Executive summary
Morris Hargreaves McIntyre (MHM), a leading cultural consultancy, supports cultural and arts organisations globally with their Culture Segments programme. To enhance this initiative, we partnered with MHM to develop and maintain the Culture Segments TagTool - a robust web application hosted on AWS. This tool empowers arts venues to seamlessly integrate MHM's 'golden questions' survey into their systems, enabling audience segmentation and deeper insights into customer engagement. The application's global reach, available in eight languages, has facilitated millions of survey responses, optimising audience understanding and targeted marketing. By digitising MHM's intellectual property, we created a web service that allows them to scale their offering and meet the growing demands of the arts sector.
Morris Hargreaves McIntyre
Morris Hargreaves McIntyre (MHM) is a specialist cultural consultancy based in the UK, renowned for their innovative approaches in audience development, marketing, and strategic planning for arts and cultural organisations. Their Culture Segments programme offers a comprehensive data-driven approach to understanding audience engagement, enabling cultural organisations to communicate more effectively with their patrons and target marketing efforts with precision.
The challenge: Taking culture segmentation to the next level
MHM's goal was to extend their Culture Segments programme to provide arts venues with a flexible, integrated solution that could harness the power of survey data to segment their audiences effectively. The challenge lay in designing a platform that could scale to meet the global needs of cultural organisations, support multi-language functionality, and integrate smoothly with popular CRM and ticketing systems like Tessitura and Spektrix.
Before developing the TagTool, venues faced inefficiencies when attempting to collect and analyse survey data. Manual processes were time-consuming, prone to error, and failed to provide real-time insights. Without a streamlined system, venues struggled to engage their audiences effectively, which impacted marketing strategies and limited the potential for targeted communications.
Why AWS: Powering scalability and global reach
AWS was chosen as the platform for its exceptional scalability, global availability, and robust security features. AWS services provide the flexibility and reliability needed to host an application with millions of surveys being processed globally. The extensive ecosystem of integrated AWS services ensures seamless operation, data protection, and ease of integration with external systems like CRM and ticketing software.
Why MHM use us as their trusted technical partner
MHM work with us due to our proven expertise in delivering scalable, secure web applications that leverage the full range of AWS technologies. Our deep understanding of cloud architecture, especially in implementing server-based and serverless solutions, positioned us to create an application that could scale globally while providing optimal performance. Our collaborative approach ensures that MHM's vision is accurately translated into a powerful, user-friendly platform. We also offer comprehensive support, including proactive regular maintenance, reactive technical support, client engagement, and periodic project meetings, establishing a close and trusted partnership with MHM.
Our Solution: Building a Web Platform for Cultural Transformation
We designed and developed the Culture Segments TagTool as a cloud-native application hosted on AWS, ensuring reliability, scalability, and high performance. Key AWS services utilised include:
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk: For scalable deployment and management of the application, providing an easy-to-use environment for hosting and running the web application.
- Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): To store and manage survey data, offering a fully managed, scalable database solution.
- Amazon S3: For secure and cost-effective storage of application assets.
- AWS Security Services: Implemented to ensure compliance and safeguard data, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall).
The TagTool application enables venues to access the survey system via a web platform and API, integrating seamlessly with CRM and ticketing systems to deliver a unified data flow. The solution is designed to scale effortlessly, accommodating millions of surveys with support for multiple languages to serve an international audience.
Ongoing innovation and collaboration
Our collaborative relationship with MHM extends beyond the initial build. We continue to support and maintain the application through a comprehensive retainer that provides regular maintenance, proactive monitoring, and prompt technical support. We also hold regular meetings with MHM to discuss potential improvements, strategic needs, and feature enhancements. This continuous development approach ensures that the application evolves to meet changing user needs and adds new capabilities to keep MHM's services at the forefront of the industry.
We would absolutely recommend Si Novi to organisations looking for unique solutions. Communication is excellent and they are reliable, flexible and innovative, working with us to deliver creative solutions and provide peace of mind.
Morris Hargreaves McIntyre
Results and Benefits
The deployment of the Culture Segments TagTool has significantly enhanced MHM's service offering, leading to:
- Millions of surveys distributed globally, providing cultural organisations with actionable audience insights.
- Enhanced segmentation capabilities, allowing venues to tailor their marketing efforts based on detailed customer engagement data.
- Streamlined data collection and real-time reporting, removing manual intervention and improving operational efficiency.
- Secure and compliant data handling, with integrated AWS security measures ensuring data protection.
These benefits have positioned MHM and their client venues to better understand their audiences and execute more effective marketing campaigns, driving engagement and fostering deeper connections within communities.
Next steps: Growing the impact
We look forward to continuing our partnership with MHM to further develop the Culture Segments TagTool. Future enhancements will focus on advanced analytics capabilities, enriched reporting tools, and greater integration options with evolving CRM and ticketing platforms.
About Si Novi
Our company is a leading provider of cloud-based solutions, specialising in building and maintaining robust web applications. As an AWS certified team, we leverage our deep knowledge of AWS services to deliver innovative and scalable solutions. Our team's commitment to using best practices ensures high-quality, secure, and cost-effective cloud services tailored to meet the needs of our clients.
Si Novi have played a crucial role in the development of Culture Segments TagTool, from its inception to what it is today. They have brought to life our vision for the product with a thoughtful and creative approach.
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