Built by someone who did the job. Run for the people still doing it.

MANA is the operations platform for arts organisations — newsletter, marketing, ticketing analytics, building and programming, producing, finance, fundraising. It is the reporting and integration layer between the systems a venue already runs, built to enterprise security standards at small-organisation prices.

Where it came from

Running an arts organisation means running a production schedule, a building, a bar, a community programme and a fundraising operation at the same time, on a small team. Each of those has software. None of it talks to the rest. The systems that could carry the whole weight were built for commercial-scale touring companies and priced accordingly; the ones a venue could actually afford could not hold it.

MANA is the set of tools that answer to that problem. They began as the things worth building while running the venue, and there was never time to build them properly. There is now.

The approach

An arts organisation is an operating system with a programme on top of it. The discipline that keeps an engineering programme honest — one source of truth per fact, an audit trail on every action, integrations that fail loudly rather than quietly — is the same discipline that keeps a season honest. MANA treats box office, finance, marketing and producing as one system with one set of numbers, rather than five products that each hold a different version of the truth.

The platform is built to ASVS Level 2, hosted in Europe, GDPR by design, with audited dependencies and a documented architecture. Small organisations deserve the substance of enterprise tooling, not a cut-down version of it.

Founder

MANA was built by Ben Todd. He has been involved with Arcola Theatre since 2005 — initially as a volunteer, later as its Executive Director, and now as a Trustee — supporting the founders and building environmental sustainability into the theatre's core mission. He holds an MEng and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and co-founded Arcola Energy, a clean-energy company specialising in hydrogen and hybrid powertrains, which was acquired by Ballard Power Systems in 2021 and which shared its Hackney home with the theatre.

He came to this as the person running the venue, building early versions of these tools to solve real problems in a real building. He is no longer involved in the day-to-day operation of an arts venue — which is precisely why there is now time to build them properly, and why they are built for the people currently doing the job rather than by someone still in the middle of it.

MANA is not the only thing built on that instinct. Ecology App does the equivalent for landscape-scale ecology and land stewardship — a newer interest, and one he now practises as well as builds for. His day job is Arcola AI, which applies the same technical background, and an interest in what makes a healthy society, to artificial intelligence: foresight on emerging AI risk for regulators, insurers and researchers.

Contact

For partnership enquiries, tenant onboarding, or anything else, email Ben at ben@makeartnotadmin.com.