Ottawa Chamberfest

Ottawa Chamberfest contacted Foundation to reimagine their website so that it connected with their community more effectively, and better reflected their three core pillars: the annual summer festival, concert series, and extensive community engagement and education initiatives.

Their existing site was sluggish, difficult to manage, inconsistently bilingual, missing content, and non-responsive (i.e., it didn’t shift between screen types like laptops, tablets, and phones).

Chamberfest wanted us to ensure a web input system that streamlined the processes for their staff, in English and in French. Another important consideration for the new website was ensuring ease of connection to their important third-party platforms (donation, ticket sales and volunteer management).

We got in touch with Ottawa-based web developer Rob Sherwood, a talented web developer with over a decade of experience working with federal government websites in a consistently bilingual environment.

We put our heads together with the Chamberfest team and beat around many ideas before settling on what we call an “Action Grid” system with a built-in translation plugin.

While Phase 1 centred around the 13 concerts of the Chamberfest Concert Series, we knew we had to keep a much larger process in mind for Phase 2, in line with the launch of the summer festival. Chamberfest’s summer festival attracts up to 100,000 people every year and consists of up to 100 concerts over the course of two weeks. This is a significant endeavour from a web administration perspective, requiring the construction of up to 200 individual web pages. We knew we needed to automate as many of the processes as possible.

The final process for the Chamberfest team in relation to confirmed concerts? They enter a concert title, date, and descriptive text. Below that, if available, there is concert program information. They input two photos, one in landscape format, and the other as a square.

The automation? The square photo becomes the featured photo on the concert series action grid, which also exports the date, concert title and brief description. Any upcoming concerts are programmed to feature automatically on the sliders on the homepage. Three hours after a concert has taken place, it disappears from the slider and greys out on the action grid on the concert series page. The Buy Tickets and Buy Passes button on the individual concert page also disappear automatically.

We applied the same automation process to the Chamber Chats section, in a unique layout. Upcoming chats are featured on the main page. Two hours after the chat takes place, it shifts to the Past Chats page.

This has been such a fun project! It has been great to consider all affected aspects of the site in real-time, as we tweak the site to ensure the Chamberfest web input process is as streamlined as possible, and in line with all of the other associated communications processes (e.g., press release creation, social media scheduling, livestream and box office setup).

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Ottawa Chamberfest

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