The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts
The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts (THC) is a world-renowned cultural venue on a mission to expand Houston's reputation as a cultural center of the world. With a unique variety of Broadway shows, comedy acts, concerts, dance performances, educational series, and even magic acts, the Hobby Center is the homebase for culture in the Greater Houston area.
The Hobby Center provides one of the nation's premier performing arts facilities, fosters accessibility to the performing arts, and promotes arts education with an emphasis on musical theater.
The Hobby Center's digital experience had become dilapidated after struggling with an antiquated version of Joomla, responsivity for mobile visitors had been bolted on retroactively, and the organization's focus on accessibility was not represented in its digital experience creating a disconnect from its mission.
It was time to create a digital experience equal to the amazing physical experience.
Enter Monkee-Boy (stage left).
Priority Goals
- Event Management - Easily manage the 100s of varied events that The Hobby Center hosts and allow the patrons to easily explore and filter to quickly find events that most interest them.
- Accessibility - Create a more inclusive experience and better represent The Hobby Center's mission of accessible experiences.
- Experience - Deliver a compelling digital experience that mirrored the in-person experience Hobby Center patrons enjoy.
Challenges
- Content Migration - Moving 100s of events to a new system
- Advanced Ticketing System Integrations - The Hobby Center sells tickets through two different ticketing vendors (Tessitura and TicketMaster).
- Accessibility - allowing users to navigate custom event calendars and easily finding which performances provide accessibility considerations.
The Hobby Center's Digital Evolution
The Digital Diagnostic
To fully understand The Hobby Center's current challenges and build a plan to meet their short and long-term goals, the Monkee-Boy team worked closely with The Hobby Center through its trusted Digital Diagnostic process. With the marketing team, events team, IT staff, and executive director, the Monkee-Boy team accurately solidified the Hobby Center's target audiences, competition, content types, functionality, and challenges associated with keeping their current site updated. One of the largest discoveries was related to the wide variety of event materials provided and how those different assets would need to all be managed within one elegant system. All of the diagnostic project deliverables were created to solidify the project fundamentals, help the Hobby Center organize & prioritize future features, and organize how all of the new content should be organized and labeled to provide a clean intuitive experience.
Once approved, both teams had a clear view of what the experience needed to be explored and documented during the Digital Strategy phase.
Digital Strategy
During the Digital Strategy phase, the Monkee-Boy build the blueprints and design aesthetics for the new Hobby Center experience. Each step of the process included a deep accessibility review, content modeling & strategy, and technical confirmation of how the Hobby Center's shows would be built, managed and distributed in the new system.
Monkee-Boy also utilized its trusted content governance process to ensure that the site could support any type of Hobby Center event and streamline the collection, loading, and migration of hundreds of pages and performances.
Advanced Calendaring System
To handle the expansive event list, complex integrations, and accessibility compliance, Monkee-Boy created a filterable events list and calendar view that allows patrons to easily discover and explore all of the major events that fill the Hobby Center’s two theaters.
In addition, the calendaring system allows The Hobby Center team to connect events with different back office ticketing systems (Tessitura & Ticketmaster) to ensure the right tickets get purchased through the right system.
Consistent Event Management
One of the biggest challenges the Hobby Center was facing was managing their wide variety of events in one central location. Monkee-Boy worked with the THC team to understand the wide variety of content types events might include ranging from recurring performance dates to different creative publication & media kits provided by touring Broadway companies.
To help streamline the ongoing event management, MBoy created one central system that allowed THC’s non-technical staff to easily enter & manage all events and then dynamically feed them to all of the right places at all the right times across the site.
In addition, Monkee-Boy gave THC the ability to set auto-publish & expiration times on events to keep the event stream current and reduce the amount of required oversight.
Special Experience for Accessible Events
To help patrons with disabilities easily find events with special considerations, Monkee-Boy created a unique view of performances with accessibility accommodations.
In this view, each event clearly articulates which events include audio descriptions, open captions, and American Sign Language (ASL).
Community Engagement & Education Series
Due to the website launching during the Pandemic, The Hobby Center’s educational programming came to a screeching halt.
To help ensure the site could launch and THC could quickly reboot the education programming series when ready, Monkee-Boy designed & built two unique experiences for the educational content to ensure The Hobby Center had what it needed when the in-person event experiences came back online.
39% Increase
Top Google Quality Metrics - Bravo!
Web Accessibility Receives Standing Ovation
The Hobby Center is known for providing an equitable education and entertainment environment. As such, web accessibility considerations were prioritized throughout every part of the redesign process. Inclusive were special icons, calendars, and pages created to intentionally highlight accessibility options for each and every performance. Both manual and automated web accessibility testing were completed to ensure the experience would meet or beat WCAG compliance guidelines. In addition, a full web accessibility statement was created for the site underscoring the Hobby Center's dedication to providing an equitable experience. Once launched the site received a perfect score for Web Accessibility.
86% Increase
69% Increase
89% Increase
Encore! Encore!
The show must go on. Even after the (redesign) show was over, the Monkee-Boy team continues to receive high praise for helping keep the Hobby Center experience healthy and profitable.
Dedicated WordPress Hosting & Cloudflare Security
The Hobby Center's website is the critical driver of ticket sales & revenue. As such, website uptime & security are critical to its success. Monkee-Boy is no stranger to supporting organizations with these business needs and currently provides the Hobby Center with dedicated hosting & security to help keep the website site online & secure for its patrons. To assist, Monkee-Boy provides an intelligent combination of WP Engine hosting, Global Edge Security (with managed Cloudflare), uptime monitoring, backups, and proactive WordPress Security & Health Checks to ensure the show can always go on.
Ongoing Digital Strategy, Analytics, and Digital Support
In addition to providing the Hobby Center's digital infrastructure, Monkee-Boy's tenured team also helps with ongoing digital strategy, analytics, and ad hoc support to ensure the Hobby Center has full digital coverage as the organization evolves.