Scaling insight delivery across Auckland’s leading cultural venues

Use case

Background

Tātaki Auckland Unlimited is Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s economic and cultural agency, tasked with making the region a vibrant place to live, work, visit, and invest. As a council-controlled organisation, it drives economic growth and cultural enrichment through tourism, events, investment attraction, and the stewardship of some of Auckland’s most treasured institutions, including Auckland Live, Auckland Zoo, the Maritime Museum, and Auckland Art Gallery.

To support operational excellence and visitor experience across these venues, the team runs a range of consumer research programs. These include ongoing monitors for Auckland Live and stadiums, as well as onboarding efforts for visitor research at other major venues.

“For the first time, we can properly analyze our data. Harmoni has given us the control we needed and freed up our time to focus on what really matters: adding value through strategic interpretation and supporting the business with timely, actionable insights.” Taija Peach, Senior Research and Insights Specialist, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited

Challenge

With multiple venues, diverse audiences, and various teams managing data, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited faced challenges common to large, multifaceted organisations:

• Disparate tools and platforms made harmonisation and cross-venue comparison difficult
  
  
• Manual workarounds and slow data access limited the speed of reporting
  
  
• Stakeholders needed reliable, timely insights to make informed decisions on everything from visitor experience to infrastructure planning
  
  
• Traditional tools served ticketing and visitation well, but lacked the depth, flexibility, control and statistical functionality needed for analysis of survey data

In short, the insights team needed a more researcher-friendly, DIY platform that would scale with their growing program.

Solution

After exploring other potential solutions, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited ultimately selected Harmoni to support its evolving insights function. The platform now underpins quantitative analysis and reporting across its key venues. Benefits include:

• Full control and flexibility – Harmoni allows researchers to manage their own data cleaning, updates, and transformations without relying on outside vendors
  
  
• Specialized features for researchers – including significance testing, base size controls, and customizable axis creation
  
  
• Greater accessibility – more than 20 stakeholders now use viewer licenses to access interactive dashboards, enabling self-serve access to timely data
  
  
• Integrated workflow – the insights team can rapidly triage findings, prepare tailored PowerPoint updates, and respond to follow-up questions with guided “show and tell” dashboard sessions

Results

With Harmoni in place, Tātaki Auckland Unlimited has transformed how insights are delivered and consumed across its cultural venues:

• More time for adding value: The ability to report through Harmoni has enabled self-service for the bulk of questions, freeing up research and insights specialists to spend more time on adding value, strategic interpretation and assisting the business.
  
  
• Improved data visibility: Dashboard access has given operations managers real-time data to support planning around parking, traffic flows, event timing and more
  
  
• More consistent reporting: Shared metrics like Net Promoter Score can now be tracked across venues without requiring separate reporting systems
  
  
• Future-ready capabilities: The team is exploring open-end text coding within Harmoni and investigating integration options with other tools

As the organisation continues to grow its research program, Harmoni remains a core enabler of its mission to deliver high-quality, audience-led experiences across Auckland.