Engine then splits ranked customers into ten equal segments so you can see what sets your best customers apart from the rest.
• Annual Segmentation: this is really many segmentations, since it segments ticket bookers from within any one year, and allows you to see how the segmentation in one year compares to other years. It shows who came as subscribers or large party sizes in the year, then other ticket bookers by frequency.
• In addition, all of the individual variables (frequency, average ticket yield, etc.) are kinds of segmentation too, since you can see your customers broken down by any one of them.

There is also a Custom Segmentation option:

• This requires a consulting engagement with us so that we can tailor a segmentation to you.   There are different ways of arriving at this segmentation, from in depth clustering analysis, to an exercise with you to decide the most important variables to your strategy.   It can also draw on a wider range of behavioral data than you can see in the standard variables.  If, for example, you want a segmentation to help you instantly compare ‘members who only go to drama’ with ‘low yield, late booking customers’ with ‘non-member, high frequency, early bookers’, this would be the way to do it.
  To discuss a Custom Segmentation, contact Baker Richards.

Tags are what the Segmentation Engine sends back into your Tessitura database, whenever you choose to do so.  They are the names that you attach to each cohort or segment of people.

• You can send tags from any of the variables or segmentations.  So, you could tag all your constituents by frequency, e.g. “Very frequent”, “Infrequent” etc… plus all your constituents into “High yield”, “Medium yield”, “Bargain hunter” etc…
• You can then use these tags in Tessitura, in List Builder, extractions and T-Stats.
• This makes it easy to send a targeted email to people who are “Not in last 6 months” but “High yield”, or to analyze the behavior of particular kinds of people.

The user application itself is a web application, so you will have a user name and password to access it from anywhere.  However, in order to get data to and from your database to the data warehouse for the Segmentation Engine, there are two components:

• Data is extracted from your system via the Data Extraction Client.  This is a small piece of software that goes on your server (or on RAMP).  Each night it sends the data securely over HTTPS to the warehouse, making it available to the Segmentation Engine.
• To send Tags and Lists back to Tessitura, there is a second tool called Posty.  Again this is a small piece of software that goes on your system and you can have it set to run every night, or more frequently if you wish.

The data extracted includes performances, customer numbers, date and value of ticket sales and donations.  However, the Segmentation Engine doesn’t take name and address other than zipcode/postcode.  There are also never any payment details extracted (so you do not need to worry about PCI compliance, for example).

Yes !  Within the application, you can filter what performances and donations you are looking at, using:

• Start date and end date
• Performance Classifications that you set in the Segmentation Engine (or are imported from a keyword category you have in Tessitura)
• Facility
• Season, Season Type and Performance Type
• Campaign
• Subscription – you can filter to only include people who have bought a subscription ticket, or people who never have

You will also choose, when your organization is set up, what data is extracted in the first place.  If there are parts of your database that you never want included (perhaps a Season that is for Parking or similar) this does not need to be extracted, we can simply set to extract only the scope that you want.

We want you to be able to start using the Segmentation Engine straight away, so we’ve tried to make it as intuitive as possible and we provide access to detailed online help pages.

If you would like some help taking what you can do with the Segmentation Engine to the next level, there are more services available from Baker Richards and JCA Arts Marketing.

At the moment the Segmentation Engine is only available for Tessitura.  We are working on making the Segmentation Engine compatible with as many more systems as we can.