As a follow up to our 2013 conversation, AMT Lab sat down with Artful.ly's Director of Product Management Selena Juneau-Vogel at Fractured Atlas to understand how the tool that is used by 4,803 organizations (as of November 21st, 2016) has evolved and what direction it is heading in.  

Technology providers in the nonprofit space are often uniquely mission driven. At Fractured Atlas, this mission to serve arts based organizations sprang from their history as a performing arts producing organization in downtown New York City. The events of 9/11 forced the organization to refocus and become an arts service organization.

Artful.ly's Director of Product Management Selena Juneau-Vogel stated that “Our members were seeing the benefit of CRM systems from their day jobs at large art organizations, and wanted something similar to support their create side projects.” 

Aiming to democratize technology and empower artists, Fractured Atlas launched a series of community design sessions to understand their needs. This drive to serve the community continues through a feature request forum, allowing users to vote on different suggestions for new features.

This community driven nature and focus helps ground the organization and their development. In addition to community driven design, Artful.ly seeks to address barriers that prohibit artists from using technology. As an organization, their central challenge is how to provide information to guide users to fully realizing their artistic vision, development, and marketing plans. They don't lose sight of why their customers are motivated to use the platform: to reach people who love what they do.

One feature that emphasizes the commitment their core focus is that each individual profile prominently displays their lifetime giving total and value relative to other supporters. Additionally, there are tags adjacent to these metrics that help identify the individual as belonging to a number of different stakeholder groups (trustees, donors, volunteers, etc.).

Heading into the future, Artful.ly is likely to look for additionally ways to help artists use their data more effectively. “We want to lead our users to better practices, to help them to look beyond donations as the only measure of value, and to think about all the ways their fans can support them.” Juneau-Vogel stated. Developments in artificial intelligence and automation of different tasks both hold a lot of potential as they become less expensive and more readily available.