San Francisco Symphony

Orchestrating an enhanced web experience for the world-renowned San Francisco Symphony

The San Francisco Symphony, one of America’s most forward-looking arts organizations, presents over 220 concerts each year, creates leading edge media initiatives such as Keeping Score on PBS television and its own Grammy-winning record label SFS Media. The performing arts organization serves its community with one of the most extensive education and community programs of any orchestra in the country.

San Francisco Symphony sought out iMedia to help bring their vision of making the website a leading digital destination for fans of music that also reflects the diverse and vibrant cultural life of the local Bay Area communities that SFS serves.

Aaron Levin, Technical Project Manager, San Francisco Symphony

“iMedia's technical chops, excellent project management skills, deep knowledge of the Performing Arts space, and expertise with the Tessitura CRM made them an ideal partner for the rebuild of sfsymphony.org. Whether we are talking back-end systems integrations or front-end design, they are always able to deliver high quality results. Having nearly two decades leading large scale technical projects for arts organizations, I would not hesitate to recommend them to any of our peers looking for a team that can shepherd them through the complicated process of a website rebuild.”

The Challenge

San Francisco Symphony came with a design, direction, and deadline just ahead of kicking off their busy season. The goal of this project was to help them bring their already well executed design to life through thoughtful user experience, web development and iMedia’s vast experience within the Performing Arts space.

What We Did

Web Development

Created a fully custom Kentico MVC site with custom page types, and widgets, as well as a full integration with Tessitura to manage all ticketing, memberships, subscriptions and donations.

Compose Your Own + SeatMe

iMedia leveraged our Select Your Own Seat product, SeatMe to allow the user to choose their seats for each individual performances and subscriptions, including build your own subscription. A Socially Distanced seating feature was added to support the post COVID reopening.

Customized Technology

Critical functionality that drives user engagement is robust site search, faceted performance search, powered by our integration to Algolia. The Tessitura integration allows editors to never edit content twice, pulling in performance, production and subscription data in real time to the CMS.

User Experience

Defined the user experience for key areas of the site like Musical Director and Conducting Staff, Meet the Musicians, Press Room and SFS Media, a section of the site that showcases the CDs and DVDs released by San Francisco Symphony’s own audio label.