The Arts Council
Customer relationship management for the arts sector
An easy way for creative institutions to manage their relationship with the artist community.
The challenge
An arts council’s role in society is to support the arts and artistic community by providing the resources for the best projects to get made. Central to this effort, are funding programmes. Arts Council Malta routinely releases funds to the general public and several institutions to enable them to fulfil their artistic visions. To this end, the council receives several hundreds of applications from aspiring and established artists throughout the year. They needed custom software to address the shear amount of submissions, the creations of the many different application forms, managing the actual application review process and ultimately the project it self, in one streamlined system.
The solution
We built a CRM (Customer relationship manager) for the arts council — a system tailored entirely for their needs, mimicking the best parts of their older paper-based process and evolved into a more rapid, efficient one. The CRM is a 360 solution: Queries coming in through various channels can be recorded and dealt with directly in the system. The applications are tracked, review, evaluated by external evaluators and finally funded by the arts council within the system it self. The artists are informed all along the way by email, on the status of their application. Successful applications which become lengthy artistic projects are tracked in the system, milestone by milestone. The CRM has also become Malta’s first artist directory, which includes information and the project history of schools, organisations and the many institutions around the island — an invaluable resource for Malta’s creative future
Process applications in minutes
Artist applications coming into the council can be processed within minutes. Evaluators and reviewers are able to leave notes along the way, resulting in a full history of the review.
Project monitoring
The council is able to ditch the paper based process for an automated digital one. Using a custom-built project monitoring tool based on key project milestones, admins with access to the system can track progress with a few clicks.
Easy query management
With hundreds of calls and emails flowing into the council on a monthly basis, the CRM comes in very handy in recording every individual’s interaction with the organisation from start to finish.
