Hi! My name is Paige, and I’m the General Manager at the Gate.  

A General Manager’s role is multifaceted – from HR, policies, financial processing, company management (honestly, if you ever need to get out of a silly contract or call any type of provider to get a bill reduced, I’m your girl), but I’m also responsible for our audiences’ experience. Access performances? Hit me up. FOH? They’re my little gang whom I love very much. 

 Yet, before you even enter the theatre, there’s a step that is most audiences’ first interaction with an arts organisation – and that’s the website. Back in September last year, The Gate were lucky enough to be invited onto the Bloomberg Digital Accelerator programme – a scheme that provides grants and training to help arts organisations invest in strategic improvements to their technology infrastructure. Overnight, I became a Tech Fellow (i.e., the project manager of our Bloomberg grant, and the project that we were about to embark on). 

 If you think “that’s a lot of big words”, that’s because there are. This programme has helped arts organisations do some amazing things– VR, digital archiving systems, building out CRM systems, content creation projects – but for us, we just really needed a new website. So, as the Tech Fellow, I’ve been on a journey this last year via seminars, support from my wonderful advisor Sam Scott Wood, and lots of reading to write a project charter to develop a new website for the Gate. This included significant brand work, hiring a web developer, cleaning up our database… When I chose a career in theatre, this seemed miles away from what I thought I’d be doing!  

But we’re about halfway through the website’s development, and I’m super, duper proud. Have a read here to see what we’ve done so far; 

 Artist Consultancy  

• To make a website, we needed to ask our artists what they wanted from it. We interviewed 18 artists who are Gate alumni, who presently work with the Gate, and those we’d like to work with in the future. Their answers to our questions were beneficial to us in terms of planning our artistic programming moving forward, but also what they do and don’t need from a website. What was clear on both avenues was that what artists need is clarity – and we need to be clear about who we are, and what we’re offering. Chloe Osborne facilitated these conversations and wrote us a brilliant report with these findings.  

Brand Consultancy 

• We began working with Pamela Kent as our Brand Consultant around April this year, who has been instrumental in helping us work out our brand identity, in language and visually, going forward.  

• Pam ran multiple sessions with Nic, Alice and I (Executive Director, Producer, and General Manager respectively) to distill what the Gate is, where we sit within the fringe theatre market, what makes us different, and what do we want to be. By running these sessions, alongside her own research, Pam created for us a Communications Strategy, a Brand Toolkit and Guidelines, an Audience Development Strategy, and a Forward Plan as we move forward (for want of a better word!). 

• Pam has been working closely with Rebecca Prentice, our new Communications Manager, so these plans are implemented on our marketing channels and understood. Pam is also working with Tim Jukes, our Website Designer, to imbed this new visual identity and brand language in our new website. 

 Website Developer 

• Tim Jukes also began working with us around April / May, following a procurement process after I developed a website brief. We received 5 proposals and ultimately, we chose Tim as he understood the needs of the Gate the most. 

• Tim has been brilliant so far; he’s led 3 sessions with the team to better understand the needs of the website, and has built a realistic project timeline, taking into account our busy show period. He has improved our current site in the meantime with interim updates to allow us to get Wish You Were Here on sale. He is currently presenting to the Gate team the wireframes of the website (the site map of where everything will go), allowing us to give feedback before he continues his design.  

• The next step for us is to create content for the new site – new copy, images, and videos to showcase the Gate, being led by myself, Tim and Rebecca.  

 Accessibility Consultancy 

• We are stoked to be working with Caspian Turner from Accessible by Design to ensure our website is as accessible as possible for our audiences and artists. This includes working closely with Tim on the design of the site, and also carrying out user testing towards the end of this year / beginning of next. 

 New staff – Administrative Assistant and Communications Manager 

• The Bloomberg scheme has enabled us to expand the Gate team –  Fisola, our Administrative Assistant, and Rebecca, our Communications Manager. Having them on board has been invaluable for the team, and we hold them very dear to us. 

Data Cleaning 

• Part of the Bloomberg grant has been allocated against cleaning the data on our CMS system – Spektrix. This is to improve our marketing ability as we remove inactive customers and duplicates, implement tags onto customers, create mailing lists -but mostly to ensure our data is up to date and relevant. The team are about to undergo some training to get us all clued up – which as a small team without a box office department, is so very needed.  

 Launch 

• We are on track to launch in March 2025! 

 So, it’s been a busy few months! But such important progress has been made. The work outlined is crucial to us to ensure our success go forward – especially as a team that’s undergone a lot of change in the last couple of years. We now know more than ever who we are, what our artists’ want, and how we can best provide that via our website as a resource.  

 The work has always been more than a website, but how we communicate with the world, shout about the work we do and the artists we support, and how we can make our work a bit more efficient internally, especially as a small team. Without this grant, we would never have been able to carve the time and money out in such a committed way to undergo this work – to ultimately really understand ourselves.  

On that note – keep a look out in March! Big shiny new site incoming!  

 Px