Scottie is a husband-and-wife team made up of Connie and Andrew Girvan, an actor / theatre producer and an arts technology product manager respectively. Following two years as the Head of Operations and Head of Product for festival ticketing software and services provider Red61, Andrew wanted to offer producers, festivals, theatre companies and venues a way to tell their stories and showcase their productions online. Clients are offered a bespoke solution to all their ticketing requirements and producers can communicate with audiences, sell event tickets or even use the Scottie platform as a fundraising tool.
Scottie’s development included participating in the Creative Bridge pilot intake, which reinforced the idea that the business should be a productised platform rather than a traditional web agency offering services to clients. Their journey has been a collaborative process involving UI/UX designers based in Gdansk, Poland, and an open-source enterprise content management system developed by a team in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Their roadmap saw them integrate with additional ticketing systems, moving away from white-glove onboarding of clients to offer more of a self-service structure.
Scottie’s Resident Entrepreneur project was borne out of a realisation that as mass gatherings were banned by governments around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most theatre-makers struggled to source tools to allow them to collect customer data and monetise their online work.
In response to this challenge, Scottie extended its platform to add a paywall which can be placed in front of video, audio or written content, allowing theatre makers to collect customer contact details, gain marketing consents and charge for their work. This extension to Scottie’s platform also allows organisations to solicit donations through self-service payment platform Stripe and allows donors to access written and video content as a reward for their support.
For this project, the company collaborated with Edinburgh-based UI/UX designer and fellow Creative Bridge alumnus, Andy Johnston of Eido Studio who designed the Ludio templates, which were first used for the Fringe of Colour Films Project in August 2020.
Scottie participated in our Engaging and Accessing New Audiences session at the 2021 CI Innovation Showcase and also took part in CI Lab 15 where we discussed what ticketing and payment for live events might look like in the future.
