Challenge:
Boston Ballet, the first professional repertory ballet company in New England, maintains an internationally acclaimed repertoire of classical, neo-classical and contemporary works. In addition to staged performances, the Ballet operates the Boston Ballet School, with more than 3,000 students at four locations in Boston, Newton, Norwell, and Marblehead, and has an educational and outreach arm centered in the Boston Ballet Center for Dance Education.
In the fall of 2009, the Boston Ballet moved from its long-standing home in the Wang Center to the Boston Opera House. It used that opportunity to reinvent their brand, and wanted to create a Web site experience that better reflected the Ballet’s professionalism and art.
The user experience needed to become more robust and the Web design team had to meet the following objectives:
- Create a site that invoked a rich experience for patrons, emblematic of the ballet itself
- Include more content, including music, video, and photography
- Improve the site’s layout to allow users to more easily navigate to pages where they could interact with the site
- Create a fully functional shopping experience, including the ability to allow users to create their own subscription packages online and to be seated immediately for single ticket purchases.
The Boston Ballet staff wished for a site that would be easier for them to manage, which would include:
- Single source entry to edit copy that they could manage internally, reducing the need to depend on IT or outside vendors
- XML-based structured content that is reusable, distributable, and can be re-skinned for various purposes
- A content workflow and approval process that incorporated the inclusion of content from multiple sources, including marketing, the Boston Ballet School, Public Relations, development, community outreach, and the box office
- An eCommerce platform that allowed for real-time seating, cross-selling of all inventory, customized subscriptions, donations, and an integration to their CRM package
- Complete integration into their Tessitura Performing Arts system, which provides real-time ticketing functions and order fulfillment
Solution:
Interactive Media Associates’ long-standing relationship with various performing arts companies gave the company a deep understanding of customer needs. With web technology experience combined with a user focused approach, IMA created a best-of-breed framework for the performing arts marketplace which uses Ektron as its centerpiece: the IMA Enterprise Performing Arts Framework.
IMA’s unique framework uses a service-oriented model providing a scalable solution for arts organizations. There is tremendous value in using the best functionality each of these applications offers, creating a flexible and outstanding solution to the organization’s needs. By integrating the Ektron CMS with the Elastic Path enterprise eCommerce platform and Tessitura box office assets, IMA provided a solution that enabled Boston Ballet to save time, cut costs, increase revenue, improve reliability and most importantly improve the user experience. The Tessitura online ticketing system is completely in synch with the theatre’s box office and phone ticketing systems, allowing for transparent, up-to-date account management and online/offline order history. Tessitura’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is utilized to its fullest extent.
This integrated solution utilizes the strengths of each service application, resulting in a robust, best-of-breed platform.
Boston Ballet staff members use Ektron to edit content on both information and eCommerce screens, giving them a single place to author all content across the entire Web application. Ektron offers workflow, versioning, structured content and Web services to the application.
Boston Ballet staff members are now able to sell, within a single shopping cart, performances, gift shop items, subscriptions, memberships and gift cards. The presentation is seamless, maintaining a unified look-and-feel from content page to shopping aisle to checkout. A next phase of the project will incorporate school registration into the same application.
Users are able to more easily find and buy tickets through an improved interface, increasing conversion, revenue, and overall customer satisfaction. A calendar-based interface featured on all screens enhanced the user’s ability to search performances and events by date.
Results:
The results of the new Web site were immediate and significant. Among the process-oriented results are the following:
- The ability to edit all content (including ticketing and sales promotions) through Ektron
- The system accommodates multiple content contributors with a consistent workflow process
- Routine box office procedures, including price changes, availability, and promotions, are now on the Web without requiring additional processes
- Default settings are established to deal with the breakdown of any one of the individual technologies that is part of the application framework; for instance the Web site can continue to take orders even if the ticketing system is down
- Load balancing and high availability are ensured
- Boston Ballet can now can sell single tickets, subscriptions, Nutcracker tickets, gift shop items and gift cards and present them in a single shopping cart – but fulfill them via different fulfillment entities
- Boston Ballet can now sell customizable subscriptions online.
- The number of unique visitors, as well as the number of return visitors to the site, has more than doubled within the first 2 months of the new site launch showing a positive trend in visitor retention.
