Icons on Inspiration virtual gala

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.

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.