What makes a good orchestra website? Author Drew McManus looks under the hood of 71 orchestras and the results may surprise you.

Orchestra Website Review

Awesome article, only I was sad to see my orchestra got a very poor grade. But, not surprising as it is a bit of an embarrasing site. At least we were not the only one to end up in the lower end of the curve.

Should be interesting if our management takes note of this and fixes the various links, and makes a better user friendly site.

Thanks...

Bravo to you for 'Adaptistration'! The time it took to write that article must have been exhausting--now you need to make sure it gets seen by the right people. As an artist getting dates with orchestra, it is importnat for us to understand these things--most importantly, our managers. We are always finding new vistas, repertoire. I enjoyed your tribute to the Milwaukee Symphony--and Mark Hanson in particular! I have known Mark since his Rockford days when they played the IL premiere of the Zwilich 'Millennium Fantasy'--he's a brilliant and compassionate young man--who I am sure will keep climbing the ladder in the business--without him, the Lowell Liebermann Third Concerto might not be receiving its World Premiere with me in June 2006! Thanks again for the very educational article.

Jeffrey Biegel

Bravo! An excellent article. I am most curious if you evaluated the performance speed, specifically loading time of each orchestra's Web site. I am always frustrated by the time it takes to load a page and I have DSL.

I also think that fostering community would be a good criteria to include as well, perhaps in your next evaluation. It is one thing to allow a lot of bells and whistles but the real value is creating ways in which to keep visitors coming back for more.

Thanks for the kind words folks.

Mac, I did take speed into account but only in how long it took for the frontpage to load, and purchasing tickets. What exactly do you mean by "fostering community". That could go a number of directions...

I have added at least one additional concrete sub category for the next evaluation - which will be Canadian orchestras.

Drew

Fostering community could be a number of things. Primarily, visitor retention and what services the orchestras provide to keep their visitors on their sites for extended periods of time or services that keep them coming back repeatedly.

For example, one of the great things i like about myauditions is the discussion forums, the news and the job postings. It changes daily so i check all three each day for the latest info. myauditions has done a wonderful job of building a community.

That being said, community services provide users with incentives to make repeat visits to the site, like marketing campaigns that perhaps specifically target the demographics of their patrons.

Take Toronto Symphony Orchestra for example. When they realized that they were ignoring a large population of their city, the Chinese, they built a Chinese only Web site with special programs, packages, etc that emphazied the Chinese culture in classical music. As a result, they found a new audience and their overall revenue increased.

The Boston Symphony has Interactive services like the Online Conservatory which is a pretty neat feature. It is any wonder that the BSO is the only major orchestra in the US that is consistently in the black flush with cash? Where was the BSO when NY, Philly, and CLE were negotiating new contracts. You don't often see the BSO in the news on these issues because they really know how to market to their patrons, compensate their musicians (a whole different topic) and Tanglewood doesn't hurt either.

I think that orchestras need to move beyond simply providing a brochure site and provide the kinds of interactive tools that Boston and Toronto have added.

I don't see much of this kind of interactivity out there.

Any of this make sense?

Thanks Mac, that makes more sense. I did have a "uniqueness of offerings" sub category which covered features such as the BSO online conservatory and discussion boards.

As a matter of fact the BSO's online conservatory did add a few extra points to their score but when I attempted to use it it was VERY slow and glitchy under both Netscape 7.1 and IE. As a result, it didn't get as many points as it could have.

I would say that boston's financial position is due in large part to their ability to raise money for their endowment and then managing those funds to earn a higher return rate compared to peer orchestras is more responsible for their balanced budgets than anything else. They've always had great ticket sales on an industry wide basis, but so do all of the Big 5 orchestras.

Overall, Boston's website scored fairly low for what you might expect from a Big 5. It was confusing to navigate and very little orchestra information. And if you want to contact someone in administration, forget about it - they don't seem to care.

Toronto actually has a number of neat extra features such as the chinese version of the site you mentioned that are really good.

Drew