Sydney Lynch, Director of Customer Experience at L2, and Stephen Lynch, L2 Co-founder, sat down to discuss how they built Prospect2, a marketing automation solution that integrates ActiveCampaign with Tessitura, the primary CRM used by arts organizations worldwide.
Since 2017, their Prospect2 solution has deeply integrated ActiveCampaign with Tessitura CRM, serving 200+ organizations across six countries with contact lists ranging from 10,000 to 2 million patrons.
The manual marketing problem
Arts organizations with small marketing teams (0.5 - 5 people) struggle with massive contact databases and industry-specific CRM requirements. Before automation, these organizations manually pulled lists and sent individual emails daily—separate campaigns for donors, VIPs, and general audiences with limited conditional content.
"They're pulling a list, writing the email with event-specific information, and sending it out on a daily basis," Sydney explains. "They'll send out a segment to their donors, a segment to their VIPs, and a segment to the regular audience. Manually updating personalization tags or leveraging conditional content on that scale is a lot of work for any team.”
ActiveCampaign is able to solve this manual problem.
“Small businesses really value personalization. There is a big focus on embedding the “surprise and delight” philosophy within the patron experience… that will build on their relationship with you, and they're more likely to become a donor or a member or a subscriber or even tell their friends. The tools that we have within ActiveCampaign and with our integration really facilitate that personalization.”
20-year Tessitura API mastery creates unbeatable advantage
What sets Prospect2 apart isn’t just their knowledge of ActiveCampaign; it’s their deep understanding of Tessitura, the CRM that powers the arts world.
This experience enables sophisticated automations impossible for competitors. Their data sync automatically identifies key patrons and keeps their data updated for real-time personalization. This extends beyond sending emails to patrons, such as triggering real-time alerts when high-value patrons unsubscribe, so box offices can immediately address issues.
Crisis management delivers 4,000 responses in 6 hours
When COVID forced arts organizations to pivot overnight, Prospect2’s ActiveCampaign integration became essential infrastructure to their clients. A west coast ballet reached out for help - they needed to handle thousands of ticket holders for cancelled shows, offering three options: refund, donation, or putting the funds on their account for future use.
Stephen explains the technical solution: “Imagine three button options in your email: I'll donate, I'd like a refund, or Put the money on account." With the power of ActiveCampaign’s automations and the integration we’ve built, clients could instantly process a ticket holder's selection and automatically send a message back to their CRM with a single click.
Results were dramatic: They had 4,000 of these responses within six hours, and the next day, they were able to process them quickly without making thousands of phone calls.
This showcased how arts organizations could maintain operations with reduced staff while preserving the personalized experience patrons expect. "They were able to connect with their audiences and still keep that level of personalization that is so important to them without having to have a full team," Sydney notes.
AI that engages future donors automatically
Prospect2 created an innovative post-event engagement automation using ActiveCampaign's AI capabilities and custom fields. Here's exactly how it works:
Step 1: Post-performance survey setup after attending a show
Patrons receive an automated survey sent through ActiveCampaign. They write a narrative review and rate their experience numerically (like 8/10).
Step 2: AI analysis through custom fields
ActiveCampaign's AI analyzes the written review text using two custom fields:
- Sentiment field: Determines if the review sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral
- Intent field: Categorizes the patron's likely next action from six predefined options:
- Could become a donor
- Could become a member
- Would never attend again
- Will tell their friends
Step 3: Automated segmentation based on results
AI assigns both sentiment and intent scores to each review. ActiveCampaign then automatically checks the patron's existing donor status in their CRM through Prospect2's data sync integration.
Step 4: Trigger appropriate automation
- If AI indicates "could become a donor" AND the patron doesn't have a donor tag → Automatically enters them into a donation nurturing campaign
- If they already have a donor tag → System leaves them alone to avoid over-solicitation
- If sentiment is negative → Triggers immediate outreach for service recovery
Step 5: Real-time response capability
The entire process happens within hours of the performance. If someone indicates a negative experience, box office staff can call the next day to address concerns while the experience is still fresh, potentially salvaging the relationship.
In this case, AI handles review analysis that would otherwise require manual processing, enabling immediate action on high-potential prospects while they're still emotionally connected to their experience.
This system captures what Sydney calls the critical timing element: patrons leaving a performance have "high adrenaline" and an emotional connection that makes them more likely to give—but only if approached at the right moment with the right message.
The ActiveCampaign Customer Advisory Board listens to the needs of your clients
Prospect2’s three-year Customer Advisory Board (CAB) membership shapes ActiveCampaign's roadmap. Stephen stresses the importance of partnering with a platform that listens, taking the opinions of over 200 arts organizations in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, the United States, and Canada into account.
This collective voice has a direct channel to the engineering, product, and executive teams, giving these arts organizations the chance to share their needs with ActiveCampaign through Prospect2. And because of this, ActiveCampaign can take its perspective and build out the features it needs to be successful.
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