The San Francisco Symphony, one of America's most forward-looking arts organizations, presents over 220 concerts each year, creates leading edge media initiatives such as Keeping Score on PBS television and its own Grammy-winning record label SFS Media, and serves its community with one of the most extensive education and community programs of any orchestra in the country.
The Challenge
San Francisco Symphony came with a design, direction, and deadline just ahead of kicking off their busy season. The goal of this project was to help them bring their already well executed design to life through thoughtful user experience, web development and iMedia’s vast experience within the Performing Arts space.
What We Did
Web Development
Created a fully custom Kentico MVC site with custom page types, and widgets, as well as a full integration with Tessitura to manage all ticketing, memberships, subscriptions and donations.
Compose Your Own + SeatMe
iMedia leveraged our Select Your Own Seat product, SeatMe to allow the user to choose their seats for each individual performances and subscriptions, including build your own subscription. A Socially Distanced seating feature was added to support the post COVID reopening.
Customized Technology
Critical functionality that drives user engagement is robust site search, faceted performance search, powered by our integration to Algolia. The Tessitura integration allows editors to never edit content twice, pulling in performance, production and subscription data in real time to the CMS.
User Experience
Defined the user experience for key areas of the site like Musical Director and Conducting Staff, Meet the Musicians, Press Room and SFS Media, a section of the site that showcases the CDs and DVDs released by San Francisco Symphony’s own audio label.
“iMedia's technical chops, excellent project management skills, deep knowledge of the Performing Arts space, and expertise with the Tessitura CRM made them an ideal partner for the rebuild of sfsymphony.org. Perhaps even more importantly, their continued support and evolution of our site since launch has been just as great. Whether we are talking back-end systems integrations or front-end design, they are always able to deliver high quality results which reflect our collective vision of sfsymphony.org as a leading digital destination for fans of music that also reflects the diverse and vibrant cultural life of the local Bay Area communities that we serve. Having nearly two decades leading large scale technical projects for arts organizations, I would not hesitate to recommend them to any of our peers looking for a team that can shepherd them through the complicated process of a website rebuild.”
The Results
A month after launching, San Francisco Symphony saw:
69%
increase in average order value
16%
increase in overall revenue
