Challenge:
New York City Ballet (NYCB) has worked with Interactive Media Associates, Inc. (IMA) since 1998, when IMA took an initial, stagehand-built Web site and transformed it into a professional venue with eCommerce capabilities. With yearly increases in the online box office, the strategic decision was made to move to the Tessitura Arts Enterprise box office application.
Like many other performing arts companies, New York City Ballet (NYCB) felt constrained by the limitations of the box office application and eCommerce system to fully meet their enterprise level marketing needs.
The challenges the company faced included:
- The site was difficult to maintain. The IT department or an outside vendor was required to make changes to the ticketing screens – even for minor changes.
- Biannual updates were costly and required considerable programming hours. Because every season (Spring, Nutcracker, and Winter) had to be configured by a programmer, the associated costs were extremely high.
- Patrons could not select seats within a desired section. Seats were not assigned at time of purchase. The system lacked real-time seat availability.
- Ticketing content updates required programming changes and resulted in content inaccuracies. Only the non ticketing portion of the site utilized content management. Content on ticketing screens had to be edited by IT directly in templates, leading to inaccuracies between marketing- and IT-controlled content.
- The site lacked merchandising opportunities. Products were not associated with like products, and the merchandising screens did not focus on conversions.
- Sales of non ticketing items, such as unseated events, dinners, lectures, and benefits were not integrated. Such events could not be purchased in the same shopping cart as a seated event, resulting in fulfillment silos and one-off development efforts.
- Personalized pricing could not be accommodated online. The system could not recognize membership levels.
- Complex orders could not be placed online. Certain types of tickets, such as “Build Your Own Subscription,” could only be sold over the phone or at the box office.
- Box office system configuration made it impossible to sell certain packages of tickets online. The system setup mandated a manual fulfillment of such orders.
Solution:
Interactive Media Associates’ long-standing relationship with various performing arts companies, particularly with New York City Ballet, gave the company a deep understanding of customer needs. IMA’s web technology experience combined with a user focused approach enabled IMA to create a best-of-breed framework for the performing arts marketplace: the IMA Enterprise Performing Arts Framework.
IMA’s unique framework uses a service oriented model providing a scalable solution for arts organizations. By integrating an enterprise eCommerce platform, Elastic Path, with existing content management and box office assets, IMA provided a solution that enabled NYCB to save time, cut costs, increase revenue, improve reliability and most importantly improve the user experience. This integrated solution utilizes the strengths of each service application, resulting in a robust, flexible platform.
New York City Ballet staff members use Ektron to edit content on both information and eCommerce screens, giving them a single place to author all content across the entire Web application.
IMA’s solution prevented any loss of revenue due to conflicts or set up issues in the box office system
New York City Ballet patrons are now able to sell, within a single shopping cart, performances, gift shop items, subscriptions, memberships, and gift cards, as well as downloadable video and audio clips. The presentation is seamless, maintaining a unified look-and-feel from content page to shopping aisle to checkout.
Users were able to more easily find and buy tickets through an improved interface, increasing conversion, revenue, and overall customer satisfaction. Additionally, a calendar-based interface featured on all screens enhanced the user’s ability to search performances and events by date.
Results:
The renovated NYCB site launched in time for the spring 2009 season and the results were immediate. In a shrinking economy, the spring 2009 season outperformed spring 2008 by 2%. With the addition of personalization, customized subscriptions and eCommerce user interface improvements, the Nutcracker season is poised for growth.
New York City Ballet’s staff and patrons are happier because:
- Now, NYCB can increase conversion with cross-selling, up-selling, “You may also like” recommendations, recently viewed items, and other standard eCommerce features.
- Patrons now enjoy a personalized shopping experience. By logging in, they immediately see customized pricing and targeted messaging. New York City Ballet is poised to quickly and easily offer special promotions to defined segments.
- Single tickets, subscriptions, and other merchandise are sold in a more user-friendly interface, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
- Now patrons can self-select their seats, satisfying a long-standing, pronounced market need.
- Now content can be authored in one place across the entire eCommerce and content-driven site. This allows NYCB’s marketing team to be in control of the message, and takes advantage of a single approval workflow.
- NYCB staff can now create complex, customized packages for sale online, such as “Build Your Own Subscription,” while non-ticketing items can be quickly and cost-effectively developed within the framework.
- The simpler, quicker, and less technical interface, which does not require IT intervention to maintain, results in significant cost savings when preparing each season’s online sales.
- The IMA framework introduces a level of system redundancy that prevents the accidental loss of ticket sales.
- A strong and reliable framework easily adapts to ongoing market demand and is ready to grow as the organization does.
Testimonial:
“IMA’s rapid response and creative and collaborative approach to problem solving makes them a highly valued partner. Our new solution has empowered the New York City Ballet marketing team to quickly implement revenue-producing programs and deliver better experiences to our online patrons.” – Karen Girty. Director of Marketing, New York City Ballet
