Most Philadelphians are quite familiar with a series of local TV commercials featuring well-known personalities like Kevin Bacon and Katie Couric promising, “You’re gonna love the arts in Philadelphia.”
But Love the Arts in Philadelphia, the team behind this popular campaign, is always looking to take that message one step further. So, in 2013, Eastern Standard worked with the organization, which supports many of the city’s most prominent arts, music, and cultural institutions, to create a website that provides a comprehensive and centrally located resource for local arts and culture programming.
The content strategy for the new site relied on aggregating all of the media that the campaign was already sourcing and creating for each of the promoted events, including audio files, video, and photo galleries. In the end, the client was able to better leverage all of its assets without the additional burden of having to create a significant amount of new content for the web. The Drupal CMS-based site has become the go-to destination in the region representing the leading arts organizations and exposing users to new and related programming — encouraging “cultural omnivorism."
Viewers can now quickly and easily browse events filtered by genre, presenter, and date range.
“When we released the first version of this site, our clients told us it was 'everything they had ever hoped for, but like nothing they could have imagined,'” explains Mark Gisi, Eastern Standard Partner and Brand Strategist. “In this new release, we aimed to broaden their vision and reach once again. At Eastern Standard, good enough is never enough.”
After nearly a year of use, the site was clearly a runaway success. However, we reminded our clients that, in the digital world, they always need to be looking for opportunities to redefine themselves and refine their approach. We identified the opportunity to add personalization to the site, allowing users to specify their interests by selecting genres and presenters in order to also receive a curated and automated weekly e-mail, appropriately branded "Arts in Your Inbox,” which contains relevant upcoming events that meet their criteria.
User-selected preferences allow for the delivery of customized e-mails promoting relevant local cultural events that match their interests.
To send the e-mails, we leveraged Mailgun, a service that provides reliable high-volume e-mail delivery with tracking services. We also implemented Cloudflare, a content-delivery network solution that not only speeds up load times for the site’s image-heavy design, but also provides a security shield, keeping the site safe from a variety of common online threats.
