At a recent Ticketing Institute pop-up session at the Arts Marketing Association (AMA) annual conference in Bristol UK, I was part of a panel discussion along with a number of other ticketing software suppliers

I was asked how I saw PatronBase and I went on to outline that I didn’t see PatronBase as a ‘platform’. My view of a platform is that is where you launch things from. In my view that puts the booking system at the centre of the thinking rather than our customer having that role. Our customer of course is the organisation using PatronBase.

So if our customer wants to innovate with their audience in a way that suits them, their audience, or the upcoming Production then they can look at their booking system as a supporting act rather than dictating what is available.

I likened it to a Lego set that can be used to create the relationship with the audience that our customer is after. To think of us as a preassembled set of pieces, much the same as a Lego Star Wars character, but able to be utilised separately and form part of whatever the imagination comes up with.

There are pro’s and con’s with this approach.

A more structured environment allows for certainty and a well-trodden path to achieving known results; whereas a more free-form approach relies on the users having the creativity to push boundaries.

It is this latter aspect that gets us excited at PatronBase as we rely on our customers to come up with things that they want to be able to do – to extend those limits – which we don’t currently support. So that we can then set about building the pieces that will allow them to do that next time.

To build an audience their way