La Jolla Music Society, a performing arts presenter and producer, had recently moved into its new, state-of-the-art venue in San Diego. The non-profit needed to bring its website, which hadn't had UX/UI updates in nearly a decade, into the 21st century and create a digital brand that reflects the world-class artists that it hosts. During the full-scale website redesign, we enabled online ticketing, season subscriptions, and donations. This case study focuses on the “Compose Your Own” package flow, which gives users subscription discounts when purchasing tickets to multiple events, and helped us surpass subscription revenue goals by 68% (over $200,000) in the first post-launch season.

UX Designer, Project Manager, Service Designer

Hayley Woldseth, Analytics & CRM Manager

Shannon Bobritchi, Box Office Manager

Adam Thurman, Director of Marketing

Todd Schulz, CEO

Convert “single-ticket” (really single-event) buyers to multi-event buyers

Find new ways to attract new audiences and retarget one-off attendees, converting them into long-term supporters

Increase overall ticket revenue and subscriptions

No financial benefit to purchasing multiple concerts (outside of curated, genre-specific subscriptions).

No flexibility in the subscription programming for genre-agnostic ticket buyers

Concertgoers couldn’t purchase season subscriptions online.

Concertgoers could only subscribe through the box office by visiting in person, calling, or returning the form by mail (which still required phone calls). This placed a large burden on customer service staff at the beginning of each season.

LJMS was struggling to bring single-ticket concertgoers into the subscription pipeline (attending 4+ concerts/season).

LJMS was struggling to bring in younger audiences and ensure the long-term success of the organization—the average age of attendees is 62.

LJMS was not meeting subscription sales goals, which placed an immense burden on the fundraising team to cover the gap in organizational revenue.

Launched right after COVID shutdowns, when in-person events were just starting up again, which required new disclaimers and event rules.

The majority of patrons are not tech-native and require high levels of onboarding.

Tessitura CRM and TNEW ticketing API limitations.

Adam, the Director of Marketing, launched LJMS’ website redesign project soon after he and I joined the marketing team in the autumn of 2019. The website was built in approximately 2010. It was full of bugs, had confusing and inaccessible UX, and patchwork fixes that regularly broke or crashed the site. The organization was well overdue for a refresh.

During the research phase of the website redesign, we learned from data analysis led by Hayley and surveys and user interviews I conducted that many of our audience members were lovers of the arts in general and often purchased tickets to events across a variety of genres, from classical music and jazz to modern dance and global roots.

We had been under the impression that our new ticketing API, TNEW, didn’t allow for custom packages. However, while conducting competitive analysis, I came across Carnegie Hall’s “Create Your Own Series” packages, built in TNEW.

To satisfy the organizational goal of converting younger audience members and single-ticket buyers into return attendees and the desire for flexibility expressed in user interviews and surveys, I proposed that we explore a custom package flow.

I persuaded Adam and, eventually, Todd, our CEO, to try it out for a season.

Initially, Todd resisted because he believed in the traditional genre-specific subscription model. He wanted to “force” concertgoers to purchase events they didn’t want to or plan to attend because it would bolster revenue for programming that was booked to fulfill LJMS’ artistic mission rather than its popularity.

It was an interesting debate and lesson in corporate politics. On the one hand, my argument was based on what the empirical and anecdotal evidence suggested would support the long-term health of the organization. On the other hand, Todd thought this new package would interfere too much with traditional subscription sales. He was in favor of alienating or annoying some clientele to ensure short-term revenue and maintain a stellar reputation even when events were struggling to sell.

While the idea of bundling the less attractive events in with the headliners feels like a dark pattern to me, I see how it helps fulfill the organizational mission of supporting the arts and arts education.

After convincing Adam and the President of LJMS’ Board of Directors, we were able to persuade Todd to let us test the new package’s efficacy for one season, then reassess.

As is often the case on small nonprofit teams, I wore all the hats while working at LJMS, including that of lead copywriter. Chamber and classical music have always been at the core of LJMS, so I couldn’t pass up “Compose Your Own” package as the name for our new flow. It’s cheesy, I know, but thankfully, most of our staff also loves a good pun.

We looked at our sales data to determine the minimum number of events in the “Compose Your Own” package. Our average multi-single-ticket buyer purchased tickets to three events per season. Adam wanted to push the boundary and incentivize larger purchases, so we set the minimum to four events per CYO package. This number also mirrored our traditional subscriptions, which were 4 to 6 genre-specific events per season.

To solve Todd’s concerns about jeopardizing sales and maintaining the exclusivity and benefits provided for traditional subscriptions, we decided that CYO would have a 10% discount, as opposed to the 15% discount offered on traditional subscriptions.

That relatively small discount proved highly effective.

Our ticketing API, TNEW, didn’t have a preset option for allowing users to create custom subscriptions or packages. The first few workarounds we tested broke or were inconsistently applied by the software. We settled on a pricing rule that automatically applied the 10% discount when four or more events were added to the cart.

One problem with the pricing rule: the TNEW cart didn’t give any feedback or indication that the discount was applied. Instead, it simply reduced prices in the cart.

TNEW didn’t allow us to add the discount as a line item or use common discount UI patterns. As a workaround, I built a notification banner that encouraged upsells and told users about the CYO discount for the first three events added to the cart. When the fourth and any additional events were added to the cart, the banner notified users that the discount had been applied.

The text in the notification banner was totally customizable, allowing us to add a “continue shopping” hyperlink, improving navigation in the cart.

This banner came in handy when we resumed in-person events after COVID shutdowns. We used it to detail event restrictions, safety precautions, and attendance rules for all events.

The launch of the new website and the ability to subscribe online and purchase CYO packages meant we needed a new revised process for launching season sales. It had previously been a primarily analogue process, with the only digital element being adding the events to our CMS, which automatically populated them in the calendar.

As the marketing project manager, I was in charge of developing the new launch SOP and overhauling the schedule. And as the web designer, I also built it all out.

In the first season with CYO, we surpassed subscription sales goals by 68%—over $200,000.

While subscriptions could only be purchased before the start of the performance season, CYO allowed package sales to continue throughout the season. Non-subscription ticket sales increased by 30% in that first post-launch season, likely thanks to the discount’s duration and the upsells in the notification banner.

We continued to surpass subscription sales goals by over $100,000 for the three subsequent seasons that I worked with LJMS, thanks to “Compose Your Own” packages.

Prior to the project, the box office spent nearly 300 person-hours per annum prepping and booking subscriptions via snail mail and phone for only 120 subscribers. After the launch, more than 60% of subscribers began subscribing online, significantly reducing the burden on the box office.

The increase in patrons who purchased multiple single tickets via the CYO program led to a much larger user group for the marketing department to retarget for future subscription and single-ticket sales.

Improvements to the website and ticketing flows led the majority of users to start purchasing tickets online, further reducing the burden on the box office.

I took a risk on a new approach that received hesitant buy-in from senior staff, but it ended up a huge success. I learned a lot about office politics, and that empirical data isn’t always enough to persuade senior staff to take a short-term risk for long-term rewards.

I was particularly proud of how well this program performed financially, as well as how much easier and less stressful it made season launches for my coworkers.

Completed in 2021