Elvespeilet sits right on the riverbank in Porsgrunn, Norway. The name means 'the river mirror', and the venue wears its setting proudly. A team of eleven runs a full-year programme of theatre, concerts, conferences and community events, most of them coming from external producers and promoters.
That's over 400 events a year, with every booking arriving from outside the building and needing to find its way onto the website, into the ticketing system and onto the screens in the foyer.
For a long time, one person was holding all of that together. That person was Per Kristian Indrehus, Elvespeilet's marketing manager. And for a while, the main tool keeping the organisation running was a spreadsheet.
"After the first year, we had a spreadsheet with over 100,000 cells," Per Kristian says. "You can imagine, next year it would be 200,000. That's not viable long-term."
A single source of truth
The problem wasn't just scale. It was the structure underneath. Marketing, ticketing and event planning each lived in their own world. Every time a new event arrived from a promoter, the same information had to be entered again and again across three different platforms. Errors crept in. Complaints followed. The team spent more time as data entry clerks than storytellers.
What Elvespeilet needed was simple to describe and hard to build: one place where information lived, and from which everything else flowed.
The solution they built centres on three platforms working in concert. Yesplan handles venue and event management – all bookings, all logistics. From there, events are pushed to Tixly for ticketing. The CultureSuite CMS then pulls from both, surfacing the right information on the website in real time. "It's those three systems working together that's the brilliance," Per Kristian says.
The practical effect is that when a start time changes, it propagates across Elvespeilet's entire digital infrastructure automatically. Prices, availability, sold-out flags – all updated without anyone having to touch a second system. Elvespeilet even built their own intake form for promoters, feeding data straight into Yesplan and eliminating one more layer of manual handling.
From four weeks to a day or two
The results are tangible and measurable. Lead times for getting a new event live have dropped from up to four weeks during peak season to a day or two. For a venue running over 400 events a year, that's not a marginal gain – it's weeks of potential ticket sales recovered, per event, across the whole programme. Errors have almost disappeared, and with them, so have the complaints.
"The peace of mind that comes from knowing the price on our website is always pulling the correct price from the database," Per Kristian explains, "that's an undervalued but massive benefit."
CultureSuite's role goes well beyond event listings. In-venue screens throughout the venue now populate automatically from Yesplan – images and event details formatted and ready to display with one click, where previously it required a separate system and fully manual input. The newsletter module works the same way: pre-formatted, pulling from live data, ready to go. The mailing list syncs with the ticketing system so audiences can opt in when they buy a ticket, and event tags from Tixly flow back into CultureSuite, opening up segmentation based on what people actually engage with rather than broad genre buckets.
The shift in how the team thinks about the website is perhaps the most telling change of all. Component-based editing means non-technical staff can update landing pages or reshape audience journeys in minutes, without the risk of breaking anything.
"Our website is no longer a static brochure that we update once in a while. It's a living interface that reflects the pulse of the house – our content, our public relations, our programming." Per Kristian Indrehus, Marketing Manager, Elvespeilet
With the infrastructure now in place, the next priority is personalisation. The team want to use rich data from Tixly and Yesplan, combined with website behaviour, to serve tailored content to different audience segments. Easy-to-curate pages, using CultureSuite’s themed pages feature, are on the radar too – surfacing events by shared interest rather than just genre or date, creating more meaningful discovery paths.
For Per Kristian, the lesson is straightforward: "The frictionless flow of data. It's not just about having a pretty website. It's about building a digital infrastructure that frees your staff to focus on what matters – the culture and the audience. Not the spreadsheets."
Is disconnected data costing your team more than they realise?
If Elvespeilet's story sounds familiar, it might be time to see what a connected digital infrastructure could do for your venue.
- See how CultureSuite CMS works
Book a personalised demo to see how CultureSuite builds websites for arts and culture organisations. - Keep exploring
Dive into more thinking on digital strategy through our articles, events and webinars, Spotify, YouTube channel or our newsletter.
