About MANA

MANA — Make Art Not Admin — is an operations platform for arts organisations. It brings together newsletter, marketing, ticketing analytics, producing, finance and fundraising tooling into one place built to enterprise security standards.

Where it came from

MANA started as Arcola Theatre's internal operations platform. The theatre runs a busy production schedule, a bar, a programme of community work and a fundraising operation — all on a small operating team. The off-the-shelf tools available were either built for commercial-scale touring companies or were so simple they couldn't carry the weight of integrated reporting.

So we built MANA. The platform handles the integration between Spektrix ticketing, Xero finance, mailing list providers, social media analytics and the producing lifecycle. It is the reporting and analysis layer that makes the operational stack of an arts organisation coherent.

Why we're offering it more widely

The substance of what MANA does — the integrations, the security work, the multi-tenant architecture — is expensive to build but cheap to run. Once the platform exists, adding another tenant costs us very little. So we are extending MANA to other arts organisations who need this kind of operational layer but cannot justify building it themselves.

The team

MANA is built by Owletts Farm Partnership, drawing on the former Arcola Energy software development team. We bring two decades of experience in building production software for small specialist organisations — automotive, energy, theatre — where reliability, security and proportionality all matter together.