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Boston Symphony Orchestra

An infrastructure project that rivals the Big Dig

A world-class orchestra deserves a world-class website. We built a digital platform for the BSO, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood that reflects the spaces, people, and music inside this 140-year-old institution. The new platform is accessible and forward-looking, welcoming new audiences and long-time patrons into the world of BSO.

What We Did

  • Research & Strategy
  • Web Design
  • Craft CMS Implementation
  • Algolia Integration
  • Tessitura Integration

What We Made

Four sites for the BSO, Boston Pops, and Tanglewood

Close up of an orchestra conductor performing.
An event on the Boston Symphony Orchestra website titled "Andris Nelsons conducts HK Gruber, Mozart, and Prokofiev featuring Hilary Hahn, violin."

An app-like experience on every device. The site is teeming with new videos, stories, and media around every single performance, supported by a blazing-fast infrastructure. Even if everyone can’t attend in-person, the site brings you closer to the experience of hearing the symphony play.

A collage of smartphone screens displaying various pages of the Boston Symphony Orchestra's website.

The ticket buying experience is transformed. The new BSO feels equivalent to industry leaders like Ticketmaster and is focused on making the entire concert-going experience more cohesive. It’s not just buying a ticket. It’s ordering food to have at the concert, learning the history of the music, making a donation along the way, and coming back to see a recording of the performance the following week. All touchpoints are unified.s

In the first 3 months (compared to 2019)

  • +20%
    conversions
  • +14%
    transactions
  • +4%
    revenue
A collage shows various views of Boston Symphony Orchestra's website on different devices. Top-left: a hand holds a phone displaying an event listing. Top-right: an artist's profile with a photo. Bottom-left: an outdoor venue with large windows. Bottom-right: an event page on mobile.

A treasure trove of new content. You don’t just find a concert and leave. You fall down a rabbit hole of deeply interrelated content, learning more about the history of the work, the composer, the story of this performance, other similar composers, upcoming performances of their work, who in the orchestra is playing the work, that there is a livestream coming up next week, and so on.

Four digital event brochures from the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

And it’s much easier for patrons to find exactly what they want. On-site search feels as powerful as Google and puts musicians, venues, program notes, performances, and more at your fingertips.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra website header with a search bar autocompleting a user's search for Beethoven with different events and profile links.

The most important part of this redesign is BSO’s ability to maintain and extend the foundation we’ve laid, using the tools and systems we delivered. This is just the beginning. The new website demonstrates how the BSO is using technology to do more for the region and spread music and music education far-and-wide.

Four overlapping brand guideline pages titled "Typography," "Colors," "Template Reference," and "Block Reference."

How did we get here? It’s challenging for an organization this large and this established to make nimble change. We conducted deep research, built a lot of empathy, and guided the BSO through a major shift in process, tooling, and storytelling. This organizational change was propelled by a clearly articulated vision that made everyone see what was possible.

A collage of presentation slides, organized in a grid layout. The slides contain a mix of text, charts, graphs, images, and infographics, featuring various color schemes but predominantly black, white, and yellow.
Our epic vision share, a north star for the entire project