Made Media

Small projects, big impact: the care and feeding of an arts website

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Your website doesn’t need a redesign every few years to stay effective. In fact, some of the most impactful digital work we see in the arts and culture sector comes from smaller, focused projects that solve a specific problem — a page that isn’t converting, a transaction that’s eating up box office time, a user journey that’s creating friction instead of removing it.

The key is treating your website like a living thing that needs regular care, not a one-and-done project that sits untouched until the next big rebuild. With the right data and a clear problem to solve, a targeted investment can deliver outsized results — and keep your site feeling current for much longer.

Start with a problem, not a solution

Our successful smaller projects always start with a larger problem the client wants to solve: losing people in the sales funnel, subscription sales numbers, staff spending too much time on routine tasks or transactions. There are many ways to solve these problems with small, iterative web changes, and your digital agency can help come up with the right solution based on your organizational priorities and budget if you start your approach with a concrete problem in mind.

Narrow down your goals with data

Once you have the larger problem in mind, asking the right questions of your analytics data can help narrow down the details of a project. Google Analytics is the obvious place to identify audience behavior and find your highly trafficked pages that are worth greater investment. But there are other channels that can provide insight into what your patrons are doing (and not doing) on your website. Your CRM can tell you the routine issues that are taking up box office time, session recording tools like Hotjar and Mouseflow provide insight into user behavior, and your internal site search can reveal pain points in your site architecture. Where are your patrons getting frustrated, and what are they having trouble finding? Small changes to the UX or the structure of key pages can have a huge impact.

Bring in your agency

Your digital agency can help analyze your data and come up with a workable solution to the problem you’ve identified based on your goals, priorities, and budget. There are a lot of ways to increase revenue, decrease audience frustration, and introduce new self-service features. Staff at a good agency have experience working with different clients who are facing similar issues and have probably already solved them in a creative way.

Mini case study: improving Minnesota Orchestra concert pages

The Minnesota Orchestra has been a Made Media client since 2018, and in 2025 they decided to use their annual digital budget to improve single ticket conversions online. The site feels fresh and represents their brand well, so a large redesign wasn’t on their radar; they reserve a portion of their budget each year to keep their digital presence relevant.

The Orchestra staff knew from their analytics that concert pages had some of the highest traffic on the site, primarily from users who had seen marketing materials and were ready to purchase a ticket. Originally these pages were designed to sell a concert to a potential patron who hadn’t yet decided to buy; the Buy Tickets buttons were buried under several pieces of supplemental content. But their other marketing channels — video content, ads, email, brochures — do the sales work for them. Not only were their concert pages not serving their purpose, they took a lot of staff time to build each year.

The concert page’s design needed to shift to suit its true role: as a transactional landing page at the end of the marketing funnel to help patrons buy a ticket seamlessly. With the amount of traffic on these pages, a small design refresh had a big impact. We removed the clutter, surfaced the Buy Tickets button and made it more prominent on mobile devices; their team also streamlined their marketing copy and focused on answering the main questions that ticket buyers have.

MOA’s old event pages had a lot of extra content that put the performance dates and times below the fold.

New event pages surface the buy tickets buttons at the top of the page.

Case study: Wales Millennium Centre’s new self-service features

Like arts organizations around the world, the Wales Millennium Centre was hit hard by the pandemic. They lost a large portion of their box office staff but wanted to maintain the high level of customer service they were known for. The solution was to invest in new digital features to allow patrons to complete routine transactions online, with an emphasis on a quality user experience.

The Wales Millennium Centre team created a multi-year roadmap informed by box office data and staff and patron feedback, which focused on exchanges and group sales booking. We worked with them to build new journeys and adjust their business practices to better serve audiences online, and the results are remarkable.

After the first three years 81% of their exchanges were completed online, freeing their staff up to handle more complicated transactions for patrons over the phone. About 59% of group sales transactions are online now as well, amounting to about 27,000 group transactions each year. The project paid for itself within the first year, and the ROI has continued to rise since then.

Small project or redesign?

Sometimes a redesign is necessary to accomplish your goals. When your organizational identity or structure goes through major changes, when your CMS platform becomes outdated and hard to use, or when a rebrand necessitates a total rebuild of every page, a small project isn’t going to be the right fit — you can’t put bubblegum on a dam, as we like to say. But regular refreshes of key pages or new feature builds can keep a site fresh and healthy for much longer.

Made Wrapped 2025

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This year has asked a lot of all of us. The economic uncertainty that’s shaped 2025 hasn’t spared the arts sector, and we know many of you have navigated budget pressures and shifting audience patterns that test even the most resilient organizations. For many cultural institutions and their teams, this has been the most difficult year since the pandemic—a reality we don’t take lightly as supporters of the arts & culture community.

Even as we’ve all worked to meet the immediate demands of the moment, we’ve also kept our eyes on what comes next. This year, Made Media has invested heavily in building foundations for the future: supporting major infrastructure upgrades that strengthen clients’ digital backbone, developing the new Basker CMS to streamline our projects, and exploring how AI tools can help free up time for strategic work that needs a human touch. We were also honored to receive the King’s Award for Enterprise in the International Trade category this year, which reflects not only the hard work of our team, but that of our incredible clients who push us to innovate.

These aren’t projects that solve today’s challenges overnight, but they’re the kind of investments that help ensure your organizations can adapt and thrive regardless of what the landscape looks like tomorrow. We’re grateful to work alongside organizations that continue to prioritize both their communities and their long-term sustainability.

The work

Looking back on a positive note, we launched new sites for a wide range of clients: the Kennedy Space Center, our long-time partners at Signature Theatre in Virginia, and a late-December BlocksOffice launch for the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Our first Basker CMS-powered sites also went live this year, for The Cleveland Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois; these three sites make clear the range of functionality and design that Basker can support. We have several more in the pipeline for next year, and each successive project is getting faster and proving the model of building on a solid, shared foundation.

For our longtime partners, we worked on several exciting projects:

A new subscription purchase path for Ensemble Arts Philly, with flexible fixed seat packages and members-only VIP seating.
Converted the Stanford Live ticketing path to integrate with Spektrix
Restyled TNEW and stretching its capabilities in creative ways for the LA County Museum of Art
A robust content hub to showcase the deep classical music knowledge of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Simple, secure ticket sharing for the New York Philharmonic that starts in My Account
Seeing many clients through their Tessitura version 16 upgrades on the REST API
Displaying ticket fees for all US client sites in compliance with the federal fee transparency law - which led to a sharp decrease in cart abandonment rates across many of our clients

SeatCurve: Better than Ever

SeatCurve, our select-your-own-seat application, has long been available with a BlocksOffice subscription or as a custom solution for TNEW-integrated websites. This year, we released a new version of SeatCurve with robust self-service features, monthly pricing, and full integration with TNEW and Spektrix right out of the box. It’s also fully keyboard-accessible and easily styled to match the branding of the rest of the site. We’re planning exciting new features for next year.

Looking ahead to 2026

We’re looking forward to new projects next year:

Redesigned websites for Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, New York City Center, and the New York Philharmonic
A continuation of our five-year strategic plan with the LAPhil
Three presentations at INTIX in January: James Baggaley on the self-service revolution, Jake Grimley on bots and on-sale strategy, and Krystle Kline on launching a big project on a tight timeline
Much more conference travel - stop by our tables and say hi!

Many thanks to all of our clients, partners, staff, and friends in the arts sector for making 2025 a memorable year. We couldn’t have gotten through it without you all, and it’s a pleasure to contribute to the cultural wellbeing of our communities in our small way. Can’t wait to see what you all put on your stages and exhibits in 2026.

What makes a good RFP?

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

For most of my time at Made, I’ve been part of the team that works on preparing our project proposals. As a result, I’ve seen hundreds of requests for proposals of all different shapes, sizes, and styles. Some are fifty pages of formal requirements. Some are three paragraphs in an email. Some are a conversation we have over coffee at a conference.

Here’s what we’ve learned: The format matters much less than the content. The best RFPs help us understand what you’re trying to accomplish and why. They give us enough context about your team and organization and goals to help us meaningfully respond to your particular situation, rather than sending back a generic proposal that could be for anyone.

If you’re soliciting proposals for a new web project, from our agency-side perspective, here are some notes about what actually helps.

Tell us your why

The most important thing you can share is the organizational context behind the project. Why this work, why now? What problem are you solving, what opportunity are you pursuing? How does this project fit into your broader strategy?

Maybe your current site is built on a platform that’s being discontinued. Maybe your audience has shifted and your digital presence hasn’t kept up. Maybe you’re launching a new initiative that requires capabilities you don’t have. Maybe leadership has finally agreed to fund work that’s been needed for years.

Whatever it is, tell us. Understanding your why helps us think about the right solutions for your particular situation, and what success looks like beyond the minutiae of requirements and technical deliverables.

Don’t worry about making it formal or fancy

We’ve responded to RFPs that read like legal contracts, RFPs that were literally someone’s scattered thoughts spoken aloud on a phone call, and just about everything in between. The formal ones aren’t better.

An RFP written in the voice of the actual people at your organization who will be working on the project - people who are on the hook to get this done, and who will most directly live with the results - is always more useful than something that’s been processed through consultant-speak or written to sound impressively corporate.

We want to hear from you, not from what you think an RFP is supposed to sound like. Tell us what you need in the way you’d explain it to a colleague. That clarity is worth more than polish (and it should be easier to write, too).

Help us understand how your business works

For us to scope work meaningfully, we need to understand what your digital presence actually needs to do. Particularly if you’re selling tickets or taking donations through something like Tessitura, we need to know the footprint of what you’re asking us to build, and how it fits into your goals and systems.

What products do you sell? Single tickets, subscriptions, memberships, donations? Do you offer exchanges or refunds? (To everyone, or just some people? Do you charge a fee? What are the other rules?) Time-based entry? Recurring donations? Membership benefits that people should be able to view or redeem through the website? Which of these capabilities exist in your current system, and which are new or aspirational?

If you’re working with specific platforms or systems that will connect to the new site, tell us about them. If you have particular constraints or requirements, share those up front. If you’re unsure about something, tell us that. The more we understand about your operational reality before we start, the more useful our proposal will be.

We always start major projects with an intensive discovery period, and there will be lots of time then for us to dig into all the details. But even a high-level understanding early on helps us give you meaningful, accurate answers about scope, cost, and timeline.

Tell us about your team and stakeholders

Who will drive this project on your side? Do you have an in-house web designer or developer? A ticketing-system administrator who knows your audience and data inside and out? A digital marketing person who’ll be maintaining the site longterm?

It’s always our aim to deliver work that is built to last, and a major factor in that is making sure the system is architected to suit the resources of the organization we’re building it for. We might propose something quite different for an organization with in-house database experts than for an organization with a leaner team. Neither is better or worse - they’re just different situations that call for different approaches.

Also, we’d love to know about the broader stakeholder picture. Who needs to approve this work? Whose opinions matter? How do decisions typically get made? What’s been hard about projects like this in the past?

This isn’t about organizational politics (although if there are political realities that will affect the project, we’d like to know). It’s about understanding how we’ll actually work together and what you need from us to make this successful.

I know this one can feel tricky. Maybe you don’t know your budget yet because you need our proposal to make the case to your board. Maybe you’re worried that if you name a number that’s too high, you’ll end up paying more than you need to. Or if the number is too low, you’ll close yourself off to proposals worth finding more money for.

But here’s the thing: there’s no single right way to build a website. There might be dozens of valid approaches to meeting almost any requirement, each with different trade-offs in cost, timeline, complexity, long-term maintenance, and customer experience. Without knowing your budget expectations, we’re guessing at what makes sense for your situation.

Even partial information is useful. One of the best budget disclosures I’ve seen in an RFP said something like:

For transparency, we have $25,000 reserved for this work in this year’s budget. We realize that good-fit solutions may cost considerably more, and we may need to secure additional funding. We welcome proposals that efficiently address our needs, even if they require more investment than what we have currently budgeted.

The work they were describing could well have cost many times that budget. Having this clarity up front helped us respond in a way that laid out a few options including a fully realized version of what they were describing and a lightweight version that would stick to their budget by making some strategic compromises.

Be clear about your timeline

Do you have a hard launch deadline? Tell us what it is and why it’s hard. Is it tied to a season announcement? A campaign launch? A contract expiration? Understanding what makes a deadline immovable helps us think about phasing - how we might sequence launches to hit the critical date while still giving enough time to the other parts of the project that need it. It also lets us call out if we don’t think your deadline is a realistic or safe target so we can plan ahead and avoid surprises.

If your timeline is flexible, that’s worth knowing too. Some projects genuinely need to be done by a specific date. Others just need to be done well. Both are fine! But they’re different situations that affect how we’d approach the work.

What happens next

The best RFPs don’t feel like transactions, they feel like the start of a conversation.

We’ll read what you send us, we’ll probably have questions, and we’ll put together a proposal that lays out how we might suggest approaching your needs as we understand them. If we see multiple viable ways forward, we’ll lay those out, and give some indication of how we might suggest navigating the decision. And if we think we’re not the right fit for some reason, we’ll tell you that too, and will gladly share our thoughts and recommendations and alternative suggestions.

We want to do work that actually helps you. An RFP that helps us understand your situation is the best way to start.

The AI Search Revolution and the Arts

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

AI has fundamentally changed the way people find information, both with traditional search engines and through interacting directly with large language models like ChatGPT. Google now shows AI summaries at the top of the search results page, beating out ads and high-ranking sites for every query. People are also increasingly turning directly to LLMs to answer basic questions and learn new things. We’ve seen alarmist articles touting “the end of the web as we know it” and providing “Tips to Game AI” to win back traffic.

But what does the rise of AI search mean for organizations that sell tickets? Is this the end of traditional arts websites as we know them? (Spoiler: no.)

How Does AI Search Impact Ticketing?

Let’s be clear: AI will change how people discover content online. Cultural organizations should pay attention to these shifts. But they should approach them thoughtfully, not frantically.

A recent study from One-Further reports that in early 2025, cultural organizations had seen an average 10% drop in their organic search traffic due to the impact of Google’s AI Overview, which is being reported as a sky-is-falling situation. This is not all bad news: if your website is cited in Google’s AI Overview, the users who do click through to your site are more engaged and are more likely to make a purchase. At the end of the day, vanity metrics like impressions don’t matter as much as clicks and ticket purchases.

Arts audiences don’t primarily discover shows through Google searches or AI chatbots. They discover them through relationships, word-of-mouth, local media, targeted advertising, and email lists. Likewise, museum patrons and tourists.

In our experience, 80-90% of the average regional theatre’s organic search terms are driven by the name of the organization. These are people who already know the theatre exists. They’re not asking ChatGPT “what musicals are playing within 30 miles of Philadelphia?” They’re checking when their local theatre’s production of Hamilton opens. (Check out OpenAI’s recent study for more info about what questions people are actually asking ChatGPT.)

Practical Steps That Actually Help

Here’s what arts leaders actually need to think about:

Make your content genuinely useful: Answer the questions your audiences actually ask. What’s the show going to be like? When does it start? Who is the exhibit for? What are your hours? Where do I park? Format and signpost this information clearly—not buried in PDFs.

Structure your information logically: Use clear headings. Put important information first. Create FAQ sections that address real patron concerns. Include accessibility information prominently. These aren’t AI tricks—they’re good communication practices.

Keep your technical house in order: Fast loading times, mobile responsiveness, working forms. Add schema markup for events if you can—it’s basically just labeling your content so machines understand “this is a date” and “this is a price.” But a slow, broken website with perfect schema is still a slow, broken website.

Write like humans talk: Include the conversational phrases people actually use. “Kid-friendly museums,” “date night theater,” “parking near X.” This isn’t gaming the system—it’s speaking your audience’s language.

Maintain accurate, current information: Keep your Google Business listing updated. Ensure your show dates and operation hours are correct. Archive old productions properly. Basic housekeeping that helps everyone—human or machine—find what they need.

Focus on real results, not vanity metrics: Ultimately, your goal is to sell tickets and engage with your community. Stay focused on this goal and avoid getting sucked into page views, AI citations, or other metrics that don’t tell the full story of the way people use your site.

These optimization tips should sound familiar: they’re the same things Google’s been telling us for the past decade to improve SEO. Providing valuable, well-organized content is still what matters, even if how it gets delivered is changing.

The Real Digital Challenge

The genuine digital challenge facing cultural organizations isn’t AI. It’s the same challenge they’ve faced for years: effectively communicating the value of live performance and community connection in an increasingly mediated world. It’s building sustainable audience relationships in fragmented attention economies. It’s making the economic case for cultural investment in communities facing budget constraints.

These are hard problems that require thoughtful, sustained effort. They can’t be solved by panic-implementing technical fixes or chasing every new platform that promises relevance.

The irony is that as digital experiences become more automated and AI-mediated, the human connection that arts and culture provides becomes more valuable, not less. The organizations that will thrive aren’t those with the most AI engagement but those creating work that matters to their patrons and visitors.

Made Media receives King's Award for Enterprise

Tue, 27 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

We have some fun news to share: Made Media has been honored with a King’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade. We’re one of just 197 organisations around the UK to receive this prestigious recognition this year — you might say we’re quite chuffed about it.

The King’s Award for Enterprise — previously known as the Queen’s Award — has recognised outstanding achievement by UK businesses since 1966. Made’s award specifically celebrates our success working transatlantically and beyond to create digital products for arts and culture organisations around the world.

We’re not ones to get too caught up in awards, but this one feels special. What started as a small design agency in the West Midlands has grown into an international operation partnering with some of the world’s most prestigious arts and cultural institutions globally. It means a lot to have the hard work of our brilliant team recognised in this way – plus we get to use the fancy King’s Award Emblem (and fly a literal flag!) for the next few years.

This recognition would be impossible without:

Our incredible clients who trust us with their digital presence and keep pushing us to innovate
Our talented team across both sides of the Atlantic who bring creativity, technical expertise, and genuine passion to their work
The arts and culture sector as a whole, which continues to demonstrate remarkable resilience and innovation

We’re headed into the rest of 2025 with renewed energy thanks to this new feather in our cap.

Accessibility Developer Sam O'Neill

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Can you tell us about yourself and your role at Made Media?

I’m a full stack and accessibility developer and parent of two. I like creating things – useless apps, bad art, food. If you want the Murder She Wrote theme tune to play while you make notes on your phone or fancy bao from my food stall give me a call.

What made you want to pursue your chosen career path and job role?

None of us can interface with a machine without some kind of access requirement and I currently have fairly few. There are a lot of people who have more requirements than I do and I believe everyone has the right to access arts and culture.

What would you say are the main skills you need within your job role?

Understanding different tools people use to access content and use interfaces, patience for repetitive testing practices, not screaming into the void when you see a div being used as a button in the wild.

What’s your favourite thing about working at Made? (If anything)

The people and culture!

What was the last play/film you went to see?

I took my kids to see Paddington in Peru.

What’s your favourite movie quote?

The milkshake’s after giving me a fooking milkshake headache

What’s your hidden talent or party trick?

Ask me about my Arnold Schwarzenegger impression.

If a new person was to join us at Made Media what advice would you give them?

Apparently Vipen makes the best cup of tea.

Who would play you in the film or your life and why?

Danny DeVito. I want to get real weird with it.

Practical Tips to Keep Your Site Accessible

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

You could spend days wading through vague or overly technical articles about online accessibility, bombarded by sales pitches from products promising to “make you compliant” with minimal effort. But what does accessibility really mean to a digital or marketing team in the arts, when you’re updating your subscription page, adding a video to promote an upcoming event, or launching that new education program you’ve been planning for months?

Our client services team is asked about accessibility all the time, and one of most important things for us to convey is that making a website truly accessible goes far beyond the code we write. The heart of good accessibility is simple: every person visiting your site should be able to access the same information, no matter their vision, hearing, motor skills, or other abilities. Here’s what that means to us:

Organizing content with headers

A well-organized webpage creates a better experience for everyone—including for people using screenreaders, software tools that help people with visual or reading difficulties to navigate a site. When you structure your content with clear headers and sub headers, you’re not just making your page look nice; you’re helping all visitors find what they need quickly. And in addition to good design, it’s strongly encouraged by WCAG standards.

Headers create a roadmap that helps readers scan for the information they want more efficiently, and screenreaders let users jump from header to header instead of having to listen to every word on the page. This means that it’s important to use proper header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) rather than just making text bigger or bolder. Using this kind of “semantic” HTML makes them more useful to human readers and search engines alike.

Remember: Always use your CMS’s text editor to create actual headers instead of faking it with formatting. This small step makes a huge difference for people using screenreaders to navigate your site.

Read the WCAG Standard

Descriptive CTAs

Improving your CTAs is a small but impactful change you can make to your website and email content strategy. Instead of vague phrases like “click here” or “learn more,” use specific phrases that indicate where the link leads: “Read Article,” “Buy Tickets,” or “View the Collection.”

This simple switch helps in two important ways:

First, when screenreader users navigate through links on your page or email, they need to know where each link will take them without visual cues like button location, color, or other design features. With descriptive links, they can understand the purpose without needing extra context.

Second, specific CTAs create visual points of interest that naturally draw attention and help guide all visitors to different sections of your website to improve the discoverability of your content. Your pages and emails will be more engaging to everyone in addition to improving your WCAG compliance.

Read the WCAG Standard

Audio & Video

We love a good event promo video—it captures the energy of an upcoming performance, the emotional resonance of a new exhibition, or the transformative potential of an educational program. However, the power of your stories should extend to every potential audience member, regardless of how they experience digital media.

When integrating video and audio assets across your digital ecosystem, accessibility considerations should be a core part of your content strategy rather than a technical afterthought. WCAG standards provide a structured framework for creating media experiences that serve diverse audience needs while enhancing overall engagement potential.

Captions: Major digital platforms including YouTube and Vimeo have integrated captioning directly into their content management interfaces. While captions were originally created for Deaf or hard of hearing audiences, they also assist non-native language speakers, people watching in louder environments, and social media users where videos are muted by default. Read the WCAG Standard

Audio Descriptions: If information is conveyed in a video purely through visuals, WCAG AA compliance requires an audio description for low-vision or blind users. As of March 2025 Youtube’s audio description feature is in a beta release, but WCAG accepts a full text alternative if necessary. Read the WCAG Standard

Audio transcripts: For podcast content and standalone audio, transcripts are required to allow Deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences to experience your content. Text transcripts also improve searchability for all users, particularly for longer pieces of audio. Read the WCAG Standard

Conclusion

Keeping your web content accessible creates a better experience for all of your users, similar to the way that automatic doors make life more convenient for many people in addition to wheelchair users. By getting the details right, you can create a better experience for each person who visits your site and deepen your relationship with your community.

On the surface, accessibility plugins like Accessibe seem to guarantee quick, easy wins to improve your site without adding steps to your workflow. But in web accessibility, the old adage applies: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Most audiences who need assistive technology already have their devices set up to meet their needs and don’t want a plugin to navigate your site. In fact, plugins can actually interfere with a screenreader or other assistive tools, potentially making the experience worse rather than better.

Over the years we’ve seen the WCAG standards evolve to better meet the needs of users and incorporate new technologies. If your site is more than a few years old, contact us about a full or partial accessibility audit. Our team can look at your code and content on the whole site or a few key pages and make recommendations to help you meet your accessibility goals.

Substance Over Style: Judging Success in Performing Arts Websites

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve all been there. A theatre, orchestra, or dance company unveils their shiny new website, and everyone’s first reaction is “Ooh, pretty!” But as we know in the design world, a website’s success goes far deeper than that initial first impression.

Of course, there are plenty of objective ways to evaluate website design—analytics can tell us about user experience metrics, performance testing measures load speeds and mobile responsiveness, and focus groups provide structured feedback. These data-driven approaches are valuable and necessary for measuring success in the long term.

But let’s be honest: we’re often in situations where we need to make subjective judgments about design quality without waiting for months of analytics or commissioning expensive user testing. Perhaps you’re reviewing designs in the early phases of a project, comparing proposals from different agencies, or simply trying to articulate why something isn’t working visually.

This post is about navigating those subjective evaluations, particularly in the context of performing arts websites. You’re serving multiple audiences with different needs (first-time visitors, subscribers, donors, artists, media). And you’re often working with limited budgets while trying to capture the magic of performance in pixels.

So how do we move beyond the “ooh, pretty” factor to judge if a performing arts website is truly successful? I’ve found it helpful to look at five key areas.

Flair: The Emotional First Impression

Let’s address the elephant in the room first. Yes, flair matters. That initial emotional impact when someone lands on your site sets the tone for everything that follows. Our designers love to include subtle animations and vibrant visuals into a project to draw in the eye and tell a brand story.

But here’s the thing about flair – it’s the most subjective aspect of design and often the one stakeholders fixate on. “Make it pop!” has launched a thousand designer eye-rolls. The real question isn’t “Does it wow me?” but “Does it create the right emotional connection for this specific organisation?”

For performing arts sites, this emotional connection is crucial. You’re not selling widgets; you’re selling experiences that move people. Your website needs to give a taste of that emotional journey.

But style without substance is just digital jazz hands. Which brings us to…

Usability: Making Life Easier (Not Harder)

Ah, usability. Often the unsung hero of website design. Unlike flair, which announces itself loudly, good usability quietly does its job, guiding users where they need to go without drawing attention to itself.

For performing arts websites, usability challenges abound. Take the events calendar – a seemingly simple feature that can become a UX nightmare. Users need to filter by date, venue, genre, accessibility options, and price. They need to compare options and understand availability. They need clear paths to purchase. Each decision about what information to display (and what to hide behind clicks) shapes the user experience.

Similarly, the user flow for purchasing tickets often involves multiple steps: selecting seats, applying discounts, creating accounts, etc. Each friction point risks losing sales.

Smart layout decisions are crucial here. What information needs to be front and centre on a production page? Show dates and “Buy Tickets” button, certainly. But what about cast lists, running times, content warnings, or donor recognition? Usability isn’t just about making things easy to find; it’s about making the right things easy to find for different user groups. The answers to these questions vary by audience and organization, and it takes a skilled UX designer to create the right experience for an individual company.

Great website design for performing arts organisations works like great theatrical lighting – it directs attention exactly where it needs to go, enhances the mood, and never distracts from the main event.

Brand Alignment: True to Who You Are

Brand alignment isn’t just about slapping your logo everywhere. It’s about ensuring every design choice – from colour palette to typography to image selection to voice and tone – authentically represents who you are as an organisation.

This is particularly tricky for performing arts organisations that might present diverse programming. How do you create a coherent brand identity for an arts centre that hosts everything from children’s puppet shows to experimental sound art to Shakespeare? The answer lies in focusing on your organisation’s values and personality rather than specific art forms. Are you playful? Provocative? Traditional? Community-focused? Those qualities should shine through regardless of the specific event being promoted.

Content: The Star of the Show

A crucial truth that sometimes gets lost in the design process: your website isn’t about the design. It’s about the content. Design should be the thoughtful frame that highlights the artwork, not the artwork itself.

Great website design for performing arts organisations works like great theatrical lighting – it directs attention exactly where it needs to go, enhances the mood, and never distracts from the main event. It makes your content more digestible and impactful without calling attention to itself.

This servant-leader approach to design is particularly important in the performing arts world, where what you’re showcasing – productions, artists, experiences – must take centre stage. Your stunning production photos should be displayed in ways that maximise their emotional impact. Your season announcement should be structured for easy scanning and comparison. Your artist bios should be formatted for readability.

I’ve seen too many performing arts websites where design choices actively fight against content. Text overlaid on busy images making it unreadable. Video players so small you can’t appreciate the choreography. Programme notes buried under flashy but meaningless animations.

Strong design decisions that serve content include:

Typography choices that prioritise readability while reflecting organisational character
Image treatments that respect the integrity of production photography
Information architecture that helps users find the content they need without frustration
White space that gives content room to breathe and creates focus
Responsive layouts that ensure content remains impactful across all devices

When design truly serves content, the resulting website doesn’t just look good – it communicates effectively. And for performing arts organisations trying to convey the magic of live experiences through digital means, that communication is everything.

Execution: Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Finally, we have execution – the technical craft of bringing design to life. This encompasses everything from code quality to responsive design to accessibility.

Performing arts websites serve diverse audiences. Your users might include elderly patrons booking on desktop computers, young people browsing on mobile devices, visitors with visual or motor impairments using assistive technologies, or international tourists with translation needs.

Good execution means your site works beautifully across all these scenarios. It loads quickly (even with those gorgeous high-res production photos). It’s fully accessible to screen readers. It looks good on both massive desktop monitors and tiny phone screens. Forms work smoothly. Videos play properly. Links don’t break.

This unglamorous work often happens behind the scenes, much like the technical aspects of theatre production. And just like a smooth technical rehearsal can make or break opening night, solid execution can make or break your website’s success.

Finding the Balance

There’s no magic formula for perfectly balancing these five elements. Each performing arts organisation has unique needs, audiences, and constraints. A major opera house will approach these differently than an experimental fringe festival.

What matters is considering all five aspects when evaluating design success, not just focusing on the most immediately visible (looking at you, flair). Because ultimately, a successful performing arts website isn’t just pretty – it’s an effective platform for connecting audiences with transformative artistic experiences.

And isn’t that connection what this work is all about?

Beyond the wheelchair symbol: case studies expanding digital accessibility

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

True digital accessibility goes beyond simply meeting legal requirements - it’s about fostering a meaningful relationship with your audience. Accessibility overlays and one-size-fits-all solutions won’t cut it, and we recommend that our clients approach accessibility as an attitude rather than a box-ticking exercise. By focusing on thoughtful details and human-centered design, you can create improvements for new and longtime audiences.

Read on to explore how arts organizations can lead the way in making digital experiences genuinely inclusive.

Surfacing Accessible Performances

Performing arts organizations are increasingly offering relaxed, sign-interpreted, and audio-described performances, creating more welcoming spaces for diverse audiences. However, ensuring these performances are easy to find online is just as important as offering them.

Relaxed Performances at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) offers a dedicated series of relaxed performances designed for neurodivergent audiences. These performances provide an accommodating environment where patrons can move around, make noise, or visit a quiet room if needed. The TSO also provides descriptive visit guides so that audience members know exactly what to expect at a relaxed performance to alleviate any anxiety.

What sets the TSO apart is how effortlessly patrons can access this information. Their Relaxed Performances page is prominently linked in the global navigation, featuring a clear overview of services and a scroller of upcoming relaxed performances available for purchase.

The orchestra’s calendar page further highlights relaxed performances, allowing users to filter for these events specifically. Individual concert detail pages also include clear links to the Relaxed Performances page, so that the relevant information is always easy to find across the site.

Accessibility on the Seat Map

While many countries require venues to mark wheelchair-accessible and companion seats, seat maps can be used to provide even more valuable information for patrons. Consider adding icons for features such as wider seats, clear sightlines for sign interpretation, or seats with minimal stairs. Including the precise locations of stairs and doors on a seat map is useful for patrons with a variety of accessibility needs, as well.

Limited Steps Symbol for the Melbourne Theatre Company

The Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) identified a need to assist patrons who can navigate some stairs but prefer easier access to their seats. Their standard venue map already showed stairs and doors, but patrons often struggled to identify which seats were easiest to reach.

By leveraging SeatCurve, our custom seat-selection product integrated with Tessitura, we designed a unique symbol - a circle with a flat base - that indicates “limited steps” seats. This subtle yet effective icon helps patrons locate accessible seating options that aren’t wheelchair-specific. As a result, patrons with a range of mobility needs now have a smoother booking experience.

Melbourne Theatre Company’s seat map includes a new icon to show that they can be reached with a limited number of stairs.

Language Accessibility

In diverse communities, serving patrons in their preferred language is a cornerstone of digital accessibility. From the landing page to the order confirmation screen, a seamless multilingual experience ensures all patrons feel valued and respected.

End-to-End Translation at the National Arts Centre of Canada

The National Arts Centre of Canada (NAC) is a shining example of how to make multilingual accessibility work. Catering to both Anglophone and Francophone audiences in Ottawa, NAC’s implementation of BlocksOffice - our Tessitura-integrated ticketing platform - respects the user’s language preference on every screen.

NAC patrons can select their preferred language on any page in the global navigation and move across different areas of the site in seamlessly; even their transactional emails (password reset, order confirmation, etc.) respect the user’s chosen language on the site.

Made Wrapped 2024

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

As the Made team wraps up another year (and preps for our festive annual holiday code freeze) it’s a good time to look back at the successes, lessons, and sheer volume of work that defined our 2024. This year was one for the books: a record number of new site launches, a growing team on both sides of the Atlantic, and the debut of a game-changing CMS built for the arts and culture.

The work

Let’s start with the big wins. This year, we launched new sites for a diverse mix of clients: Stanford University’s Stanford Live, the Miami City Ballet, Playwrights Horizons in New York, the Canadian Opera Company, Ensemble Arts Philly and the Philadelphia Orchestra, Des Moines Performing Arts, and — expanding our presence on the Upper West Side — a replatform of the New York Philharmonic’s marketing and ticketing sites. This wasn’t just a busy year for our team: it was a banner one.

For our longtime partners, we tackled some equally exciting projects:

Custom new subscription purchase flows for Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Center and the Melbourne Theatre Company.
The kickoff of a five-year digital strategy initiative with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Made partners since 2015, planning and architecting the next phase of their digital growth.
Support for a series of clients on our BlocksOffice platform migrating to Tessitura v16 and preparing for the deprecation of Tessitura’s SOAP API. (Planning the same upgrade? We’ve been in the trenches — give us a shout.)

The Basker debut

One of the biggest headlines for Made in 2024 was the launch of Basker, a new content management system and hosted service designed specifically to empower marketing teams at a wide range of arts and cultural organizations.

Basker isn’t just another CMS — it’s a direct application of our learnings from years of building and refining digital solutions in this space. It’s packed with features like:

Seamless integrations with ticketing systems.
Beautiful out-of-the-box page templates and content blocks.
A data model that already knows about the arts and is extensible and customizable from the start.
A simple, powerful system for creating new custom pages and themes without requiring deep knowledge of back-end web development.

We’re already using Basker to build new sites for a handful of early adopters, and we can’t wait to see where the platform goes in 2025 and beyond.

New faces

To make all of this happen, our team grew once again in both the US and the UK, welcoming new talented developers, client services pros, and development operations engineers. Here’s who we welcomed to the team this year:

David Craigmyle

Front End Developer

Meng-Yun Lee

Front End Developer

Issa Mohamed

Front End Developer

Georgie O’Donnell

Digital Producer

Phoebe Orr

Digital Producer

Jonathan Ross

Junior DevOps Engineer

Ronaldas Turevic

Full Stack Developer

The state of the sector

The post-Covid state of the arts and culture sector is still evolving and establishing itself, with new challenges and opportunities continuing to come into sharper focus for our clients and colleagues. One thing is clear: organizations are planning smarter, thinking longer term, and looking for ways to future-proof their digital investments. We’ve noticed clients coming to us earlier in their planning cycles, whether to shape a strategic roadmap or to explore next-gen features and strategies. We’re encouraged by this trend — we do our best work when we’re brought in as partners to solve problems, and not just to execute solutions.

Looking ahead to 2025

We’ve got some exciting projects lined up for next year:

Redesigned websites launching for Arlington, Virginia’s Signature Theatre (one of our very first clients in the US), the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex at Cape Canaveral, and Writers’ Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois.
New projects kicking off for the Liberty Science Center and a major American orchestra.

Beyond new builds, we’re continuing to partner with clients on long-term strategy and infrastructure projects, helping organizations to stretch the lifespan of their digital platforms while staying agile enough to adapt to new challenges.

2024 by the numbers

It was a big year for us. Here’s how it shook out:

8 new websites launched
3851 support tickets resolved
76 new projects delivered for existing clients

As we close the year, we want to give a very heartfelt thanks to you — our community of clients, partners, staff, and friends — for making 2024 a success. Whether you were building a new site, brainstorming strategy, or just grabbing a drink with us at a conference, we couldn’t have done it without you, and we wouldn’t have wanted to try.

Here’s to an even brighter 2025. Let’s get to work.

Content Strategy 101

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Whatever your other goals at work, if you’ve found your way here, there’s a good chance that driving ticket sales and donations is high on your list. Often, we find ourselves focusing on short-term strategies for pushing an underselling show or hitting revenue targets by the end of the season - setting up promos, discounts, and bundles, making sure ad tech tracking is in place, constantly proving the impact of our work.

Content strategy is a way of thinking about these same goals, but on a longer timeframe. It’s about using storytelling to strengthen the connection between your organization and your audience, so they aren’t just buying a ticket (or at least not right away, necessarily) - instead they’re engaging with your mission, trusting your voice, and feeling more like they’re a part of your story. That connection doesn’t happen overnight, but when you build it thoughtfully, it creates lasting value for your audiences and your organization alike.

What is content strategy, and why does it matter?

Content strategy is the practice of planning, creating, and sharing stories that resonate with your audience. Unlike advertising, which focuses on quick wins, content strategy looks at the bigger picture: what stories can you tell now that will still matter months or even years from now?

Done well, content strategy can:

Help you stand out in a crowded cultural landscape.
Build trust and emotional connection with your audience.
Create assets with longterm value that can be repurposed.

For arts nonprofits, this isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a way to show that your organization is more than just your events and exhibits, and that you’re a vital, vibrant part of your local community and the arts landscape you exist in.

Choosing the right stories to tell

The best content strategy starts with a simple but powerful question: What do we want to say? You might be tempted to begin with logistics - “We need a blog post about the gala next month!” - but it’s far more effective to focus on the unique stories your organization has to share. What will surprise, delight, inspire, intrigue, or fascinate your audience?

New York City Ballet’s Anatomy of a Dance

Anatomy of a Dance

The Anatomy of a Dance series invites audiences into the artistry of ballet. By hearing dancers explain their process, viewers gain a deeper appreciation for the craft. The videos connect emotionally, offering insight and intimacy, and they have lasting value beyond a single performance.

Takeaway: Be specific, be human

Your audience doesn’t just want information - they want to feel something. Look for stories that highlight your organization’s personality and values.

Who are you creating content for?

Your audience isn’t one monolithic group. Some people are longtime supporters who know your programs and art forms inside and out, who might be turned off by content that insults their knowledge; others are newcomers still deciding whether to engage, and who might be repelled by content they feel is written “over their heads.” Tailoring your content to the right audiences is key to building meaningful connections, and finding the right balance can take time and exploration.

LA Phil’s “Where Should I Sit in Walt Disney Concert Hall?”

First-time visitors to the Walt Disney Concert Hall can find its scale intimidating, and new users booking seats online don’t necessarily have a sense of where to sit for the experience they want and what seats are worth extra to them. The LA Phil’s seating guide addresses this head-on, offering a clear, approachable way to choose which section is best for you. It’s practical, welcoming, and perfectly suited to an audience unfamiliar with the venue.

Read the full guide

LA Phil’s guide to the Walt Disney Concert Hall provides a practical description of each section in the hall.

Conversations with Frank Gehry and Esa-Pekka Salonen

For the Walt Disney Concert Hall’s twentieth anniversary, the LA Phil released a conversation between its famous architect and a former conductor. The content is highly specific, but it’s perfect for their most dedicated fans and for architecture enthusiasts.

Takeaway: Know your audience

Great content starts with understanding who you’re speaking to. When you can meet their needs and speak to them in their language, your stories become more relevant and impactful.

Making your content discoverable

Even the best stories need help reaching their audience. Think about how and where people will find your content:

Plan for versatility: Can this blog post become an email, a social media post, or a video? Repurposing content gives you more bang for your minutes, and keeps your messaging consistent.
Optimize for shareability: Make sure to consider how your content will look when a user shares it in an iMessage or a social media post. Is your headline written to inspire a click? Is your website automatically choosing a good thumbnail and a useful summary? Make sure things like Open Graph tags are set up correctly. (Need help setting this up? Reach out - we’re happy to take a look.)
Keep your calls to action clear: What do you want your audience to do next? Buy tickets, watch a video, sign up for a newsletter, keep reading? Once the user has engaged with the content, give them obvious an obvious next step - ideally including an option that doesn’t require them to give you money right away to be successful.

Takeaway: Make it easy for your audience

Your stories are only as impactful as their reach. Help people find, share, and engage with them by planning for discoverability from the start.

Beyond the basics: content hubs and other advanced strategies

These principles are just the foundation. As you grow your content strategy, you can start to explore more advanced approaches, for example content hubs - collections of related content around a central theme or topic - that can act as a go-to resource for your audience and help you capitalize on your existing authority in the field.

Imagine a “Behind the Scenes” hub showcasing stories from your staff, artists, and productions, or a hub including guides to the top 100 works or pieces in your organization’s artistic niche. These hubs provide both structure for your content and value for your audience, creating an intuitive way to explore your organization’s work. And even though we’re focused on doing right by your human audience, there’s an SEO benefit here too, as search engines are tuned to recognize high-quality hubs of content like this and reward them with clicks from interested users.

Minnesota Orchestra’s Meet Our Musicians

The Minnesota Orchestra’s Meet Our Musicians content hub organizes their videos and blog post interviews with their musicians, which makes it easier for their audiences to fall down a rabbit hole and learn more about the people performing onstage. This framework also provides a place for sillier content, like the Thanksgiving video below.

Minnesota Orchestra Thanksgiving video

Takeaway: Build for the long term

Once you have a strong foundation, advanced strategies like content hubs can make your content even more powerful, helping you deepen relationships with your audience over time.

It’s about people, not posts

Content strategy isn’t about churning out blog posts or ticking off SEO checklists. At its heart, it’s about connecting and communicating with real people. When you focus on what you truly want to say, find the right voice, and create content that’s discoverable and shareable, you’re doing more than marketing - you’re building relationships.

Ready to get started?

At Made, we help arts organizations craft thoughtful, effective content strategies tailored to their needs and audiences. Whether you’re just starting to think about content, or looking to take your strategy to the next level - or if you’re just wondering how you can use your website’s existing tools to put some of these principles in motion - we’re here to help. Let’s talk.

Des Moines Performing Arts: A digital platform for 250,000 students, subscribers and theatregoers

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Des Moines Performing Arts

Des Moines Performing Arts (DMPA) is the premier performing arts center in Iowa. Beyond their diverse selection of theater and dance performances, concerts, and lectures, DMPA runs a robust education program that reaches 70,000 community members each year. In 2024, we partnered with their team to completely redesign their website, better showcasing the breadth of their offerings and creating streamlined self-service purchase paths for their school groups and summer camps.

The challenges

DMPA’s education programs and Broadway subscriptions needed streamlined custom purchase paths to better serve their patrons.

Flexible fixed package purchases

DMPA’s Willis Broadway Series brings 10-12 touring shows to Des Moines annually, supported by a substantial subscriber base. Their traditional fixed seat packages include 6 productions with longer runs, with options to add limited engagement shows at the time of purchase. The marketing team aimed to increase add-on show purchases through a simple, visually appealing upsell experience within the subscription purchase path.

Subscribers are also able to directly substitute a production in their package for a different add-on show after purchase; DMPA needed a custom solution to facilitate a self-service option for these substitutions online.

Education program registration

During our on-site Discovery process, the DMPA education team introduced us to their popular summer camps and weekday school group matinees, all managed in Tessitura. These programs sell out quickly every year and require more extensive data collection than standard tickets or packages - details like bus parking for schools or campers’ allergies. Processing these orders consumed significant staff resources, while patrons increasingly expected self-service options to manage their registrations.

On their previous site, DMPA lacked a comprehensive self-service solution for these educational offerings. Their team needed a custom purchase path that could handle both the volume and complexity of these transactions seamlessly, reducing staff workload while improving customer experience.

Design and development

Our design improved site navigation to fully display the breadth of DMPA’s offerings, with BlocksOffice providing the perfect custom solution for their ticketing needs.

Improved event and package discovery

The redesigned DMPA website now features intuitive navigation and clear pathways to discover both their performance offerings and educational programs. We implemented mobile-first design principles that showcase their diverse programming while making it easy for visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for, whether that’s the latest Broadway show or information about summer camps.

Custom upsells and package exchanges with BlocksOffice

Given the complexity of DMPA’s education and ticketing needs, we implemented BlocksOffice, our customizable Tessitura-integrated online ticketing platform. We leveraged the standard BlocksOffice upsell functionality to create a tailored production add-on screen in the subscription purchase path. This allows subscribers to quickly and intuitively add limited-run shows to their order with just a few clicks.

The platform also empowers patrons to exchange their tickets for another seat or performance directly from the My Account area, with specific limitations controlled in Tessitura. Subscribers can even substitute a show in their package for a limited-run production, again with parameters managed through Tessitura. This self-service approach significantly reduces box office call volume while giving patrons greater control over their experience.

Student matinee group sales and order management

One of the most transformative elements of the redesign was our approach to education programming. We created a dedicated purchase path where teachers and administrators can register as representatives for their schools and then purchase blocks of tickets. The system allows them to reserve buses if needed and note accessibility requirements, with flexible payment options including upfront payment or invoicing.

To complement this, we developed an Educator Hub within the My Account area that appears specifically for users that are registered educators. This specialized portal allows educators to manage or make payments on their school group reservations without needing to contact the box office, streamlining the process for both DMPA staff and their educational partners.

By creating these custom pathways integrated with Tessitura, we’ve helped DMPA significantly reduce administrative workload while providing a more convenient experience for their educational partners. The result is a digital presence that truly reflects DMPA’s position as Iowa’s premier performing arts organization, with technology that supports both their artistic vision and their educational mission.

Introducing Basker: a new way to create brilliant websites that power live experiences.

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Today we’re pleased to announce a new venture from Made Media: Basker is a new content management and website building platform focused on live events.

Building on Made’s experience of designing and delivering complex websites for some of the largest arts and cultural organisations in the world, we have spent the last 12 months first undertaking deep discovery into the state of content management systems, and then investing in a new platform designed specifically for live events and cultural organisations.

Basker is delivered as software-as-a-service, with hosting, ongoing upgrades, and maintenance all included within the monthly fees. It comes pre-integrated with a number of ticketing systems and other platforms, and is highly customizable and extensible.

Basker is purpose-built for organisations in the arts and culture sector. Our mission is to create a digital platform for the people who make live experiences happen, making building and maintaining an events website easier than ever.

— Sealan Cronin, Managing Director, Basker

It’s also been designed to be user and developer-friendly, with three different routes to website delivery. Organisations will be able to get up-and-running with the platform in a matter of hours using Basker’s no-code theme customiser, or they can engage with developers to leverage Basker’s comprehensive GraphQL and REST APIs to interact with the platform in a headless way. The real power of the Basker platform comes through the use of Custom Themes, where Basker remains responsible for hosting and backend configuration, but front end developers gain full control over the look-and-feel of the site via a flexible templating language. Basker welcomes engagement from all developers working in the arts and cultural space who may wish to build websites using the platform.

The new venture is being delivered by a totally separate team within the Made Media Group, under the leadership of Sealan Cronin, previously Made’s CTO between 2013 and 2021.

Sealan says, “Basker is purpose-built for organisations in the arts and culture sector. Our mission is to create a digital platform for the people who make live experiences happen, making building and maintaining an events website easier than ever. It’s for all of us, from the lone arts entrepreneur to a large venue with a dedicated digital team and developers; Basker is on your side. I’m excited to share more about what Basker can do as we continue on our product roadmap of features and capabilities.”

The current Made teams will remain exclusively focused on our agency clients, working with a range of platforms to meet our clients’ business challenges in the best and most effective way.

James Baggaley, CEO of Made Media, said, “I’m delighted to be unveiling Basker today – it marks the end of a long period of research and development, but is just the starting point for what I’m confident will be a new and exciting journey over the coming months and years.”

Read more and sign up for updates on the Basker website.

Writers Theatre: A new home for Writers Theatre, built on Basker

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Writers Theatre

Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Illinois is a leading regional theatre known for producing high-quality plays and musicals in an intimate setting. They needed a website that matched their artistic vision and improved the audience experience. Basker, our CMS tailor-made for arts organizations, was the perfect fit with its customizable templates for events, artists, and other content types. The result: a new site built and launched more efficiently than on any other CMS.

Made Media unveils new leadership team

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Made Media, the global agency that delivers innovative digital solutions to the arts and culture sector, today announces a series of promotions as it forms a new leadership team:

Karan Mahay becomes Director of Client Operations & Production, with a remit to oversee all client-facing services and delivery. Karan joined Made Media in early 2019 as Senior Account Manager and was promoted to Account Director in 2020 before being appointed as Head of Client Services in 2022. She brings experience of complex project delivery in the third sector and public sector in her previous agency roles.

Andrew Shuttleworth Fowler is now Director of Growth & Marketing. Andrew will take the lead on Made’s relationships with prospective and new clients, marketing, as well as a mission to identify new opportunities for growth and strategic partnership. Andrew first joined Made from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2015 as our first employee in the United States, and re-joined us in 2021 as Executive Producer.

Michaela Drapes takes on an expanded role as Director of Strategy & Consulting, looking after all discovery and consulting projects, as well as leading Made’s product strategy. Michaela joined Made as Head of Strategy in 2021 from the New York City Ballet where she previously spent 9 years leading digital activity.

They join Made’s existing Director of Finance & Business Operations, James Demetriadi. James joined Made in 2018 as Financial Controller and was promoted to Director of Finance & Business Operations in 2021.

I’m delighted to have a talented and energetic leadership team in place to drive forward Made’s next phase of growth. I’m excited that Made is well-positioned to navigate the evolving demands of the industry and help its clients thrive in a digital-first world. This team brings a wealth of experience, creativity, and dedication that will undoubtedly strengthen our service offerings and enhance our ability to support the arts and culture sector globally.

— James Baggaley, CEO, Made Media

l-r: Karan Mahay, Andrew Shuttleworth Fowler, Michaela Drapes, James Demetriadi.

About Made Media:

Made Media is a global digital agency delivering innovative solutions for the arts and culture sector. With a dedicated team spread across the UK, United States, and Poland, Made combines strategic insight with creative execution to support leading cultural organizations worldwide. For more information, visit made.media.

ACT and Sydney Opera House: Mobile-first seat selection from San Francisco to Sydney

Sat, 01 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

SeatCurve, Made’s mobile-first seat selection product, takes the guesswork out of choosing the perfect seat online.

Ticket buyers can easily see the exact location of their seat on a detailed house map, including the seat’s proximity to stairs and other architectural features, and they can look at view-from-seat photos to see how close they’ll be to the action onstage.

We integrate SeatCurve with all clients who license our BlocksOffice ticketing platform, but it can also be used out of the box with TNEW or custom Tessitura ticketing platforms.

Read about how we worked with the American Conservatory Theatre to integrate SeatCurve into their TNEW purchase path and how the Sydney Opera House tailored it for their custom needs.

Integrating SeatCurve with TNEW for ACT

Visit site

American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco is a cornerstone of arts and culture in the Bay Area, and we worked with them in 2019 to deliver a fully redesigned TNEW-integrated website.

ACT’s patrons expected a mobile-first seat selection interface that included detailed venue representations and photos of the venue to help them make informed decisions. ACT staff were also looking for a long-term relationship with an agency that understands the needs of a regional theater company and could take care of installation and any future customizations to their seat map.

To address their concerns with the select-your-own-seat screens, we integrated SeatCurve into ACT’s restyled TNEW purchase path. SeatCurve includes a custom seat map layout that represents the real-world shapes of their venues. Its flexibility allows users to select their seating section from beautiful venue photographs and pinch-to-zoom on the full-screen mobile seat map. ACT also opted to color-code seats on the map by price, which we were able to implement with their brand colors.

As a user makes choices on the SeatCurve map, their seats are held in their cart and TNEW takes care of the rest of the purchase process. The full path is styled with ACT’s branding for a seamless experience.

Sydney Opera House sets up SeatCurve in house

As one of the world’s iconic buildings, the Sydney Opera House needs no introduction but in brief: they present live performances, films, and exhibitions from international artists year-round from Sydney Harbor and are Australia’s premiere arts organization.

The Opera House’s in-house web development team built and maintains their website, including a custom Tessitura-integrated ticketing path unique to the house. While planning a 2022 website redesign, they approached us about integrating SeatCurve as a standalone product with their revamped ticketing system. With so much in-house coding expertise, they were looking for a solution that they could implement themselves with guidance.

After a brief training and with our robust documentation, their team of Javascript developers was able to get SeatCurve up and running within a few days. Using our system of simple feature flags the Opera House’s team was able to activate the settings that they needed, including color-coding by zone. If their seating configurations change in the future, their graphic designers are empowered to adjust or create new seat maps that integrate with Tessitura as well.

Results

For both clients, the speed of each transaction increased dramatically in the first year, and cart abandonment went down as well.

Minnesota Orchestra: How personalization drove $579,000 in new season revenue

Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The Minnesota Orchestra

The Minnesota Orchestra is a Grammy Award-winning organization based in downtown Minneapolis, with a diverse array of artistic and educational programming. We’ve worked with them since 2018, through a multi-phased marketing and ticketing path redesign and continual improvements each year, including to their Create Your Own (CYO) package purchase process.

The challenge

With over fifty concerts announced each season prior to tickets and Create Your Own (CYO) packages going on sale, patrons needed a seamless way to keep track of concerts and refer back when ready to purchase. Orchestra staff also wanted user-provided preference data for targeted marketing campaigns; concert favoriting solved both problems.

Digital strategy

The Minnesota Orchestra produces a wide array of concerts, most announced several weeks before single ticket and Create Your Own package sales. Previously, audiences would discover performances through the website or brochure with nowhere to save concerts of interest until they went on sale. We proposed a simple, powerful interface for users to save performances in a “wishlist,” which could then be used to create a package or referenced when tickets go on sale.

Prioritising the user experience

For this feature to succeed, it had to be intuitive and clearly communicated to both new and highly engaged audiences. The Minnesota Orchestra staff did not want to introduce any barriers to use, including steps that would allow them to collect more data; the user’s experience was always prioritised, and the design had to be seamless across mobile and desktop devices.

What we did

Visit Site

Seamless interface across devices

Favoriting was rolled out across the site on every page that listed performances, including the calendar page, concert pages, the homepage, and in modular scrollers that could be placed on any page with the Silverstripe CMS. Once a user adds a performance to their favorites list, the list becomes accessible across devices; a link to the list is easily found in the top-level navigation globally on the site.

Create Your Own package integration

One of the key benefits of Made’s own platform for Tessitura integration, BlocksOffice, is that it can be customized and built upon as our client’s needs grow and change. The Minnesota Orchestra had used BlocksOffice as their ticketing platform for several years and already had a well-organized CYO package page. It was a natural next step to surface the user’s list of favorites to the top of the page, where they could easily select each performance to create their ideal package. Because Made built both the marketing site and the ticketing purchase path, favorites added in the Silverstripe CMS were seamlessly communicated to the BlocksOffice ticketing platform while maintaining a cohesive look and feel throughout the user journey.

Tessitura integration

This first-party preference data is a marketer’s dream, and the Minnesota Orchestra team needed to access it easily. We created a Tessitura custom table to store the user’s customer information and their favourite performances, which can be accessed for marketing campaigns and personalized upsells.

Impact

Users immediately started adding concerts to their favorites list after this feature launched, and it’s become an integral part of the way many patrons interact with the Minnesota Orchestra’s website. Now that patrons are regularly adding concerts to their favorites list, we’re working with the orchestra’s marketing and ticketing teams to strategize new ways to build on the success they’ve seen so far.

Since a user’s favorites are stored in the Tessitura ticketing database, the Minnesota Orchestra marketing team has been able to leverage this data for automated email campaigns and to build targeted lists for paid social and direct mail campaigns. They’ve integrated favorite concerts into their marketing plan to keep their communications personal, without feeling intrusive.

In a subsequent release, we added a powerful custom upsell in the BlocksOffice ticket purchase path to surface the user’s next unpurchased saved concert. This upsell allows the user to seamlessly add their next saved concert to the cart without leaving the purchase path. We look forward to exploring the next iteration of this feature with the Minnesota Orchestra team, now that we have amassed 3 years of user data to guide their decisions.

Birmingham Royal Ballet: Reaching new audiences for Birmingham Royal Ballet

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The challenge

Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB) is a prestigious ballet company based in Birmingham, UK with a strong focus on national and international tours. They approached us to boost their online presence, ticket sales, and audience engagement through a comprehensive digital marketing campaign across Google Paid Search, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and display advertising.

What we did

Comprehensive audience analysis

We conducted an in-depth analysis of BRB’s existing audience demographics and behaviour, identifying potential target segments with interest in ballet or related performing arts.

Platform-specific campaigns

Google Paid Search: We implemented a highly targeted Google Ads campaign using relevant keywords and ad extensions to capture users actively searching for ballet performances. This involved optimising their Google Ad Grant account and developing a strategy to harvest interest across a broader range of search terms.
Meta (Facebook and Instagram): Leveraging the visual nature of ballet, we created visually stunning ads showcasing BRB’s performances. Meta’s precise audience targeting reached users based on interests, demographics, and behaviour at the right time, amplifying other marketing activities.
YouTube: We produced an engaging video content strategy including trailers, behind-the-scenes snippets, and dancer interviews. YouTube TrueView ads engaged users watching dance-related content whilst pre-roll ads complemented offline marketing.
Display advertising: Through strategic partnerships with relevant websites and networks, we placed dynamic banner ads on platforms frequented by individuals interested in arts, culture, and entertainment.

Remarketing and custom audiences

We implemented remarketing campaigns across all channels to re-engage users who had visited BRB’s website but did not complete a ticket purchase. Custom audience segments tailored messages and offers to specific audience subsets.

Performance tracking and optimisation

We constantly monitored campaign performance, tracking click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per conversion. This data guided ongoing optimisation efforts, ensuring budget allocation and targeting strategies aligned with campaign goals.

Results

Increased online visibility: Over 4 million impressions across all paid campaigns
Enhanced audience diversity: Website visitors aged 18-24 increased by 23%
Boosted ticket sales: Sales from paid media increased by over 22%
Higher engagement: Engaging video content contributed to a 45% increase in engagement rate
Cost-efficient campaigns: ROI increased by 43% over the course of all campaigns

National Youth Theatre: Designing futures for a leading youth arts charity

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

National Youth Theatre

National Youth Theatre is a youth arts charity that engages thousands of young people aged 11-30 around the UK every year.

Established in 1956 as the world’s first youth theatre, they offer young people training and opportunities in a variety of theatre related disciplines, both on the stage and behind it, and produce ambitious theatrical productions in local communities and on global stages. Their alumni include internationally recognised talent such as Helen Mirren, Daniel Craig, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Kate Winslet, amongst many, many others.

The challenge

National Youth Theatre came to us with a problem: their site was outdated and no longer fit for the needs of the organisation. It was difficult to navigate for their young, digitally native audience, and the content was hard to find. This presented problems during the annual auditions process when resources were needed to field questions from applicants.

The requirements on the website had expanded since the inception of the original site: what had once been a simple notice board now needed to fill a plethora of functions; sell tickets and courses, provide members with private opportunities, allow young people to audition, promote merchandise, solicit donations and hire out the premises. While the National Youth Theatre is primarily UK based, they also sought to reach an increasingly international audience for their online courses and masterclasses.

They were looking for a site that better reflected the prestige of the institution, while serving their young audience’s needs.

Channeling youthful passion and energy

Visit Site

We put our expertise to work in creating an accessible, mobile-first design to serve a young demographic. The work began with a full redesign that included visual branding and brand guidelines masterminded by our Head of Design. Taking inspiration from the angles of the organisation’s triangular logo and the kinetic energy of theatre, along with the architecture of the NYT’s newly redesigned main building, he created a fresh digital identity for the brand, bursting with energy and colour, while retaining readability and accessibility.

We helped the client source a new CRM provider, integrating GoodCRM to allow users to sign up for memberships, courses and make donations. Hidden behind the login, we created subscription-only members portals that would allow users to submit video auditions, access bulletins with opportunities and information, and manage their personal details.

As the site’s main users, young people were involved and included at every stage of the journey, from discovery and user research through to testing the finished product. Accessibility was a key consideration, and making sure users could apply to become members and sign up for courses with minimal parental aid was of utmost importance to continue attracting and admitting as wide a range of youth as possible.

Results

The end product is a site that reflects the National Youth Theatre’s users and members.

Since the site went live at the end of September 2023, early data shows that engagement on site has increased by 12%, and the time spent on site has increased by an average of 17%.

The number of users that visit more than one page has also increased by 9%.

How to make your on-sale a success

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Have you noticed how ticket sales for some anticipated events have become events in their own right? Consider on-sales like Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, and Glastonbury’s annual ticket release, where the online chatter from fans sharing their journey - from build-up, to frenzied release to the laments and celebrations that follow, depending on the success of the mission. Now, it’s all a part of the experience.

So, whether you’re having an on-sale for your new season, or for a one-off performance, having a robust and smooth online purchase path is key to maximising your organisation’s ticket sales. No one wants an exciting release to be marred by poor customer experience, with the risk of disgruntled would-be patrons as a result.

This is a guide to help you prepare for your next on-sale, with some practical tips and things to keep in mind.

Preparation is key

Spend some time working on a checklist for your on-sale management, considering the following factors:

What kind of ticket sale will it be? A single ticket on-sale, multiple performances, or a season on-sale? Or is it focused around fixed or flex packages, or both?
Is it a general on-sale, or specific to your members? Will you be using promo codes?
Think about the user journey. How will users be notified of the on-sale? Email blasts and social posts, or via a landing page on your site? Run through the steps to make sure your communication is clear for users.
When will the on-sale take place; During the day, evening or weekend?
Are you introducing new features to your site ahead of the on-sale? Consider implementing a code freeze and refrain from making major changes in the lead-up to the on-sale.
Are you expecting a high demand for the on-sale? Review the amount of traffic you expect to see on the day. If you’re not sure, look at previous on-sales of similar scale, to help you calculate what the volume might be. If you’re expecting high demand, consider doing a load test to see how your site can cope.
If you’re anticipating heavy traffic, get in touch with your web provider. You might need to scale up your environment, to prevent any CPU issues on the day.
If you’re using a CRM provider to capture your visitors data and the ticket sales, review the setup. For Tessitura users specifically, consider the following when setting up your new production/s:
- Make sure to test any changes in your website’s dev environment with data from your test CRM and ensure that they’re working as expected.
- Is the on sale date correct for the mode/s of sale you’re planning to use for the on sale?
- Are all modes of sale and price types set up correctly?
- If custom features are used, are they set up properly?
- If using a promo code, is it working, and showing correct prices?
Think about adding active monitoring support during the on-sale. Speak to your web provider to see what support they can provide.

Based on your responses, put together a plan for your on-sale and work with your web provider to ensure it’s in place, well ahead of time.

Use a virtual waiting room

If you’re expecting high demand for your on-sale, consider using a virtual waiting room to control the flow of traffic to the site for a smooth and successful customer journey. This can keep your site from crashing due to traffic overload, while also making sure that pages load quickly - giving your customers a better experience, free from frustration and abandoned purchasing journeys.

As part of our BlocksOffice subscription, Made’s clients have access to CrowdHandler, a virtual waiting room to protect their site.

Here are some practical tips when using CrowdHandler:

Spend some time familiarising yourself with the admin area of CrowdHandler to see how it works.
Test your waiting room in advance (https://support.crowdhandler.com/support/solutions/articles/80000138507-getting-started-with-your-first-waiting-room)
Review the waiting room template within CrowdHandler and see if any changes need to be made. https://support.crowdhandler.com/support/solutions/articles/80000126037
Pre-scheduling your on-sale to avoid lags: setting your waiting room to engage an hour or 30 mins before your on-sale and setting your ticketing system to go live shortly afterward, with the queue activating at the official on-sale time.
Use the autotune feature (available on the standard package) which will automatically adjust the flow of traffic during the on-sale by sampling live traffic. https://support.crowdhandler.com/support/solutions/articles/80000062466-autotune
Once an on-sale is online, test the purchase path through the waiting room. You can use the Crowdhandler admin panel (by going to Domains and finding the shield button that is labelled “manage IP addresses”) to bypass your IP address to the front of the queue.
If a customer has lost their position in the queue, your customer care team can ask them for their session token and promote their session so they can get back in the queue. They can do this by clicking on the waiting room line on the graph on the dashboard. It will take you to a session screen which shows you all the people in the queue. You then add the token in the search box to find the user. Click on the user and hit the button to promote them.

When your visitors are redirected to the CrowdHandler waiting room, they’ll want to understand what has happened and where they are. You can provide some more context by editing the Waiting Room messaging via the dashboard. https://support.crowdhandler.com/support/solutions/articles/80000138507-getting-started-with-your-first-waiting-room

If you’re interested in learning more about using Crowdhandler’s waiting room on your site, you can schedule a free demo at crowdhandler.com to speak to one of the team’s experts. This is the case both for Made clients and non-clients.

We hope this guide has been helpful in directing your on-sale strategy. If you are considering a redesign or upgrade to your site to address past issues with big on-sales, get in touch to discuss your specific needs.

If you already are a Made client and have specific questions about your upcoming on-sale, reach out to your digital producer or log a support ticket for assistance.

Mystic Aquarium: Reimagining the visitor journey for 750,000 annual guests

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Mystic Aquarium

Home to the only beluga whales in New England, this leading attraction and research facility in Mystic, CT, welcomes around 750,000 visitors annually and has active research and education programs.

Made Media partnered with Mystic Aquarium in 2022 to reimagine their digital ticketing experience in a post-COVID world. The new site would support the science, research, and education mission of the organization while providing a positive first interaction with the Mystic Aquarium brand when purchasing timed-entry tickets.

A day at the aquarium

Visit Site

The scope of the project was the full website and booking path. The Made Media design team worked with Mystic Aquarium through a user experience and information architecture design process to determine the structure and layout of the new site. The team also presented a number of potential design concepts for the visual design, which were iterated over several rounds with feedback from Mystic Aquarium stakeholders.

Mystic was already using Tessitura ticketing and CRM software to process ticketing and membership transactions, and using Tessitura Network Express Web (TNEW) as its core e-commerce path. As the checkout path was working well for the Aquarium, we focused on designing and building a hybrid integration with the Tessitura API that would allow users to plan their day, selecting the date/time of their visit, how many tickets, and applying offers/up-sells, before redirecting to TNEW for checkout.

Alongside the ticketing integration work, Made developers built the new website on top of our preferred open source Silverstripe content management system, preparing a data structure in the CMS that would feed both the new website, and following a subsequent release, on-site display screens showing information about today’s events.

Results

The site’s new Day Planner feature “really takes the guest by the hand and walks them through the process of understanding the options and getting what they need,” according to Mystic’s Director of Marketing Kyle Rathbun. This feature gives visitors clear access to special pricing (like first responder and SNAP card holder discounts) and facilitates upsells for purchasing memberships or enhanced visit add-ons like animal encounters inside the timed ticket purchase path. Since launch in late January 2023, we’ve seen a 10% increase in conversion rate on all devices (desktop and mobile) - and a stunning 73% of all ticket purchases are taking place on mobile devices.

Redesigning National Youth Theatre

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Back in August 2022, we were thrilled to kick off in-person discovery sessions with National Youth Theatre, a leading UK charity headquartered in North London in a stunning newly-remodelled (and award-winning) space on the Holloway Road.

We worked with a lot of clients virtually during lockdowns, and this was a welcome return to face-to-face meetings. At an in-person discovery, we get a special insight into what makes an organisation really tick - how the team works together and how their patrons and attendees interact in a physical space - whether that be a performing arts centre, theatre, or learning space. NYT’s home is a combination of the latter two - a maze-like warren of practice rooms and communal spaces flow into a black box performance space on the first floor, with more dedicated practice and creation spaces on the second level - all imbued with the rough-and-tumble feel of being behind the scenes. This gives the feeling while in the space that you’re getting an exclusive (but welcoming!) inside view into how the magic happens on stage and screen.

Overall, this project was especially exciting for the Made team - it was an opportunity to integrate with a new CRM provider (GoodCRM), which was a fun challenge for our Head of Development, Leo Thornton and his team. It was the first time Digital Producer Linda Yu worked on a new client discovery with our Head of UK/AUS Client Services, Karan Mahay. It was also a big learning experience for me, as it was my first opportunity to work with a UK-based client, especially one that specifically focused on the needs and requirements for young, digital-native artists and performers. But it was perhaps most delightful for our Head of Design, Stef Grindley, who’s been with Made for nearly two decades. His wealth of experience and insights working on projects for almost all of our clients around the world afforded him the opportunity to really leverage his accumulated years of experience to help the team at National Youth Theatre think through the digital expression of their brand in a tangible way.

We asked him to reflect on the project process, now that the site has been in the wild for a few months.

There was a delicate balancing act that needed to be considered when reflecting NYT’s brand values digitally. The website had to be fully accessible and inclusive, and this needed to be reflected in the simplicity and clarity of messaging and through clear, considered layouts. Yet the site also needed to be dynamic, exciting and reflect an organisation that is youthful, brave and bold.

Digitally these two things often run contrary to one another. The cutting-edge online can often be exclusive and is almost never accessible. Therefore it was a must that we ensured our choices, while bold and exciting, should always consider the site’s users.

During discovery we spoke a lot about how the building has done such a great job at reflecting its relationship to NYT members, that it felt like their home. This is something that we also wanted to reflect in the website. Subtle use of textures inspired by the NYT’s physical space were included in the design, but we were cognisant that this shouldn’t overshadow the need for clarity and shouldn’t become a gimmick.

As we worked through our design and branding conversations, it became clear that while NYT had some strong visual collateral, it had official brand guidelines, colour palette or even a secondary typeface for body copy. We quickly realised that we needed to formalise these things for digital application.

We wanted excitement to be imparted through bold use of colour; we looked at a range of colours that NYT had used for previous print work and created a palette for them consisting of dark and light versions of each colour. This would allow bold colours that would be accessible in all contexts, as backgrounds with light text, coloured text on dark backgrounds or coloured text on light backgrounds.

By selecting strong photography options, we looked to introduce image treatments and subtle shapes to content areas that reflected the interior of the building. The plywood facade throughout the building - while made of rectangular panels - never felt rigid, as you would always see them presented at some sort of angle. Replicating these shapes on the site lent a certain fluidity to the layouts and stopped the design from feeling boxy or stifling. Where appropriate, we could also inject movement using some of the fantastic video collateral that was available from NYT’s concerted focus on helping its members develop digital content creation skills.

Finally we looked at typography. In print, NYT had been using AvantGarde for titles and body copy; in the context of a poster or brochure this could be seen as a bold choice, but it lacked the nuance and clarity required for long form content or situations that required smaller typography options. We reviewed a number of complimentary typefaces based on the requirements and eventually settled on Eigerdals. A visually warm sans-serif type family, Eigerdals struck the perfect balance between feeling fresh, modern and friendly while also being easy to read. Consisting of a variety of different weights, Eigerdals also allowed us more freedom of choice when making selections based on size or typographic hierarchy.

We couldn’t be more pleased with the result of the synthesis of design, engineering and digital brand strategy for this project. Learn more about the entire project in our full case study.

Melbourne Theatre Company: A streaming platform for Australia's oldest theatre company

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

The challenge

Melbourne Theatre Company needed a solution enabling patrons and new audiences to purchase videos for on-demand rental viewing, integrated with their existing Tessitura infrastructure.

Melbourne Theatre Company is the oldest professional theatre company in Australia. They were one of the first clients using our Tessitura-integrated BlocksOffice ecommerce path, and we fully redesigned their site in 2018. In 2020, when COVID-19 accelerated their plans for a streaming service, they came to us.

Core requirements included:

Customer accounts, transactions and payments stored in Tessitura
Immediate access to media after purchase
Embeddable in the existing website or branded to match
Restricted viewing periods (e.g. 48-hour rentals)
Geoblocking capability for licensing requirements
Direct video access links for certain patrons

What we did

We built a viewing experience using the JWPlayer API paired with the Tessitura API for user credentials and access.

Visit site

The implementation included a new video page within MTC’s Silverstripe CMS allowing users to view details, purchase, and watch directly through the website.

Users received a 48-hour viewing window, communicated via pop-up. Content was geo-restricted to Australia using Geo Targetly integration.

Every time a patron attempts to watch, the system checks their order history to validate purchase access. Watch history is stored in Tessitura to control the 48-hour viewing restriction. JWPlayer functionality enabled casting to smart devices.

The first MTC Digital Theatre video was Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, available for on-demand rental during a limited season.

Impact

92% of surveyed constituents indicated they were satisfied or very satisfied with the MTC Digital Theatre platform.

New York City Ballet: A new digital stage for one of the world's great ballet companies

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

New York City Ballet

New York City Ballet is one of the foremost dance companies in the world. A firm fixture in the cultural life of New York City, NYCB reaches dance lovers all over the world through its digital channels. From its home at Lincoln Center, NYCB provides a breadth of programming for both dance aficionados and newcomers to the form, and its annual Nutcracker season is a highlight of the holidays in New York City.

The challenges

Having launched in 2012, the previous NYCB site no longer met the needs of a modern audience. The website lacked smooth mobile experiences, performance was slow, and the design itself did not reflect the vibrant and energetic aesthetic of a world-leading dance company.

Event discovery

While NYCB produced and presented magnetic content, the site’s vast, unwieldy global navigation meant that casual users often abandoned the site before discovering it. NYCB required the new site to improve the presentation of their content and increase user engagement.

Unblocking innovation

In their RFP, NYCB made it clear that they wanted the website to reflect their organization’s mission to “continually innovate and… reinforce [their] position as a leading, digitally-centric performing arts company nationally and internationally.” Due to the “obsolescence” of their old site, new features were risky and costly to build, and generated limited impact. To achieve their goal, NYCB needed a partner that embraced constant evolution in the digital sphere.

What we did

Visit Site

Event discovery

On the previous website, NYCB fell victim to two very common problems: a calendar that occupied a lot of space, but communicated very little, and unwieldy navigation. Driven by mobile-first design principles, we did away with the traditional square calendar and eliminated a significant amount of white space by only surfacing days with events in them. To make event information quickly accessible, we also implemented popovers, giving users a choice between visiting the event page or heading straight to the ticket purchase path.

Not every interaction is transactional, though. Beyond event discovery, NYCB had received feedback about issues users experienced when trying to locate information about castings, or when searching for newsletters. To tackle this, we significantly reduced the navigation and introduced a clear structure to the site.

To make sure that the new site structure was easy to navigate, we ran user testing workshops to ensure these design choices were on track before we marched down the path to launch. The feedback revealed some minor, but important, improvements which were quickly addressed, integrated into the project plan, and included in the final product.

Setting NYCB up for the future

One of the key benefits of utilizing Made’s custom ticketing platform, BlocksOffice, is that it can be customized as a client’s needs evolve. NYCB strives for high levels of innovation, and we support this through monthly strategy meetings, during which we discuss analytics, our visions for the site, and recommendations for additional features. Combined with our regular support system, we remain constant, vigilant and active with the site. Rather than maintaining a status quo, we’re able to keep NYCB where they should be: at the forefront of digital innovation.

Pandemic

When COVID-19 upended the arts and culture industries, we were a mere three months away from debuting NYCB’s new site in time for single ticket sales. With NYCB’s priorities shifting rapidly to navigate the consequences of the pandemic, a new project plan was devised with extended testing periods and a delayed launch. We also turned our attention directly to the donation and membership paths. We had planned for single tickets to be the star of the show at launch, but with no events on sale, and a clear need for revenue, we needed these contributed revenue paths to be flawless.

Royal Albert Hall: Enhancing the pre-concert experience at the Royal Albert Hall

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Royal Albert Hall

Visit Site

We have been working with the Royal Albert Hall since we designed their new website in 2015, and we are their exclusive digital development partner. In 2019, we completed a project to improve the user experience of making restaurant reservations.

This project spanned UX design, front end development (HTML, CSS, Angular JS), and backend system integration with their Tessitura ticketing platform.

The Royal Albert Hall already offered restaurant bookings on their website for a few years but they felt it didn’t serve their changing business along with bookers’ expectations of what a restaurant booking system should offer. They also saw some restaurants getting a higher portion of traffic and bookings over others. They felt this was due to the outdated UX rather than the organic popularity of the restaurant.

We worked directly with RAH technical and non-technical stakeholders to agree on the requirements which included the following functionality:

The ability to view all dining options at the Hall
See reservation availability across different restaurants and instantly reserve a table within a few clicks
Amend/cancel booking reservations online
Personalised restaurant recommendations based on the ticket or product being purchased
Google Analytics support to analyse usage statistics for the restaurant widgets
Gracefully handle situations where backend system was unavailable due to moments of peak demand (e.g., ticket releases and on-sales)
Confirmation email after a booking that includes content specific to the restaurant booking

Los Angeles Philharmonic: A content hub for the LA Phil's digital storytelling

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The challenge

The LA Phil’s previous site design lacked a news section, and the information architecture suffered as a result. Interesting media content was buried with no indication of freshness, making it hard to browse and distinguish between different content types.

In an earlier phase, Made had adopted laphil.com and hollywoodbowl.com and migrated them to Silverstripe CMS.

The previous design had no natural home for timely content—nowhere for new seasons to be announced, to promote specific concerts, or announce podcast episodes. Content became mixed with transactional sections, and there was little distinction between different media types the LA Phil was producing.

What we did

We conceived a new Watch & Listen section deployed across laphil.com, hollywoodbowl.com, and later theford.com, acting as a hub for timely and engaging content with filterable functionality through categories and curated playlists.

Visit site

Working collaboratively with the LA Phil team, we kicked off with intensive discovery sessions to understand user and content requirements.

We used these requirements to identify key user journeys, testing and refining different page layouts, content structures, and taxonomies through clickable prototypes. The agreed functionality included:

A Watch & Listen homepage for each site
Article pages supporting different media types
Category pages for navigation
Related content on concert detail and artist pages
Newsletter signup integration and promotion of key actions (buy a ticket, make a donation) within the content flow

As the site was designed mobile-first, mobile prototypes were created for review before being expanded into full pattern sets. We included support for video, audio, and text content, with video previews from the homepage.

Impact

The new Watch & Listen section went live across the LA Phil’s sites in February 2020, providing a hub for digital content just before the organization had to cancel performances due to COVID-19. This content is now a foundation of the site estate and resolved the main information architecture issues.

Dr. Phillips Center: 64,000 tickets to an outdoor festival that didn't exist yet

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The challenge

In Spring 2020, like other arts venues across the world, Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts had to close because of COVID. By November 2020 its show line-ups had been cancelled for nearly six months.

Thanks to the Florida sunshine, Dr. Phillips Center found a creative way to bring their community together again - the Frontyard Festival. There would be a stage, ticketing booths, and food and beverage tents in the front yard. For patrons, there would be physically distanced “pods”: 5’ x 7’ structures built using metal scaffolding materials, with six feet of space between each pod, allowing groups of up to five people to reserve their own space.

All that was needed was the ability to sell tickets.

What we did

Visit site

Two main challenges in translating the Frontyard Festival into a seating plan:

Making sure patrons had a clear understanding of the experience, including information about restrooms, bars, and food options.
Ensuring patrons could choose their required number of seats in a “pod” without buying more tickets than needed, and that they felt comfortable in their purchase decisions.

The “pods” were a new concept for SeatCurve seat maps. Users would need the ability to select between two and five seats in a pod, requiring a new functionality: a dropdown selection of seats appearing upon pod selection.

Thinking carefully about the Tessitura setup in the backend, we organised the seating correctly and - most importantly - distanced the groups of patrons. Careful attention was given to the user experience so users understood how to proceed with the number of seats they required for each performance.

Impact

Dr. Phillips Center’s Frontyard Festival proved to be a hit. The box office reported few questions from users, indicating they intuitively understood the map and the actions to take.

Los Angeles Philharmonic: Turning a virtual gala into the LA Phil's most successful fundraiser

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The challenge

The challenge was to keep the music and inspiration of the Los Angeles Philharmonic front-and-center while making it as easy as possible to donate, including support for programs like YOLA (Young Orchestra Los Angeles).

In February 2021, the Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered their virtual gala: Icons on Inspiration. Open to all, the event featured new recordings filmed on-stage at the Hollywood Bowl, linked by interviews between Music and Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel and iconic supporters including Julie Andrews, Common, Katy Perry, and Yuja Wang.

The LA Phil and Made teams had previously optimized the online donation and membership path, including mobile wallets like Apple Pay and streamlining the user journey by moving extraneous questions to the confirmation page. The gala challenge was to shorten this loop further, allowing viewers to complete donations without leaving the page.

What we did

Two main components: a sticky video player and an in-page donation widget integrated with Tessitura via BlocksOffice.

Visit site

The video content was positioned in a sticky block on vertical screens, allowing mobile users to interact with the rest of the page while maintaining focus on the primary content. YouTube Premiere presented the pre-recorded gala as a live stream at the publicized time, then remained available on-demand for thirty days.

We created a new in-page donation widget underneath the gala video. This component allowed users to make donations and pay via Apple Pay or PayPal without leaving the page, with a traditional card payment option for those who preferred the regular checkout flow.

The widget connected to LA Phil’s Tessitura CRM via BlocksOffice, building on previous work that delivered a 78% decrease in time-to-conversion. By collecting payment first via one-click methods, then asking additional questions on confirmation, donations were completed much more quickly.

We also undertook load profiling to ensure the interactive elements could handle large traffic volumes at event launch without impacting page loading or back-office systems.

Impact

Icons on Inspiration launched to great acclaim on February 6, 2021, and remained available on-demand for around a month. By the second week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic met their donation goal. The gala received critical praise, with the LA Times applauding: “Icons does redefine what an online fundraiser can be.”

Melbourne Theatre Company: A new chapter for Melbourne's home of theatre

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The challenge

Founded in 1953, Melbourne Theatre Company is the longest running professional theatre company in Australia. By 2017, their website no longer represented the organisation’s brand and felt dated compared to current design trends and functionality.

MTC’s previous website had been live for five years and lacked the content-marketing approach the Company was taking to focus on owned media. Understanding that the relationship between engagement, reach and attendance is cyclical, MTC wanted to increase web visits and engagement, and in turn, increase online transactions.

The project aimed to address:

Demographic shift. Build features that would convert more of their browsing audience (25-34 years old) without alienating the buying audience (55-64 years old).

Strengthening engagement. On the previous website, 51% of sessions only viewed one page. MTC creates substantial editorial content and saw this redesign as an opportunity to improve session length and depth.

Mobile usability. Sessions from mobile devices only represented 38% of total sessions with a 52% bounce rate. MTC wanted these stats to improve along with mobile transactions and revenue.

Content discovery. Previously, 50% of blog traffic came from email campaigns, suggesting an issue with content discovery on site.

Flexibility. Each page needed to be made up of flexible content blocks that could be easily edited and rearranged, rather than locked into strict templates.

Results

Visitors aged 55-64 spent 19% longer on the website, with pages per session increasing 27% and bounce rate decreasing 19%. Conversion rate for those aged 25 and under increased 12%.

Visit site

Organic search visits increased by 4%, social visits by 56%, and referral traffic by 69%. Visitors discovering the blog from other key pages increased by 12%.

Detroit Symphony Orchestra: Bringing world-class performances to a global audience

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Accessibility-first video streaming

Visit site

Even before the pandemic forced arts audiences to seek out cultural activities from their homes, Detroit Symphony Orchestra had an accessibility-first mission to bring world-class programming to audiences locally and around the world.

When Made took on the challenge to create a web experience worthy of that mission, integrating with their live and on-demand video programming was a key feature.

Prior to the launch of the new dso.org, the orchestra was switching to Vimeo OTT as a host for their DSO Live, DSO Replay, and DSO Classroom Edition channels. Some videos were to be open to the public, while others required viewers to make an annual donation before accessing them.

We built a viewing experience using the Vimeo OTT API, paired with the Tessitura API for user credentials and access. When a user goes to watch a DSO Replay video, they are prompted to login or make a donation to continue. Once identified as a donor, they have access to the full back catalogue of DSO Replay content.

For Vimeo OTT to grant direct video access, accounts need to be created on their platform based on the user’s email address. For Tessitura to grant video access, a specific constituency code must be active.

The first part of this implementation adds the constituency when someone makes a contribution online, allowing them to watch immediately through the DSO website. Additionally, an account is created in Vimeo OTT with the customer’s email address, so future visits directly to the hosted platform do not require a website login. These credentials also work for non-web deployments of Vimeo OTT, including TV apps.

For customers who donate in person, over the phone, or by mail, we worked with the Vimeo team and DSO’s technology team on a scheduled SQL job, creating credentialed accounts within the OTT platform for any new offline donors.

This creates a seamless integration with a third party OTT system, allowing donors to view videos either on the DSO site or on the hosted platform. Free versus paid access at the video level is controlled entirely in Vimeo, while the mechanism for which specific users can access paid content is controlled in Tessitura.

Better Together

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Written in collaboration with Gurj Bansal (Content Marketing Manager, Studio Bravo)

You’ve probably heard the word “collaboration” thrown around a lot when talking to digital agencies. All agencies, us included, are keen to show clients that we’re dedicated to sharing ideas, working together and achieving common goals.

When it comes to agency-client collaboration, most (good!) agencies will have this nailed.

But what about when two agencies - especially two agencies with similar capabilities and offerings - partner up on one client project? How is true collaboration achieved in these situations, without stepping on each other’s toes?

In a recent project for the Sydney Theatre Company, we (Made Media and Studio Bravo) did just that.

In this article, we’ll explain how we created a genuine and successful agency partnership that puts our client needs first.

How we achieve a great agency collaboration

1. Make it meaningful

Our first step when collaborating with another digital agency is to clearly define the project goals together. The key word there is ‘together’. Unless we’re aligned in our understanding and objectives, there’s no way the collaboration will work!

Key early discussions will be had to answer:

What are the project goals?
What is the budget and timeline?
What is each agency responsible for delivering?

We always aim to have an initial meeting with all parties, including the client, so we can hear directly from them about the project requirements.

2. Get to know each other

It’s crucial for us to get to know the other agency as early on as possible. Introducing the relevant project teams on all sides is a must - and doing it over email doesn’t usually cut it.

We always like to take the time to meet our agency partners, face-to-face when possible. This sets a more personal foundation to build our working relationship on. And it always helps when you can put a face to a name!

3. Make it easy to communicate

Establishing a working routine is so important when it comes to agency collaboration. There might be many factors at play like differing time zones, team availability or working styles that influence the preferences of each agency.

Before the project formally kicks off, we’ll make sure we’ve jointly decided how and when it’s best for us to communicate. Some of the communication tools we might use include:

A shared Slack channel for quick questions and answers
Phone calls or emails for more detailed information
Video calls or in-person meetings as required
Jira (or similar project management platform) for managing and tracking the progress of tasks

4. Be open to new ideas

This is the difference between a good agency collaboration and a great one. It’s not always easy teaming up with another company, especially when you’re used to doing things your own way with your own team.

We find that the best approach to take is a flexible one. Rather than getting caught up in our potential differences, we embrace the experience, try to learn from the other agency and understand their ways of working.

We’re strong believers that ideas are better when they’re shared and it’s no different when talking about an agency-agency relationship.

5. Play to your strengths

Last but not least, we each stay in our lane with regards to project responsibilities. There’s no denying that sharing ideas and bouncing off each other’s experiences can foster innovation and better ways of doing things.

But in the case of a collaboration between two agencies with similar skill sets and who may be friendly competitors to win projects and clients, it’s equally important to remember that each team has been brought into the project by the client for a reason - their particular expertise that’s relevant to the project at hand. By focusing on the tasks we’re responsible for delivering, and letting the other agency take the lead on their own tasks, we can avoid blurring the lines of division.

As long as everyone is still communicating openly, this is the best way of ensuring that deadlines don’t run away from us and that the client’s needs are being met.

A Success Story - SeatCurve x Studio Bravo

So we’ve told you about how we collaborate successfully with other digital agencies, but how about an example to back it up?

Made Media and Studio Bravo have teamed up together in recent years across a number of digital projects.

These collaborations have centered around implementing our standalone select-your-own-seat (SYOS) application SeatCurve in Bravo designed and/or developed custom Tessitura and/or TNEW websites for arts and cultural clients in Australia.

When Bravo delivered the design and development of the Arts Centre Melbourne website, we successfully collaborated to also implement SeatCurve as part of that project, delivering an enhanced user-focused checkout experience.

For Sydney Theatre Company STC’s highly customised Tessitura implementation needed all the benefits SeatCurve affords, including allowing customers to easily see and select their own seats before purchasing tickets. This work was part of a significant upgrade of STC’s ticketing platform and the introduction of a new Sitecore content management system implemented by Bravo.

Despite being based on opposite ends of the earth, with the majority of Made Media staff in Birmingham and Studio Bravo in Melbourne, we’re proud to have achieved outstanding results together that benefit our clients greatly!

Wrapping Up

Partnering up with other agencies isn’t always easy. But at both Made Media and Studio Bravo, we set ourselves up for collaborative success by:

Jointly defining the project goals, budget and timeline
Clearly dividing our responsibilities
Building real relationships with each other
Having open channels of communication, and using them regularly
Bringing an open mind and flexible attitude to the table
Playing to our strengths and remembering why the client chose to work with us

We’re looking forward to teaming up on more projects in the future so watch this space!

Are you looking for help in creating your arts and cultural website with a seat selector tool? Reach out Made Media today at hello@made.media or Studio Bravo at hello@studiobravo.com.au

About Bravo

An award-winning Melbourne-based creative digital agency that imagines, designs and builds user-centred digital experiences with mobile, web and emerging technologies. Bravo’s digital solutions always hit the mark across a variety of sectors including arts, real estate, education, retail, health, finance and more. https://www.studiobravo.com.au

Digital Producer Linda Yu

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Can you tell us about yourself and your role at Made Media?

I’m a Digital Producer, which basically means I translate needs between various groups, keep projects running smoothly, and constantly prune my email inbox. Think of the role as being like the Greek god Hermes, except I call performing tasks for the Pantheon “deliverables” and refer to Zeus as a “client.”

Outside of work I enjoy deep dives into niche subjects, Russian literature, Japanese pro-wrestling, and wide-legged trousers.

What made you want to pursue your chosen career path and job role?

I’ve had a rather eclectic professional life — previously I’ve worked in real estate, for an airline, on a newsletter, and as a book designer — but after I went back to college in my twenties and started thinking about my future, I decided to look for a career based on what I valued. Ultimately, what I really appreciate about working at Made is that I can be involved with meaningful projects for organisations involved in the arts — which I care deeply about.

What would you say are the main skills you need within your job role?

Good judgement about scale and priorities. Liberal use of the “remind me about this later” button in Slack. Extreme pessimism about deadlines, but equal optimism about human ingenuity.

What’s your favourite thing about working at Made?

Something interesting happens every day; whether a monarch’s death or a busy season on-sale. I also love how everyone at Made has their own creative projects outside of work, it makes talking to them every day enriching.

What was the last performance/concert/film you went to see?

The last performance I saw was Puccini’s Madama Butterfly at the Royal Opera House. The last film I saw was Jacques Tati’s Playtime — which I re-watch every time I contemplate moving to a bigger city.

What’s your favourite movie quote?

“Maybe someday your ‘maker’ will come…haul you away, take you apart, and announce the recall of a defective product. What if all that’s left of the ‘real you’ is just a couple of lonely brain cells, huh?” — Ghost in the Shell

What’s your hidden talent or party trick?

I can do a double lutz. (My dream — likely never to be achieved due to global warming — is to one day participate in the Elfstedentocht.)

If a new person was to join us at Made Media what advice would you give them?

Find comedy in the mundane and you’ll have fun constantly.

Who would play you in the film or your life and why?

At the rate things are going, it won’t matter since they’ll just deepfake me onto the actor. If I got to choose… former Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Apparently she’s hiding out in England and needs a job.

Wales Millennium Centre: A bilingual digital home for Wales's performing arts centre

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Wales Millennium Centre

Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) is Wales’ home of the performing arts, situated at the heart of Cardiff Bay. One of Europe’s pre-eminent centres for the performing arts, it’s the UK’s top cultural attraction with over 16.5 million visitors since opening in 2004.

After a competitive tender in 2017, Made was appointed to redesign WMC’s website alongside a branding exercise by North. Our process kicked off with an intensive week of on-site discovery to uncover the Centre’s requirements for the new site.

The challenges

The Centre’s previous site dated back to 2011 and was functional as a storefront for ticket sales, but struggled in several areas. Beyond bringing the look and feel up to date with responsive implementation, the new site had to address WMC-specific challenges.

Bilingualism. As a leading Welsh institution, and the national arts centre of Wales, WMC is under a statutory and cultural obligation to work bilingually, presenting Welsh and English on an equal footing. The challenge with the website is to ensure that the bilingual approach is comprehensive, doesn’t favour English as the dominant language, and makes an active offer to the user about the language in which they want to interact with the website.
Make the brand sing. We spent a bit of time talking about singing. Not just because we were in Wales, but because the idea is literally written on the front of the building. In seriousness, it was important to WMC and their stakeholders that the new website reflected the broad mission of the Centre and their position as the home of the performing arts in Wales.
Improve conversions and engagement. A new website is a significant investment, and needs to demonstrate return on investment. In terms of hard objectives, these were set largely around revenue and conversion, with the aim of increasing conversion rates through the website and the average value of orders when users bought tickets.
Provide for a dynamic content strategy. Another clear opportunity for the team at WMC was to use content in better ways, to compete for attention in the live entertainment and cultural landscape of Cardiff and South Wales. In order to facilitate this, the website needs to be able to present the content in easily searchable, digestible and relatable ways, and be able to link this content closely to the events and experiences that the Centre is promoting.

What we did

Visit site

We designed a mobile-first website to help Wales Millennium Centre tell its story and serve its users effectively. Mobile prototypes of key pages were created for review before expanding into full pattern sets. The site was implemented in SilverStripe, our preferred CMS for performing arts organisations.

For the ticketing path, we employed our mobile-responsive, Tessitura-integrated middleware product, BlocksOffice, and customised it to meet the specific needs of WMC. BlocksOffice, like the front-end of the website, can be made fully multi-lingual, by adding translations of all the text that appears in the site into the BlocksOffice control panel. It also allows text that comes directly from the ticketing system to be dynamically replaced with either the English or Welsh public-facing text as needed. We made sure that the full user journey is presented bilingually, including ensuring that post-purchase communications, like confirmation emails, are sent in the language in which the online user completed their checkout.

Engaging design

Key features of the new website design include rich production pages that can incorporate strong touring show brands or stand alone with minimal content; event collections for mini-season landing pages; cross-promotional panels; a content hub for competing in Cardiff’s cultural landscape; and clear paths for membership sign-ups, restaurant reservations, and secondary spend.

Results

The new site launched in August 2018 with immediate concrete results. This marked the beginning of an ongoing journey, with Made continuing to collaborate closely with WMC on a roadmap that builds on the success of the relaunch.

Diolch, Canolfan Mileniwm Cymru!

Glyndebourne Opera: Safely reopening one of opera's most iconic houses

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The challenge

For their Autumn 2020 performances, Glyndebourne Opera needed to implement social distancing requirements in their reserved seating maps while retaining the customer experience benefits of allowing patrons to choose their own seats.

What we did

Working with the Glyndebourne team, we implemented Select Your Own Seat with tickets set out in pairs, using surrounding seat holds to enable physical distancing.

Visit site

The approach used existing tools within BlocksOffice and Tessitura functionality to mark sold seats in SYOS, indicating to customers the difference between occupied seats and those left unoccupied for physical distancing.

Using holds in Tessitura, Glyndebourne laid out the venue so that only socially distanced pairs and occasional single seats were available. We prevented single seat purchases and added user messages explaining this limitation. A COVID icon indicated social distancing seats (using a specific hold code) to distinguish them from occupied seats.

As social distancing rules changed to allow increased venue capacity, we adapted the system to sell to larger groups of 3-4 seats. This configuration was handled within the BlocksOffice control panel, allowing Glyndebourne to indicate groups of seats that need to be sold together.

Impact

The implementation created socially distanced bubbles around patrons, providing additional reassurance during uncertain times. Glyndebourne achieved an on-sale that met government COVID requirements for social distancing.

Made Media and easy-connect Announce Strategic Partnership

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

LONDON and VIENNA — Made Media and easy-connect (Ticket Gretchen GmbH), two leading digital specialists in the global arts and culture space, are pleased to announce they have entered into a strategic partnership to support cultural organisations in reaching new audiences and increasing revenue.

As culture and live event organisations realise that the old ways of reaching new audiences have become increasingly outmoded in our rapidly-changing, digitally-focused world, there’s a greater need to provide seamless engagement and purchase pathways that work beautifully on any device and interface with existing ticketing and CRM systems.

Made brings forward its expertise as one of the leading digital agencies helping arts and culture organisations worldwide showcase their brand storytelling and increase ticket and donation revenue. easy-connect shares its knowledge and experience helping performing arts organisations to digitise their sales and communications channels, via dedicated digital tools for strengthened customer retention and audience engagement.

Made Media’s clients will now have access to easy-connnect’s innovative white label app solution & digital engagement tools, powered by social and community features, personalised communication and fully-integrated ticket purchase. easy-connect’s clients can benefit from Made’s holistic approach in addressing the complex operational needs of ticketing and fundraising-focused organisations with highly-customised marketing and ticketing websites.

James Baggaley, CEO at Made Media, says, “I’m excited to announce this strategic partnership with easy-connect, which will enable Made Media clients to take advantage of their innovative tools for audience acquisition and development, with a particular focus on new, younger, and digitally-native audiences.”

Wolfgang Graf, Co-Founder & CEO at easy-connect, says, “This new cooperation with Made, one of the leading voices in the cultural sector, is a huge next step on our road to overseas expansion. We are particularly excited to see how our clients will benefit from the combination of Made’s website expertise and easy-connect’s next-gen apps to boost digital audience (re)engagement. A promising start to the New Year!”

About Made Media

Made Media designs and produces creative digital solutions for world-leading cultural, entertainment, and experience-led brands, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, Melbourne Theatre Company, Royal Albert Hall, Lincoln Center and many more. We enable our clients to connect with the world, sharing their ideas, events, and passions with as many people as possible.

https://made.media

About easy-connect (Ticket Gretchen GmbH)

easy-connect works with Europe’s leading arts institutions, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Salzburg Festival & Vienna State Opera, to digitise their sales and communications channels. By transforming content presentation and championing an integrated, smartphone-first approach, we’re putting community and NextGen audiences centre-stage. At the core are real-time interfaces to existing ticketing systems, therefore enabling a seamless integration and providing organisations with all available customer data and analytics.

https://www.easy-connect.io

For more information and interview requests, please contact:

Michaela Drapes, Head of Strategy, Made Media

Email: michaela.drapes@made.media

Sophie Garzon-Lapierre, Business Development & Marketing, easy-connect (Ticket Gretchen GmbH)

Email: s.garzon-lapierre@easy-connect.io

92Y: A design system for New York's most eclectic cultural institution

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

92Y

92Y - officially the 92nd Street Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association - is a world-class cultural institution with an absolutely enormous array of programs and services, collectively serving hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Many New Yorkers aren’t aware of the full scope of the institution. Most would know it as a leading performing arts center, with a renowned series of conversations and literary readings. For others, it’s a religious community center, a place to gather on the High Holy Days. People of all ages take advantage of its classes in subjects from jewelry-making to dance to career development. There’s also a nursery school, a senior center, a fitness club, educational outreach programs for New York City’s public schools, an array of summer camps for children, and even a swim team. And some literally call it home: 92Y offers safe and affordable housing for students and interns.

Any one of these programs might be the entire mission of another organization with an entire website dedicated to it. But there’s only one 92Y, and only one 92y.org. The website needs to be many things to many people, just like the institution itself.

What we did

Visit site

Partnering with the in-house team

Because of the strength of 92Y’s in-house web team and their longstanding investment in their existing Kentico codebase, this project became a close collaboration between our two teams.

Made provided expertise in information architecture, user experience, responsive design, and Tessitura-integrated AngularJS widgets, while 92Y’s in-house developers focused on implementing this work in their CMS. Both teams worked to a unified plan and acted as a cohesive unit. This structure let Made provide the expertise 92Y needed, without introducing redundancy in skill sets or effort.

A responsive redesign and pattern library

Our first job was to deliver a responsive redesign of the site, including careful information-architecture work and navigation design to ensure that users could quickly and intuitively find their way to the site sections that interested them.

Made’s designers directly designed many key pages, but for an institution the size of 92Y, we also needed to deliver a way to quickly construct new on-brand pages. To enable this, we delivered a comprehensive library of reusable components that could be used as building blocks for any number of new web designs.

A dynamic event and class finder

The sheer volume of events and classes at 92Y necessitated a better way for users to filter and find ones that might interest them. Made built on top of existing Tessitura-integrated event finder functionality, extending its filtering abilities, refining the design, and increasing its performance.

As users interact with these filters, the URL updates in real time. This ensures users can return to exactly the filtered view they were looking at. Coupled with a feature that enables 92Y to include curated content at the top of listings for certain filtered views, this also lets the team quickly create landing pages featuring particular groupings of events and classes.

A First Timers' Guide to TLCC

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The last time we all saw each other in person at Tessitura’s annual TLCC conference was three years back in Chicago. Maybe you’re brand-new to working at an arts and culture organization, or maybe this year is your first time at a conference after being in your role for a few years, or maybe - like us - you’re a little rusty at this whole traveling across the country (… or the globe) for a big industry conference thing.

With that in mind, in anticipation of TLCC Denver (August 14-17, 2022) kicking off in just a few short weeks, we bring you Made’s First Timers’ Guide to TLCC.

Preparation

Make a packing list - and stick to it. Sprawling Gaylord resorts are full of fun features and can accommodate a big crowd, but by that same token are often a bit isolated. The frequent travelers’ refrain of if I didn’t pack it, I can get one when I get there is a bit of a challenge when you’re dependent on a hotel gift shop or convenience store to replace your essentials.
Oh, did we say sprawling? Consider packing comfortable shoes and get ready to have an easy time reaching your daily step count!
But that said, pack light if you can. We’ve all heard about the chaos that the airline industry is in at the moment, especially with lost luggage. The conference is just four days, so consider building your conference fashion strategy around a capsule wardrobe of versatile clothing that can transition from day to evening activities and can fit in a carry-on suitcase - just don’t forget your swimsuit!
Check out the conference portal and app to build your itinerary, make connections, and prep a list of questions to ask and people to meet. Did you spot that there’s also a special First-timer’s Lounge at the Opening Reception?

Arrival & Getting Settled

Coordinate travel from the airport to the conference hotel with colleagues. On the same flight with folks from your own or other organizations? Consider teaming up to share an Uber XL or other transportation options.
If your flight arrives earlier in the day, it’s always a good idea to call ahead to the hotel and see if they can accommodate an early check in. At the very least they’ll be able to hold your luggage while you check out the resort amenities ahead of the crowds - so make sure you’ve got easy access to your swimming togs.
If you’re traveling across time zones, make sure that your calendar is up-to-date for your current location for any meetings or gatherings. It would be a shame to miss anything because of a time snafu!

Make New Friends

One thing we’re looking forward to this year is the Opening Reception that kicks off the conference Sunday night - we can’t wait to see old friends and make some new ones. Come and find us in the Sponsor Zone and say hello.
Speaking of social fun, keep an eye out for your very exclusive invite to the Made Social on Tuesday evening.

Push Your Boundaries

Pluck up the courage to attend sessions outside of your specialization that sound interesting. One of the joys of TLCC is learning the ways you can support your colleagues back home by expanding your skill set by sitting in on sessions on topics that are new to you. Take a look at the schedule with an open mind and no doubt you’ll find your way to the right panels for you.
Suggest or attend Open Spaces. These informal discussions are planned and scheduled on the first day of the conference by your fellow attendees, and they’re a great opportunity to meet other people who are facing the same challenges you are.

Ask Questions

We can’t emphasize this one enough - don’t be afraid to ask questions during Q&A portions of sessions. As far as we know, there’s no such thing as a stupid question - especially at TLCC! See someone from an organization whose work you admire? Don’t be afraid to ask that burning question about how they get things done.
If you’ve got questions about working with Made on a website redesign project or strategy project - or want to find out more about any of our myriad products and services - including BlocksOffice, MonkeyWrench, and SeatCurve - be sure to stop by our sponsor room anytime during the conference. Our crack team of API experts, digital content gurus, and ticketing path pros will be standing by to answer any questions you may have.

Recharge

Even if the conference is a few days long - it’s a marathon, not a sprint! Overdid it last night or a little jetlagged? Overwhelmed from so many new faces and conversations? If you need some time to recharge, hit the Lazy River and enjoy some fresh Rocky Mountain air!

Coping with Altitude

Speaking of Rocky Mountain air, be sure to hydrate, hydrate, hydrate - especially if you’re usually living at a lower altitude. While you’re not at the highest altitude in the region, Denver does boast a semi-arid climate with lots of sunshine, and the city’s tourism board recommends drinking twice as much water as you normally do if you’re not from a similar geographic or climate area.

Have fun!

Obviously we can’t make you have a good time at TLCC, but we’re pretty sure that with all the amazing resources on offer for the community and the fun social events (we’d be remiss if we didn’t give a big shout-out to The Tessiturians’ scheduled appearance at the closing party), you’ll find yourself having an incredible experience, whether it’s your first conference or your fifteenth.

It's a Small World

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

There are lots of reasons why you might be thinking about building a multilingual website: maybe it’s required by law in your country; maybe your audience (or potential audience) speaks another language; maybe you think it makes sense to offer additional language options for reasons of inclusivity and accessibility.

While this level of digital transformation may seem like a daunting task, we’ve worked with a number of organisations to develop multilingual digital experiences. Below, we’ll show some real-world examples of how we’ve made this work for our clients and dig into the available options for translations.

Wales Millennium Centre (Cardiff UK)

Since 2011, the Welsh language must be treated no less favourably than English in the communication of public services. To be fully compliant with this requirement, we worked with our client Wales Millennium Centre on a fully bilingual site redesign, encompassing its marketing and ticketing sites.

For the marketing site, we built a ‘natively’ bilingual solution in our CMS of choice, Silverstripe. This means that content editors manually enter content on each page in both languages, as the content in each language may vary based on each version of the page. This allows ultimate flexibility in providing the most accurate human-powered translations to meet customers’ needs.

The WMC purchase path is powered by our BlocksOffice platform, which features built-in multilingual functionality. Each user-facing text string in BlocksOffice is derived from a site text library (in which there are over 1,000 entries for the WMC site), which can exist in multiple languages. Additionally, BlocksOffice is configured to replace strings that are read from the ticketing system API, allowing it, for instance, to translate the labels of Price Types before they are presented to the user.

BlocksOffice also handles the end-to-end communications and tracking so that the ticketing system can record the language in which users checked out online, and users receive confirmation emails in the language they used when checking out – and in the case of some transactional emails, instructional content is provided in both Welsh and English in the same message.

Los Angeles Philharmonic (Los Angeles, CA, USA)

According to the US Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey, 13.5% of Americans (that’s about 41.8 million people) speak Spanish at home, a number that has more than doubled compared to the results from a similar survey in 1990. In Southern California alone, 42% of Los Angeles residents are native Spanish speakers, and 39% of residents of LA County speak Spanish at home. We worked with the LA Phil to deliver a lighter-touch solution for a bilingual site than the one built for the WMC site, implemented through the service Weglot, which proxies the English version of the site and provides a parallel Spanish version on the es.laphil.com subdomain.

We updated site markup to ensure that all content is properly translated, and site editors, using a dashboard in Weglot, have the ability to approve the platform’s machine learning-powered translations for new content before it’s pushed to the Spanish-language subdomain of the site. Additionally, Weglot’s built-in SEO capabilities mean that Google indexes the site in both English and Spanish, ensuring that users searching in their native language end up on the correct page when they click through on a search result.

For its purchase path, the LA Phil also makes use of BlocksOffice’s onboard bilingual functionality which uses a Spanish site text library in the same way as WMC does for Welsh.

These two solutions are by no means the only ones available for consideration when redesigning or augmenting an existing content-based and/or Tessitura-integrated site. In particular,

Google’s Cloud Translation API offers dynamic translations based on Google’s machine learning models, which can be combined with a glossary of site-specific terminology and a robust caching strategy to deliver close-to-real-time translations of site content in multiple languages with minimal intervention needed from site content editors.

If you’re thinking about creating a multilingual site for your arts or cultural organization, get in touch.

Digital Leadership in the Arts: Building a Team

Wed, 20 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

In the last edition of Made Next, I outlined six behaviours that are exhibited by digital leaders in arts and cultural organisations:

Digital leaders are trusted partners in business decisions.
Digital leaders are comfortable navigating the changing external environment, technological capabilities, and internal systems.
Digital leaders consider the potential return on investment at all stages of the strategic planning process.
Digital leaders make informed investment decisions based on relative benefits of building, buying, or adapting technology.
Digital leaders have established methods for testing and refining new ways of working.
Digital leaders are prepared to handle strategic trade-offs in order to make technology work for them.

These are all important, foundational behaviours that are required to make an effective impact on the digital output of an organisation. However, they should also be seen as a starting point in the journey to build an effective digital team.

One of the questions I’m often asked is: how much digital work can be efficiently outsourced to teams outside of an organisation, and as a result, what skills are needed ‘in-house’ to deliver on an organisation’s digital strategy?

Often, the dividing line is drawn between ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of specialised expertise, with anything requiring high levels of specialist knowledge or skill being a prime candidate for outsourcing. However, this often leads to a deficit of in-house specialisation, with organisations lacking the most appropriate mix of digital skills to deliver on their strategy. Sometimes this is most evident when considering skills such as product management or digital transformation - both are important areas of expertise for an arts or cultural organisation to draw upon, but hiring outside resources in these areas can run the risk of a ‘helicopter’ approach: consultants come in, make recommendations, and then leave without embedding long-term change in the organisation.

Instead, I prefer to think of a distinction between ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ processes, and between ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ moving fields of expertise.

There’s a clear dividing line between tangible and intangible processes. Tangible processes result in an output that might be broadly similar regardless of whether you’re an organisation that delivers cultural experiences or if you’re an organisation that sells shoes. Tangible processes can usually be fairly adequately described in terms of their output: a software application that needs to do X, or a report that explains Y, or a PPC campaign based on Z parameters. This doesn’t mean that these processes are uncreative, just that it’s usually fairly clear what the output of the process will be before you start. Tangible processes include technical activities like coding, quality assurance, data analysis, and management of platforms such as PPC and social media.

Intangible processes rely on an implied understanding of an organisation’s mission, purpose, and brand to produce results. They may often end up in a very different place from where they started, because the very act of going through the process may change the initial brief. Intangible processes include more creative skills such as copywriting, design, and strategy.

Another way of looking at these skills is to think about fields of expertise that move fast or slowly. For example, fields such as software development or social media management can move very quickly, with new frameworks and platforms emerging on a daily basis. On the other hand, processes such as project management and copywriting have changed very little in the past few decades, even if some of the platforms or tools that are used to facilitate these tasks change over time.

Fast-moving fields of expertise require constant immersion to keep up-to-date with new ideas and approaches, and can be hard to replicate in small teams where one individual may be required to contribute across multiple areas of work. These fields can also be hard to recruit into, because they require specialist knowledge from the person doing the recruiting as well as the person being recruited.

On the other hand, more slow-moving fields allow for deep expertise to be built up over time and for individuals to really understand how their expertise can contribute to the success of the team as a whole. Crucially they provide space for both domain expertise, such as in copywriting or project management, but also sector expertise, in the business of arts and cultural organisations.

		Process
		Tangible	Intangible
Speed	Fast	Software Development, Data Analysis, PPC/Social Media Management	Design, Strategy
	Slow	Project Management, Quality Assurance	Copywriting

Once you’ve categorised the skills that you need in your team, how do you decide how these skills should be made available in your team?

Tangible and Fast-moving

In many or most cases, tangible processes where the field of expertise is moving quickly are prime candidates for outsourcing to a third-party. There are significant costs involved in maintaining these skills in-house, and unless you have a large enough digital team that you can support this activity internally, the risks of losing the one or two key people who provide this expertise is too great.

Intangible and Slow-moving

Any area of your digital output that is both intangible and slow-moving is probably one you want to keep in-house. These areas often allow for deep expertise of your sector, as well as expertise of the activity being undertaken. This is the area populated by the people who are most passionate about what you do and how you do it. In the case of processes such as copywriting or content creation, having these people in-house means that they can more effectively discover and develop the stories that will power your organisation’s mission and long-term strategic goals.

Tangible and Slow-moving

Some processes produce tangible outputs and also exist in slow-moving fields of expertise. In these cases, a deep knowledge of your sector is not critical, but it can be beneficial, depending on the project. In most cases, these are the processes where you want to deliver the activity as efficiently and effectively as possible - in other words, you want to optimise the delivery of these activities. In some cases, this might mean engaging with a third-party to supplement your in-house team. This might be a great opportunity for a freelancer or independent consultant who can get to know your organisation over the course of multiple engagements. Or you may find that your organisation is particularly well set up to support these processes (such as hiring a project management resource on your digital or business development team), in which case you could keep them in-house.

Intangible and Fast-moving

Processes that are both intangible and fast-moving, like digital transformation, are areas that have often been outsourced because they are perceived to be high expertise. The long-term result of this approach is that many organisations feel a deficit in these areas, particularly related to skills in digital design or strategy. There can be a real benefit for organisations in developing these skills internally, because deep knowledge of the organisation’s mission can significantly enhance the quality of the intangible outputs being produced. The challenge for digital leaders is in working out how to navigate the tension between needing a familiarity with the work of the organisation, and maintaining skills in a fast-moving space. The best way can be to develop highly collaborative partnerships with third-parties who can provide provocation, training, and an external perspective on your challenges, while ensuring you have some capacity in-house to provide continuity and coaching across the organisation.

		Process
		Tangible	Intangible
Speed	Fast	Outsource	Collaborate
	Slow	Optimise	In-house

As a final note, it’s also important to update your skills map as technologies develop, along with your digital roadmap. Over time, some areas of expertise will become more established, and as they do they may move from being considered ‘fast moving’ to ‘slow moving’. One example of this is video production, which is becoming an increasingly core part of many organisation’s digital output in a way that it wasn’t five years ago. Some areas of expertise may need adding to the list, including specialisms in virtual reality or connected devices, which may enter the framework as a fast-moving field of expertise.

This article is taken from Made Next, a new newsletter from Made Media looking at emerging and future trends at the intersection of digital technology and the world of arts and culture.

Subscribe to Made Next and get future editions sent directly to your inbox.

Digital Leadership in the Arts

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Over the last year, arts and cultural organizations and practitioners have had to find new ways to create art, engage audiences, and try to bring in new sources of revenue. Digital channels have been at the heart of maintaining relationships with audiences and donors throughout the pandemic.

Digital expertise has also been at the core of responding to concerns around reopening physical venues - streamlining erstwhile analogue processes around ticket exchanges, ticket delivery, bar and catering orders and much more.

Will things get back to normal in 2021? It’s possible to look at the data and see latent healthy demand for arts, entertainment, and cultural activities. It’s also impossibly hard to shake the scarred optimism of 2020.

Whatever happens in the next few months, it’s clear to me that as arts and cultural organizations around the world navigate the next months and years, it is those that demonstrate strong digital leadership skills that will be best positioned to succeed.

What do we mean by digital leadership?

Digital leadership is the set of skills, knowledge and behaviors that individuals exhibit to successfully lead the digital activity of an organization. The digital leader doesn’t have to have ‘digital’ in their job title, although as we’ll see below, this can be helpful both to build credibility within an organization and to recruit individuals with the appropriate skills and behaviors.

Some of what makes a good digital leader in an arts or cultural organization is the same as what makes a good digital leader in any kind of business. But there are some key differences between these organizations and other businesses. The primary difference is the requirement to do more with less. Many arts and cultural organizations have an outsize profile and digital presence compared to their operating budgets and staff size. They also generally have a nationally or internationally recognized brand, but necessarily a local audience, who typically have to attend in person to experience the core product. They are at once large, complex organizations, and dynamic small businesses. You are unlikely to be able to pick up a Chief Digital Officer from a FTSE500 company, install them in a leading performing arts organization, and expect them to succeed. The context and challenges are relatively unique.

Similarly, there are a number of leadership skills that we would expect any senior manager or leader within an organization to possess: skills around communication, project management, team management, finance, conflict resolution, etc.

What I want to focus on is skills that are specific to digital leadership.

Digital leadership behaviors

I want to outline six behaviors that I believe are exhibited by digital leaders in arts and cultural organizations. These are based on my experience of working with and in arts and cultural organizations in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia over the past decade, and on conversations I’ve had with many senior leaders and digital leaders in those organizations over that time.

1. Digital leaders are trusted partners in business decisions.

Organizations that support digital leadership have digital specialists in the room as they’re making key business decisions around programming, strategy, marketing, pricing and more. The opposite of this is an organization that decides on a strategy and then directs a digital team to execute the strategy that has been developed.

2. Digital leaders make informed investment decisions based on relative benefits of building, buying or adapting technology.

This is about understanding when it is appropriate to commission custom development, when it is appropriate to use off-the-shelf platforms, and how it might be possible to adapt those to the required purpose.

3. Digital leaders are comfortable navigating the changing external environment, technological capabilities, and internal systems.

A common reason for the failure of digital projects is that the project or transformation was targeting a now defunct state in the organization. Perhaps more than any other specialist leaders, digital leaders need to be able to hit a moving target while riding a horse.

4. Digital leaders have established methods for testing and refining new ways of working.

The only constant is change; and digital leaders are used to navigating this change and responding to it dynamically.

5. Digital leaders consider the potential return on investment at all stages of the strategic planning process.

ROI is a core dynamic of digital development in particular, because it can be expensive to make even minor technological changes. Organizations with strong digital leaders see compounding returns from their investments in digital activity, because it is well-targeted, well-measured, and well-presented to the rest of the organization, prompting further investment.

6. Digital leaders are prepared to handle strategic trade-offs in order to make technology work for them.

This can involve coaching others in the organization through process or commercial change in order to realize bigger benefits. When this fails, it is often demonstrated by digital projects that are 90% completed but never fully finished off.

Digital leadership in the arts and cultural sectors is not new, nor is it - of course - wholly absent. There are some incredible leaders doing incredible things to use digital technologies in new, audience-focused ways.

But the common factor across organizations that are struggling to move quickly, or struggling to get digital projects off the ground, or over the line, is often that they lack leaders with the right digital skills, authority, and resources to make strategic change.

Should these skills and behavior sit within one person?

There are clearly ways to make a small group work effectively as digital co-leaders, although it is something I have seen only very rarely. Most of the time, these attributes do exist in a single person, and this is when digital leadership is most successful.

They don’t need to be called a ‘Chief Digital Officer’ or a ‘Director of Digital’, but the focus and clarity this provides about the skills that person has is a useful shortcut to many of the organizational changes required to make a success of digital leadership.

The most successful digital projects I have witnessed in arts and cultural organizations have been led by an obvious digital leader. Most of the time, this person has been a senior manager, and most of the time, this person has ‘digital’ in their job title. There are exceptions to the rule, but generally a digital leader will keep these projects on track by exhibiting many of the behaviors outlined above.

The least successful projects, on the other hand, have usually been shoehorned into a more traditional organizational structure, with responsibility sitting somewhere between marketing and information technology, and if the word ‘digital’ exists in anyone’s job title, it usually sits with some of the most junior members of the team. These people are - without exception, in my experience - skilled, dedicated, inspired, and talented digital specialists. But the nature of their role in the organization means that they do not have the authority or resources to effectively deliver on the organization’s digital strategy as it might be conceived by the executive team.

Conclusion: improving digital leadership

Improving the quality of digital leadership requires efforts at both an organizational and individual level.

For organizations: consider whether you have a formal or informal digital leader in your organization. If it’s an informal role, or you don’t have one at all, think about how you can best structure your team to deliver digital leadership in the future. Who will be the person with the skills, authority, and resources to lead digital change? How will they be supported to develop their skills and develop the organization’s capacity for digital development?

For individuals: consider how you develop your leadership behaviors as described above. Where will you go for support as you look to develop these skills? What help do you need from your organization to develop capacity and authority? Where do you look to for examples of digital leadership behaviors?

This article is taken from Made Next, a new newsletter from Made Media looking at emerging and future trends at the intersection of digital technology and the world of arts and culture.

Subscribe to Made Next and get future editions sent directly to your inbox.

Vipen Mahay

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Can you tell us about yourself and your role at Made Media?

I’m a Full Stack Developer and part time nerd, with interests such as astronomy and gaming. Oh, and I’m also an amateur archer and photographer.

What made you want to pursue your chosen career path and job role?

Dumb luck. I was flipping through a University prospectus and thought Computer Science sounded interesting… Turns out, I love it.

What would you say are the main skills you need within your job role?

Not a skill, but I’d recommend that big foam enter key you can buy to relieve stress. (Google it and thank me later.)

What’s your favourite thing about working at Made? (If anything)

The people. Really nice bunch. Also the (pre-Covid) outings.

What was the last play/film you went to see?

Red Shoes courtesy of Made - brilliant performance at The Hippodrome.

What’s your favourite movie quote?

SHOW ME THE MONEYYY!!!

What’s your hidden talent or party trick?

I can become a lot more attractive by the end of the night.

If a new person was to join us at Made Media what advice would you give them?

Bring more sea monkeys - ours died.

Who would play you in the film or your life and why?

Kunal Nayyar/Dev Patel/Kumail Nanjiani - Why? I’ll let you figure it out.

All the World's a Stage, but there's also a Restaurant

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

For many arts organisations in 2018, it is no longer enough to be a theatre, museum or concert space.

Increasingly we have seen our clients putting the emphasis on their restaurants and bars as well as their latest blockbuster productions. World class venues such as Royal Albert Hall, Lincoln Centre, and the National Theatre, have become ‘destinations’, with visitors attracted by dinner and a drink, as much as by their artistic offerings.

Repositioning your venue as a destination has plenty of advantages. Sir Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire, former chief executives of Ambassador Theatre Group, recently stated that additional facilities are key to creating a greater customer experience. Perhaps more importantly, with aging arts and culture audiences, bringing in a younger demographic is vital to the future of many venues, and offering options for an entire evening can only help in bringing new audiences through the doors.

However, for all the benefits that come with this reframing, it can be difficult to present this dual identity of artistic venue and ‘dining destination’ in your digital output. Many of the arts venues which offer dining opportunities are essentially landlords to restaurants on their site. This means that while both businesses are vying for optimum exposure, they also have to work together to attract visitors, as the clientele of one is likely to be that of the other. So how do you convince Joe or Jane Ticketholder to dine on site, while continuing to promote your productions online? Striking that balance can be tough, and needs to be done subtly. Fortunately your friendly neighbourhood digital agency is here to give you a couple of pointers…

The Only Way is Upselling

The easiest way to an audience’s heart is through their stomach (and liver). Upselling is a great way to tie the promotion of facilities and events together, making your new offerings an integral part of the ticketing experience. Providing your audience with the opportunity to purchase interval drinks or book a restaurant table as part of their ticket purchase enhances the customer experience, elevating your site from a place to buy tickets to a destination to plan an entire evening.

Upsells around interval drinks or merchandise perform well when added into the purchase pathway as an additional step after seat selection, so all items can be bought together in one go. To do this you must integrate your ticketing system with the catering company’s EPOS system, which can be complex. Lighter integrations can be achieved using third party widgets such as OpenTable on the confirmation page, prompting the user to consider additional aspects to enhance their evening.

Don’t be a Stranger

Opportunities for upselling are not limited to the purchase pathway. Once a user has purchased tickets, there are still channels open to market enhancements to their visit.

Automated confirmation emails are a perfect opportunity to promote your other services, particularly if your resident restaurant’s booking system is not easy to integrate directly into your purchase pathway. Adding widgets for tour bookings or table reservations to these emails provide easy calls to action. SMS messages can also be used to drive users towards making reservations, reminding them of dining opportunities and providing links to booking platforms. Just make sure to consider GDPR if you’re in the EU.

Ahead of a user’s visit, you may send automated emails to remind them of production details and provide important information about getting to you. If you do, these allow you to highlight the ways in which they can enhance their experience, linking to restaurant information, or promoting merchandise and interval drinks. This is particularly useful if you tend to sell tickets a long time before the productions, as your audience is unlikely to have been so organised as to consider their movements around the performance. These emails provide a reminder of the extras they were offered upon purchasing their tickets, but may not have taken up. The other benefit of these upsells being offered separately is that the cost may seem more palatable when considered alone, rather than as part of a larger total in the cart.

Retarget Practice

Automated communications enhance user experience ahead of attending productions, and are useful vehicles for upselling. However, if your audience are not already aware of the services you are offering, they are considerably less likely to interact with these calls to action.

Retargeting campaigns allow you to advertise your services to those who may not be familiar with your venue. By installing tracking pixels on the confirmation page of your purchase path, you can specifically retarget users who have bought tickets through your website. This allows you to promote your restaurant or bar in ads on the web, a gentle reminder to your patrons that your venue is a destination, with multiple reasons to visit.

If you wish to paint with slightly broader strokes, you can use the pixels on the homepage itself, so you can advertise to anyone who has shown an interest in your organisation.

Channel Hopping

You wouldn’t restrict the promotion of your productions to one channel, so don’t limit yourself when it comes to your catering. If you are worried that putting food, drink, or any other services at the forefront of your site may detract from your artistic offerings, look to your other digital channels, where offerings are expected to be more varied.

Social media is the perfect platform to promote your new dining experience to a receptive audience. Your followers are already invested in you as an organisation, and are more likely to be interested in new developments, so they are going to be your best starting point.

Similarly, those who have subscribed to your newsletter are going to be a good target audience. Begin with announcements through blog articles, as these allow you to shine a light on dining services in an organic way; your subscribers expect to learn about new offerings through this channel. Once this has been done, you can integrate advertisements, menus and information pages into future newsletters. Monitor user interactions with these promotions to see what works, and utilise A/B testing to perfect the wording and placement of these adverts.

The Show Must Go On

As exciting as the idea of new attractions can be for marketers, remember that your venue, and its reputation, has been built on its artistic output, not its dinner service. While additional services provide a more robust experience around your productions, make sure that you do not become known as “the nice restaurant with a gallery attached”. Keep your productions front and centre of your website itself, with dining opportunities highlighted in communications as an additional way to elevate the experience.

Conclusion

What is clear is that the best way to establish your venue as a “destination” online is to make the integration of this idea as organic as possible. Rather than placing adverts onto your homepage and congratulating yourself on a job well done, work on dispersing information and calls to action throughout the user journey. Provide multiple opportunities for your audience to learn more about these services, upon visiting the website, entering the purchase pathway, and even beyond, through retargeting and email campaigns.

So follow our tips, round out a fun time with a couple of rounds of data analysis, and make your tweaks. Then head to your new bar. You’ve earned it.

X. Good Business Is The Best Art

Fri, 15 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

If you don’t recognise the quote, it’s from Andy Warhol:

“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

In 2010, Made Media took the decision to focus our efforts entirely on the cultural sector. We had an affinity for it from our earliest days, and some of our earliest websites were arts websites. But before we decided to make it our sole focus, we worked doing digital ‘brand activations’ for media companies and advertising agencies. We made websites and apps that tried to increase your brand-affinity with Digital Watches, Luxury Sports Utility Vehicles, Chocolate, Pizza, and Midlife-crisis Motorbikes. Brands with plenty of money to spend on digital content and microsites. A surprising proportion of the work involved helping users to transpose their faces onto dancing digital puppets.

Working with the arts means acknowledging multiple bottom-lines.

The digital agency world thrives on doing portfolio pieces for consumer brands, projects which might get you some award recognition from your peers. But our work with cultural clients means making design decisions that will have a measurable and direct impact on their bottom line. The assets we build often channel 70% of our clients’ commercial revenue. This is design with real commercial consequence, and that’s what we’re happiest doing.

We don’t apologise for working in the best commercial interests of our clients

Working with the arts means acknowledging multiple bottom-lines. Challenging, meaningful artistic work is not born of purely commercial objectives. Sometimes we’ll work with an Artistic Director in the presentation of the work, because the website is an expression of those core values, not just a virtual cash-point. But we don’t apologise for working in the best commercial interests of our clients, and sometimes pushing that agenda: a call to action that’s a little more blunt; an upsell algorithm that’s a little more ruthless.

The better question is “I want this outcome, and I have this budget. What should we do?”

One thing that all that early commercial work left us with was a determination to deliver to deadlines and budgets, and to work around road-blocks. It’s also given us a readiness to talk about money as a dimension of the specification. The pedestrian approach is to say “I want this digital product, how much will it cost?”. The better question is “I want this outcome, and I have this budget. What should we do?”. Finding answers to that question is the most fascinating kind of art. Some people call it design.

Required Reading

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

IX. Cache First! (Ask Questions Later)

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things

— Phil Karlton, 1997

“It looks OK to me. Have you tried emptying your cache?” — Your web designer, five minutes ago.

In 2009, due to some contractual oversight, Made Media was given responsibility for hosting a companion website for one of the UK’s most popular network TV shows. In fact, said website was the most popular website for Channel 4 in the UK, partly because the show made a feature of directing people to the website, and feeding back from it, live on-air. We can testify to the traffic generated when a popular TV doctor, at prime time, points to a web page featuring a gallery of certain body parts, and suggests you might want to go online to compare yourself. The bandwidth graph has to 10X its scale axis in a second. The data centre phones you up to find out what’s happening.

It was a badass server. It probably had almost as much processing power as your phone today.

At the time, we were only just dipping our toes into Amazon Web Services. What we did have though, was a rack of web servers in a data centre in Manchester. We could dedicate one of them to this website. It was a badass server. It probably had almost as much processing power as your phone today. There was no load test. There was no backup plan.

I don’t know what we thought we would do, maybe throw water over the server if it caught fire.

What we did, was to read some articles about withstanding a Denial of Service Attack. And number one on the list was to use a Reverse Proxy Cache. The Open Source one that everyone was recommending was called Varnish. We installed it, made a few optimisations to the web server configuration, and crossed our fingers. Actually, two of us drove up the M6 to Manchester. I don’t know what we thought we would do, maybe throw water over the server if it caught fire.

The website stood up just fine on that single server, due to the magic of caching. In these days of cloud computing and horizontally scaling applications, caching can get overlooked, but it’s still critical to keeping websites operational.

The truth is most web pages do not change all that much. And when they do, they often change within predictable time ranges. Even if you’re only able to cache the information on a page for one second, that is still huge, when you’re doing more than 2,000 requests per second, like - for example - in the middle of an Ed Sheeran on-sale.

Most web assets are actually cacheable, whether that’s a home page, an on-sale button, a seat-availability feed, a piece of javascript, or a performance calendar. And you can control, quite precisely, when a cache expires, whether that’s by specifying ‘this content is good for 60 seconds’ or ‘this status expires at 10:00am exactly, when this event goes on sale’. In fact, HTTP caching is really at the core of the infrastructure of the internet. The much vaunted Content Delivery Networks are really just a network of reverse-proxy caching servers, like Varnish. The thing is, whilst most web developers have a reasonable grasp of HTTP caching, they don’t often put the work in to make sure it’s really working as intended, because it’s kind of a drag.

We design caching considerations into the application architecture, rather than tacking it on at the end.

The worst thing you can do, if you’re responsible for a high-demand application, is to fuse your highly cacheable content (like performance availability), with your hard-to-cache content (like a user’s personal data). Yoking these business concerns together has the side effect of making your entire application largely un-cacheable. It doesn’t matter how fancy your horizontally scaling architecture is in this circumstance, because we’ve already demonstrated that caching can achieve performance benefits of a factor of at least 2000. Even if your cloud can scale that fast in a second (spoiler - it can’t), you’ll be paying through the nose for it.

So at Made Media we design caching considerations into the application architecture, rather than tacking on caching at the end. It makes development harder, but if the cache breaks the code, it means it needs re-thinking. This is what we mean by cache first, ask questions later.

Required Reading

Varnish a caching HTTP reverse proxy.
Fastly a content delivery network (CDN).

VIII. Embrace the Cloud

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Some IT guys still take solace in seeing blinking lights in the broom-cupboard.

For this reason embracing the cloud still runs against the grain of standard contractual agreements. Truth be told, those IT guys have a point. You entrust your data to a faceless corporation. You can’t see where it is. You can’t be certain that they’re not sharing it with the CIA. Sometimes all that fancy abstraction gets leaky, and something goes wrong. And when it does, there is nothing left to hit with your spanner. Control freakery is an attribute unusually welcome in a SysAdmin, and the Cloud takes away control.

When we talk about fully embracing the cloud, quite often, your standard issue IT guy is not wholly conversant with what that means. They’ve been on board with server virtualisation for quite some time, but they might not be comfortable with the idea that these virtual servers are ephemeral clones. Like the character Sam Bell in Moon, their drive could be wiped at any given second, and it shouldn’t matter, because the next clone is always ready to be wheeled out.

Now the containers in our virtual server farm have names like 050487d5cab85820e. It’s harder to get attached that way.

The first rule of farming is not to name the animals. That’s why we abandoned server naming schemes a long time ago. Now the containers in our virtual server farm have names like 050487d5cab85820e. It’s harder to get attached that way.

That’s what fully-embracing the cloud means. It’s not just running some virtual servers. It means developing horizontally-scaling, stateless applications, which can be installed, booted and deleted as part of an orchestrated choir of servers. It means keeping your static assets outside your core application. It means trusting on-demand services for databases, caches, routing and storage. Somewhere, underneath it all, there are servers, but you’ll never know their names. They are disappearing into an electric sea of ‘infrastructure’. Soon there will be only code, and services like AWS Lambda and Google AppEngine are pushing us further in that direction. Which is a good thing.

Servers are disappearing into an electric sea of infrastructure.

And sometimes it will go wrong. Much as cloud providers talk of redundancy, and removing single-points of failure, ultimately, this is impossible. Only the naive entrust that the failover, multi-zone, database-clustered distributed services are truly fault-free. The very systems that coordinate redundancy become single points of failure. It’s like an immutable law of physics that designing-out architectural flaws will introduce different, more complex ones.

Even so. When you look at uptime across the system, weigh in the convenience benefits, and consider the level of expertise underlying the infrastructure, all to be purchased per processor-cycle, it’s still better than relying on that server in the cupboard. And besides, the IT person who seeks to control everything usually has a huge blind-spot covering the highest-risk single-point-of-failure in the system: Themselves.

Required Reading:

Moon 2009 science fiction drama directed by Duncan Jones and written by Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker
Service Statelessness Principle a design principle applied in order to design scalable services
The Law of Leaky Abstractions

Next Month: Cache First (ask questions later)

VII. Show, Don't Tell

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words…

Next Month: Embrace the Cloud

VI. Mobile First

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

When we first put Mobile First into our manifesto, we were on the verge of an inflexion point.

Analytics were bearing out that within a year or two mobile would take over desktop computers as the dominant computing platform. Web designers with vision were asking ‘why wait?’ If the lifespan of a website was three to five years you needed to design right now for a primarily mobile audience. We adopted ‘responsive’ design as standard in 2010. By 2013, we were considering mobile the dominant use case.

That started with our website for Royal Albert Hall, which actually got featured in the Responsive Design Podcast by Ethan Marcotte, the man who coined the term responsive design.

In 2017 we’re already way past the inflexion point. Mobile usage currently accounts for 60% of the traffic to a typical client’s website. The 60% figure includes both tablets and phones, but even this distinction is starting to blur as phones get bigger and tablets smaller.

The line between my mobile web browser, my Facebook app and my credit card is blurring.

What does designing mobile first mean? Well, it’s not just about putting everything in one nice long and narrow scrolling column. Especially one that makes my laptop feel like an oversized phone, my pixels wasted on huge type, with hero-images that don’t quite fit my viewport without scrolling.

The way we interact with our mobile devices is different. Mobile devices are personal, social and interactive. The line between my mobile web browser, my Facebook app and my credit card is blurring. My digital world is starting to coalesce around me, via a hub of familiar and friendly app platforms, and the mobile presences we design for our clients need to start infiltrating that hub like good citizens.

Interfaces need to get simpler. But our expectations of consumer interactions, from promotions, trust and security to loyalty, recognition and sharing, are getting more complex.

Another way of thinking about it, is that the user experience needs to come and find your customers, in context, pre-empting their needs, rather than expecting your customers to take the initiative.

For example:

If my phone already authenticates with Apple, Google and Paypal, do I really need to register with you? Can’t you just grab what you need from them?
Are you really going to email me a PDF of my tickets, or can they just appear in my virtual wallet?
Am I really supposed to trust your ‘Getting Here’ page over the Maps app on my phone, and its traffic-aware directions?
Are you sure I’m going to visit your ‘Watch & Listen’ section, when all my video comes to find me in an app called YouTube that knows the kind of thing I like?
Are you going to waste my precious screen-space on words explaining why this interaction doesn’t make sense, or are you just going to remove that redundant feature that’s the root cause of the confusion?

In order to support mobile interaction, interfaces need to get simpler. But our expectations of consumer interactions, from promotions, trust and security to loyalty, recognition and sharing, are getting more complex. This really is a huge design challenge. Much more serious than squeezing some content into a narrow viewport.

I like it for what it doesn’t do, as much as for what it does.

My favourite ‘Mobile First’ experience is the Hotel Tonight app. I like it for what it doesn’t do, as much as for what it does. The experience is so focused, personal and convenient, and couldn’t really exist outside a mobile sphere. The interface is visual, simple and easily navigable by thumb. Calls to action are clear and unmistakable. It only requests the exact information it needs, and it remembers it. Your loyalty is rewarded, but you don’t have to work for it by remembering some special member log in. In fact it’s only ever used my Facebook log-in, and it almost never needs to ask for that.

Apply some of that thinking to a concert booking experience

It’s usually two tickets. Can you pre-fill two and make it easy to change?
You can default to the first available night too. I’ll search if that doesn’t work for me.
No need to log me in. Facebook has my details.
Give me the best seats you can in my price range, I might change post-sale.
Paypal or Apple Wallet has my credit card, and my billing and shipping address.
You can drop the tickets into the My Concerts tab, along with the seat upgrade features and my need-to-know info.

Mobile-first design, actually means doing less, and thinking carefully about what we are doing. Are we improving convenience? Are we allowing our users to do more, without increasing their cognitive load? Are we fitting into their digital life? Or are we still expecting them to do all the work for us?

Required Reading

Responsive Web Design, since its groundbreaking release in 2011, this book remains a fundamental resource for anyone working on the web.
Mobile First, former Yahoo! design architect Luke Wroblewski knows more about mobile experience than the rest of us, and packs all he knows into this entertaining, to-the-point guidebook.
Responsive Web Design Podcast Who visits the Royal Albert Hall on their phone? Louise Halliday and Jake Grimley report that designing mobile-first means a website that works better for everyone.
Hotel Tonight make it remarkably easy to book great hotels at amazing last-minute rates on your mobile device.

Next Month: Show Don’t Tell

V. Innovation with a purpose

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

We’re as susceptible as anyone when it comes to getting distracted on the Internet by the latest innovations, whether that be Augmented Reality, Chat-bots, or Cat GIFs.

However, in the rush for relevance, it’s very easy to jump on a new development without a clear sense of purpose. It’s the definition of FoMO - Fear of Missing Out.

Do you remember The Lawnmower Man? It was a Hollywood blockbuster about Virtual Reality. It’s from 1992. Even back in 1992 some pioneering VR companies were touring shopping centres and TV studios with headsets not so dissimilar from the ones you see emerging today. How they worked, and what they did, was clear, even if why you would want them was not. Many of Made’s web developers weren’t even born back then.

No doubt in 1992, in performing arts centres around the world, artistic directors were rushing boardrooms, crying ‘VR changes everything - theatre as we know it is dead’. And perhaps - ultimately - it is. But it’s only just now, in 2017, that VR is reaching a point of convenience where it could feasibly impact on our work in a meaningful way. Of course any Performing Arts Centres to decide in 1992 to divert all their resources into VR would have gone bust long before that happened.

Yesteryear’s science fiction becomes today’s reality, eventually. The iPhone is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy made real.

And this is how we feel about many new bleeding-edge technologies. New technology is exciting. Most of the dreams we have about what a technology will do for us in the future come true. Yesteryear’s science fiction becomes today’s reality, eventually. The iPhone is the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy made real. But just because we reach the point when we can envision something, it doesn’t mean its impact is imminent. The event horizon for those technologies is often much more distant than we think. And when the technology does arrive, it often does so after several mis-steps, and in a subtly altered form.

Think of touch-screens and tablets. They existed one way or another for decades, but it wasn’t until the iPhone that we all saw how they really needed to work. You may even be old enough to remember the dotcom boom and bust. Today we order groceries, clothes and - yes - pet food online, and don’t think much about it. But the dotcom boom presumed we’d fall over ourselves to do so the minute it was technically feasible, then punished the pioneering companies that jumped too soon. Ironically, we all purchase our goods online from one of the few dotcom survivors, Amazon. But only because they persisted long enough to iterate until their experience attained pervasive convenience.

For an agency like Made the trick is to be aware without being naive. To comprehend the potential impacts of a technology, to envisage the ways in which it will change our lives, but to act on it just as the impact starts to crystallise.

Whilst we do maintain much older websites, we tend to think of the useful lifespan of a website as three to five years. So when we start work on a new website, we’re looking to address new technologies that will have a meaningful impact on our clients within a three year horizon. Whether it’s mobile, social, emojis or the latest Google algorithm, we need to act when the technology reaches a material tipping point, that’s going to move the needle for our clients. Yes, this kind of thinking led us to miss out on Pokemon Go (which has already Pokemon Gone). No, we don’t regret it.

In the meantime, it’s hard for us to get excited about a new technology in business hours if we can’t find an imminent use. And we won’t waste client billings conjuring up a use to serve the technology. We’re a technology design business, so while individually we’re going to get excited about robots and space travel, that’s not our raison d’etre when we’re on the clock.

Required Reading

The Lawnmower Man 1992 science fiction action horror film directed by Brett Leonard and written by Brett Leonard and Gimel Everett.
FoMO a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.
Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fictional electronic guide book in the multimedia scifi/comedy series of the same name.

IV. Agile Delivery, Robust Governance.

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

In 2001, the original Manifesto for Agile Software Development articulated a developer position against top-down software management.

The tenets of that manifesto are hard to argue with, and are also refreshingly simple. It boils down to getting software working as quickly as possible, working with the client as part of the team, and responding to change, rather than attempting to plan everything up-front, handing over, and waiting for it to go horribly wrong.

Fast forward to 2017 however, and ‘agile’ has increasingly become something that management want to impose on developers. It’s also acquired plenty of baggage along the way.

Like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, Scrum devotees begin to resemble the methodology-obsessed project management disciples that the original agile manifesto reacted against.

Scrum, a specific project management methodology, has become almost synonymous with the word Agile. As is typical with developer-driven cultures, it has picked up all manner of protocols, tactics and jargon, like a snowball rolling downhill. When Scrum doesn’t deliver on all of its presumed benefits, the usual reasoning is that you are not doing it right; Unless you have wholeheartedly embraced every element of Scrum, then you are doing ‘fake agile’ and your project is doomed to fail. It’s worth contrasting that view with the original Agile Manifesto. Like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, Scrum devotees begin to resemble the methodology-obsessed project management disciples that the original agile manifesto reacted against.

None of which is to say that Agile, or indeed Scrum are bad things. Getting working code at the earliest opportunity; demoing and iterating within regular, time-boxed cycles; incorporating the client into the team and using a feature backlog to manage change, these are all principles we follow at Made Media. But really, we’re talking about the software development cycle here. There are elements of website and app design, that are not strictly-speaking software development. Scrum doesn’t really have much place for design at the macro level. So we combine agile development processes with overall project pragmatism, doing just enough up-front design to avoid going down unproductive rabbit holes, and not delegating QA entirely to unit tests that see quality strictly through a lens of code.

This typically manifests itself when the project manager’s role evolves into asking the production team what’s happening, and updating their gantt chart to better reflect reality. The reality tail wagging the fictional dog.

Agile is usually contrasted with the Waterfall technique, where all tasks are pre-plotted on a giant gantt chart, which increasingly resembles a work of fiction as the real work gets underway. This typically manifests itself when the project manager’s role evolves into asking the production team what’s happening, and updating their gantt chart to better reflect reality. The reality tail wagging the fictional dog.

So yes, waterfall has its problems. But often, when pointing the finger at a methodology like PRINCE2, or certifications like PMP, agile proponents misconstrue the true purpose of those methodologies. PRINCE2, for example, actually has very little to say about project delivery. Its origins are in government procurement, where the delivery is most-likely done by an outsource partner (like us!) and is considered the outsource partner’s business. The true purpose of PRINCE2 is not to deliver the project, but to deliver enough C.Y.A. documentation to prove that it’s not the PM’s fault when the budget doubles, and the product is still nowhere to be seen.

Which is not to say that PRINCE2 is in itself bad. Its purpose is to try and control project governance, not project delivery. To ensure that a project is commissioned with a business case. To provide guidelines as to when people should raise the alarm that all is not going to plan. To anticipate and log risks. These checks and balances are important when you’re answerable to your budgets. It’s about the big picture success of the project.

Web projects are a risky business. Scope is so hard to define in words, that you’re never really sure what you’re getting, or even what you want, until you see it. It’s one of the reasons we prefer wireframes to requirements lists. But no-one’s going to give you a blank check for your web project, and you’re going to have to give your board, or your sponsor, some reassurances about what you’re getting for their money. So unavoidably, there’s going to need to be material commitment to features, budgets and deadlines up-front. This is something that developer-driven methodologies tend to duck. Guess why? Because developers are comfortable writing code, not making business promises.

At Made Media we’re conscious that project budgets have often taken years to win, and have been assigned with definite expectations about outcomes. Agile development methodologies cannot excuse us from our commitment to deliver on those expectations. Working to fixed budgets, we have to temper Scrum with some commercial realities. We estimate in hours, not pseudo-abstractions like story points. Even if sometimes that harshes a developer’s vibe.

So at Made Media, we use a methodology that borrows a lot from Scrum, and a bit from DSDM and Kanban. Clients are welcome to join the sprint planning meetings, or even daily stand-ups if they wish. But a weekly call and demo is the baseline. In relation to project commissioning, governance, reporting and accountability we run more along PRINCE2 lines. And there’s no contradiction in that.

Required Reading

Peopleware Demarco and Lister demonstrate that the major issues of software development are human, not technical.
The Mythical Man-Month insight for anyone managing complex projects.
Agile Manifesto uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
Scrum an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing product development.
DSDM Dynamic systems development method.
Kanban a scheduling system for lean manufacturing.
A criticism of Scrum illustrated with top-notch memes.

Next month: Innovation with a purpose

III. Open Source, Open Attitude

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Wherever possible, Made favours open-source platforms and open standards for development and delivery.

That’s not to say that there is no place for proprietary technology. Sometimes a singular vision for product can be diluted by collaboration, and perhaps that’s historically been best exemplified by Apple’s products. Software targeted at virtual, commercial markets, such as ticketing, might be best served by proprietary tech. But when it comes to the plumbing of the Internet, we think open source won the argument some time ago.

With open source development stacks, the barrier to entry for ‘kicking the tyres’ is low

When considered from a budgeting perspective, the most obvious difference is the sticker price. It might take more than a little digging to find what the proprietary price is, and often it’s eye-watering compared to the $0 open source equivalent. But to focus on that number exclusively is naive. Open source is not always as user-friendly and the total cost of ownership, which includes installation and maintenance, needs to be considered.

The real advantage to open source is that you can be part of the development conversation. Maybe that’s getting your must-have feature onto a product backlog. Or maybe you need to be involved in getting a bug fixed in a Slack channel at 3AM when you’re trying to mitigate packet-loss on a network somewhere. Whilst IT departments might prefer the peace of mind of an enterprise support contract, that’s really just insurance. We find open source communities to be more responsive and creative. Thriving open source communities want to make the Internet a better place for users and for developers.

When you work with open source development stacks, the barrier to entry for ‘kicking the tyres’ is low. You don’t need to handover credit card details; you don’t need to evaluate cost benefit; you don’t even need to fill in a corporate enquiry form to get up and running. GitHub is the default medium for getting stuck-in. This encourages developers to consider their options for solving the development problems of the day. When you’re tied into a proprietary development stack you look to that vendor to solve all of your problems. When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. You become cut off from development and architecture patterns used by the developer community at large. A kind of vendor-centric Stockholm Syndrome kicks in.

Issues of scale are at the heart of open source projects that power Internet infrastructure

Another key advantage to open source, and one closer to the heart of our clients’ concerns, is that it’s more likely to scale. That’s because issues of scale are at the heart of open source projects that power Internet infrastructure. Whilst IIS is a fine web server, and .Net is a fine software framework, Microsoft’s target market is corporate IT departments. Its defaults are set up for corporate Intranets - steady, medium levels of traffic. In contrast, the websites of our clients are characterised by moderate traffic interspersed with extreme traffic levels, with no warmup period. You won’t find a huge amount of accessible knowledge about scaling the Microsoft stack from a casual Google search, because it’s not a problem most of those developers are facing. It’s not that the stack can’t scale, it’s that it’s not really in the culture.

Whilst it’s possible to run proprietary operating systems on top of Amazon Web Services, it goes against the grain, because the lingua franca of cloud technologies are the open-source stacks. You will find it much easier to adopt the patterns of AWS if you’re using some variant of the trusty LAMP stack.

Under its new management, Microsoft is becoming increasingly developer friendly, and has steadily adopted some of the practices of open source. At the same time, an increased usage of software as a service, and microservice architectures has led the OS community to be less zealous in its pursuit of GPL licensing across the board. So the picture is moving. ‘Openness’ might increasingly be about a willingness to document and publish APIs, rather than distributing source code per se. Either way, we prefer to use tech that’s open.

Required Reading

CentOS a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem.
Nginx helps you deliver your sites and apps with performance, reliability, and scale.
SilverStripe is the intuitive content management system and flexible framework loved by editors and developers alike.
Varnish a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy.
Symfony The standard foundation on which the best PHP applications are built.
AngularJS an open-source front-end web application framework.
React a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Next month: Agile, Delivery, Robust Governance

I & II. User-Centered Design / Client-Driven Strategy

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

We know it’s cheating to take on two items in our first post, but the truth is that these two only make sense together.

They’re inseparable—two sides of the same coin.

There’s nothing controversial in 2017 about User-Centered Design, but at the time this term came into common parlance, it wasn’t obvious to every client that their website needed to be centered around the user, rather than the structure of their organisation. A typical web RFP starts with a round-table of department heads, and so consequently, features and navigation often wind up being department centric. Of course the user has no mental map of your organisation’s departmental structure, and so often websites do not center around the user.

It only takes sitting in on one or two usability tests to learn that people approach your website with needs and expectations completely at odds with the way your organisation conceives of itself. More disconcertingly, your website might only be one of a set of candidates resulting from a Google search, and often the most user-centred wins.

When clients are in RFP mode, they find it hard to think in a user-centered way. But we all possess the faculties to think like a user. Remember the last time you used a website to bank online, file your taxes, or do the shopping. You’re impatient, easily frustrated, and constantly distracted. Moments of actual delight are rare, but can endear you to a brand. Delight isn’t necessarily about quirky, over-familiar copy, or cute GIFs, or millennial pink. Actual delight is about having something work the way you expect and preempt your problems. We find this is so unusual that it goes a long way to earning brand loyalty.

At Made we like to refer to ourselves as a design agency that works in the medium of code. Some of us have been reading the latest thoughts on usability since 2002, so at this point thinking like a user comes relatively easily to us. Which is not to say keeping users happy is easy. But the truth is that, from the point of view of a design agency, even the best user experience is meaningless without due consideration of Client-Driven Strategy.

The problem with this excellent User-Centered Design is that it exists completely devoid of Client-Driven Strategy.

If you wanted to deliver the best User-Centered Design for a performing arts center, it might be quite easy to envisage. You dictate your ticket request into a digital assistant that knows you and understands your preferences. You get the best seats to the most popular show, free of charge. A complimentary chauffeur-driven limousine is dispatched to ferry you to the venue, where an attendant presents you with your favourite drink before the curtain rises. The problem with this excellent User-Centered Design is that it exists completely devoid of Client-Driven Strategy. The client strategy might involve selling more artistically challenging work to users who don’t know they want it yet, at a margin that will be sufficient to contribute to the organisation’s own development. The budget might not yet allow for AI bots.

So the actual job of a designer is to find the sweet spot that gives the user the best possible experience whilst meeting the client’s strategy, given constraints around budget and timescale. It’s a reason that UX can’t exist as a meaningful role if it’s delivered without reference to technology, budget, and strategy. They’re inseparable.

Let’s take an example: Interrupting a user’s digital journey with a roadblock popup to ask them to consider making a gift above and beyond the face value of their tickets. In some respects, this is the opposite of User-Centered Design. The user didn’t visit the site with the objective of giving, they just wanted to get their seats. Burying those messages and asks in a section called Support Us, which the client can pick if they’re interested, is effective User-Centered Design, but it’s terrible client strategy.

So the ideal design solution interrupts the user, yes, but frames the ask in a way that is consistent with the brand, minimises irritation, maybe even actually makes the user feel good about giving. Most importantly it supports the client’s strategy. Good design is about finding the sweet spot where both user and client win.

Made Media

Small projects, big impact: the care and feeding of an arts website

Start with a problem, not a solution

Narrow down your goals with data

Bring in your agency

Mini case study: improving Minnesota Orchestra concert pages

Case study: Wales Millennium Centre’s new self-service features

Small project or redesign?

Made Wrapped 2025

The work

SeatCurve: Better than Ever

Looking ahead to 2026

What makes a good RFP?

Tell us your why

Don’t worry about making it formal or fancy

Help us understand how your business works

Tell us about your team and stakeholders

Share what you know about budget, even if it’s incomplete

Be clear about your timeline

What happens next

The AI Search Revolution and the Arts

How Does AI Search Impact Ticketing?

Practical Steps That Actually Help

The Real Digital Challenge

Made Media receives King's Award for Enterprise

Accessibility Developer Sam O'Neill

Can you tell us about yourself and your role at Made Media?

What made you want to pursue your chosen career path and job role?

What would you say are the main skills you need within your job role?

What’s your favourite thing about working at Made? (If anything)

What was the last play/film you went to see?

What’s your favourite movie quote?

What’s your hidden talent or party trick?

If a new person was to join us at Made Media what advice would you give them?

Who would play you in the film or your life and why?

Practical Tips to Keep Your Site Accessible

Organizing content with headers

Descriptive CTAs

Audio & Video

Conclusion

Substance Over Style: Judging Success in Performing Arts Websites

Flair: The Emotional First Impression

Usability: Making Life Easier (Not Harder)

Brand Alignment: True to Who You Are

Content: The Star of the Show

Execution: Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Finding the Balance

Beyond the wheelchair symbol: case studies expanding digital accessibility

Surfacing Accessible Performances

Relaxed Performances at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra

Accessibility on the Seat Map

Limited Steps Symbol for the Melbourne Theatre Company

Language Accessibility

End-to-End Translation at the National Arts Centre of Canada

Made Wrapped 2024

The work

The Basker debut

New faces

David Craigmyle

Meng-Yun Lee

Issa Mohamed

Georgie O’Donnell

Phoebe Orr

Jonathan Ross

Ronaldas Turevic

The state of the sector

Looking ahead to 2025

2024 by the numbers

Content Strategy 101

What is content strategy, and why does it matter?

Choosing the right stories to tell

New York City Ballet’s Anatomy of a Dance

Who are you creating content for?

LA Phil’s “Where Should I Sit in Walt Disney Concert Hall?”

Conversations with Frank Gehry and Esa-Pekka Salonen

Making your content discoverable

Beyond the basics: content hubs and other advanced strategies

Minnesota Orchestra’s Meet Our Musicians

It’s about people, not posts

Ready to get started?