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.

Digital Strategy 

The Minnesota Orchestra produces a wide array of concerts, most of which are announced several weeks in advance of single ticket and Create Your Own package sales. Previously, audiences would get excited about the performances they wanted to see from the orchestra’s website or brochure, with nowhere to save the concerts that they were interested in until they went on sale. We proposed a simple, powerful interface for users to save performances of interest 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 new feature to be successful, we knew 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.

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 to enable users to easily build their own slate of performances. 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 of the site, 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

Of course, this first-party preference data is a marketer’s dream, and the Minnesota Orchestra team needed to be able 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.