Minnesota Orchestra
Favoriting feature for curated concert experiences
Made Media helped the Minnesota Orchestra transform their digital experience with a seamless favoriting feature. Patrons can now easily save and track concerts across devices, create custom packages, and enjoy a smooth journey from discovery to ticket purchase. Integrated with Tessitura, the feature powers personalized marketing campaigns and is reshaping how audiences engage with performances on the website.
The 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.
The challenge
With over fifty concerts announced each season prior to tickets and Create Your Own (CYO) packages going on sale, patrons needed a seamless way to keep track of concerts and refer back when ready to purchase. Orchestra staff also wanted user-provided preference data for targeted marketing campaigns; concert favoriting solved both problems.
Digital strategy
The Minnesota Orchestra produces a wide array of concerts, most announced several weeks before single ticket and Create Your Own package sales. Previously, audiences would discover performances through the website or brochure with nowhere to save concerts of interest until they went on sale. We proposed a simple, powerful interface for users to save performances 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 feature to succeed, 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.
What we did
Visit SiteSeamless 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. 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, 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
This first-party preference data is a marketer’s dream, and the Minnesota Orchestra team needed 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.
Impact
Users immediately started adding concerts to their favorites list after this feature launched, and it’s become an integral part of the way many patrons interact with the Minnesota Orchestra’s website. Now that patrons are regularly adding concerts to their favorites list, we’re working with the orchestra’s marketing and ticketing teams to strategize new ways to build on the success they’ve seen so far.
Since a user’s favorites are stored in the Tessitura ticketing database, the Minnesota Orchestra marketing team has been able to leverage this data for automated email campaigns and to build targeted lists for paid social and direct mail campaigns. They’ve integrated favorite concerts into their marketing plan to keep their communications personal, without feeling intrusive.
In a subsequent release, we added a powerful custom upsell in the BlocksOffice ticket purchase path to surface the user’s next unpurchased saved concert. This upsell allows the user to seamlessly add their next saved concert to the cart without leaving the purchase path. We look forward to exploring the next iteration of this feature with the Minnesota Orchestra team, now that we have amassed 3 years of user data to guide their decisions.
What we did.
- UX design
- Custom Tessitura integration
- CMS development
