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:

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:

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.