Most venues find themselves trapped between two unsatisfactory choices: expensive bespoke solutions that quickly become obsolete, or generic platforms that never quite fit their needs. At CultureSuite, we've discovered a third way.
But this reveals a deeper problem about how our entire sector approaches technology. We don't just have a website problem – we have a structural issue with how digital investment gets conceived and executed. What if the future of cultural technology lies not in building everlasting perfection, but in building systems that can evolve with the sector?
This isn't just about building better websites. It's about fundamentally reimagining how cultural technology gets developed, funded, and sustained. Instead of the wasteful cycle of individual projects, shared infrastructure can deliver better outcomes for everyone.
The hidden complexity of CultureTech
We've been adopting this approach through our website platform – a content management system and digital marketing suite that powers websites, digital signage and email marketing for over 100 cultural venues worldwide. Unlike custom-built websites, our platform operates as shared infrastructure: one codebase serving diverse venue needs while continuously evolving based on community input.
However, this shared approach creates unique technical challenges that simply don't exist in one-off client projects. Imagine you're managing digital signage across a multi-space venue. You need wayfinding that updates automatically when events change, integrates with your ticketing system, and works across different screen sizes and locations. Now multiply that complexity by the unique requirements of hundreds of different cultural organisations.
Managing this complexity at scale requires a different approach to technology development. That's why we're embarking on our largest technical undertaking: a platform modernisation that demonstrates what sustainable technology development actually looks like. Instead of the typical logic of one client, one solution, one project, building for a community changes the formula entirely.
How scale creates better solutions
The agency model creates a vicious cycle: venues spend significant resources on custom solutions, only to face obsolescence within 3-5 years. Meanwhile, each venue struggles with identical challenges in isolation—from accessibility compliance to integration headaches—solving the same problems repeatedly across the sector. This creates technical waste that’s unsustainable and eats into budgets.
Our modernisation project demonstrates the alternative. The upgrades it delivers affect every website we power simultaneously, from Hawaii's Honolulu Museum of Art to Manchester's Lowry to The Hague’s Het Nationale Theater. Under the agency model, each of these venues would require separate modernisation projects, separate timelines, separate costs. With our shared platform, what would have been hundreds of individual projects becomes a single, coordinated effort.
But here's the fascinating discovery: community-driven development doesn't just create efficiency – it creates better solutions. When you're building for one venue, you optimise for their specific needs. Building for scale forces us to solve for every scenario, making our solutions beneficial for everyone.
Take our event listing display component. When we build something like this, we're not just making it work for one venue's requirements. We're building a system flexible enough to handle everything from film festivals with hundreds of screenings to opera houses with complex subscription seasons. It needs to be adaptable so that emerging needs can be met without long timelines or costly rebuilds.
"The challenge isn't just serving one venue's requirements. It's about building something that works for every type of cultural organisation," reflects Stuart Mileham, our Front-End Lead Developer. "Our job is to translate specific requests into something robust and adaptable enough to benefit everyone."
This doesn't mean venues receive less tailored solutions. Building for multiple use cases forces us to think through every scenario, including edge cases that individual venues might not initially consider but could need later. This is how shared infrastructure development benefits everyone. What starts as one venue's need becomes a robust solution that serves the entire sector.
But this level of sustained, long-term development requires a different funding approach than the typical project-based model.
Strategic investment, not crisis management
"Our subscription model creates a shared investment pool that benefits everyone," explains Ivo van der Ent, our Chief Product Officer. "Instead of each venue funding their own modernisation separately, we can deliver platform-wide improvements that would be impossible for any individual organisation to achieve alone."
Where custom solutions accumulate problems until they become unmaintainable—forcing expensive emergency rebuilds—community-driven modernisation represents strategic investment. This stable model provides the resources to address issues proactively, before they become crises.
The scale is striking: platform-wide modernisation delivers the equivalent of over 100 individual website updates simultaneously, with a fraction of the resources, timeline, and environmental impact.
From individual solutions to shared infrastructure
What we're demonstrating through this modernisation isn't just a more efficient way to build websites. It's a different model for how the cultural sector can approach digital technology entirely.
When Nationale Opera & Ballet needed a Ticket Sharing feature, we didn't just solve their particular challenge – we built a solution that considered the needs of our entire community. Our modernisation follows the same principle: improvements driven by real needs, implemented once, benefiting everyone.
The implications extend beyond our immediate community. By demonstrating that sustainable, community-driven technology development is possible, we're offering the cultural sector an alternative to the usual cycle of expensive custom solutions followed by inevitable obsolescence. This approach proved its worth during COVID-19, when our stable model allowed us to rapidly develop features like social distancing seat maps.
Our shared infrastructure model means future improvements compound. When we optimise image loading for one component, every venue using that component automatically benefits. When we improve accessibility in our form elements, it improves accessibility across every website we power.
The modernisation creates cascading benefits across our entire ecosystem:
- For our developers: Standardised components create more confidence in shipping quality code efficiently with dramatically reduced risk of fallout. New team members can contribute effectively without needing intimate knowledge of every platform quirk.
- For our client services team: Streamlined components eliminate repetitive setup tasks and technical inconsistencies, freeing up time to focus on solving venues' unique challenges rather than wrestling with platform peculiarities.
- For CultureSuite-powered venues: Optimised components require less processing power to render pages, delivering faster loading times while consuming fewer resources and bandwidth – improvements that become particularly meaningful when multiplied across thousands of daily users.
While we expect to see measurable improvements in loading times, accessibility scores, and overall web performance, the real value lies in creating a foundation that makes every future enhancement more impactful and quicker to deliver.
A blueprint for sector-wide innovation
The cultural sector deserves technology that matches its values: collaborative, sustainable, built for the long term, and designed to elevate everyone. Our modernisation project is proof that such technology is possible.
We're not just updating code. We're demonstrating a different way forward for cultural technology – one that treats evolution as opportunity, community as strength, and sustainability as the foundation for innovation.
While others debate the merits of custom versus generic solutions, we're building something better: technology that grows stronger through shared use, evolves through community input, and creates lasting value through collaborative development.
This isn't a future possibility. It's happening now.
Redefine digital investment with CultureSuite
CultureSuite's modernisation project represents more than technical improvement – it's proof that collaborative infrastructure can transform how our sector approaches digital investment. But no matter what stage you're at in your journey to redefine digital investment, we'll help you get the information you need to make the right decision.
- Want to learn more about we make digital investment more sustainable?
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