Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

Popping-in?

Our studio is filled with light and music.
There are multiple meeting rooms, a well stocked kitchen, and an indoor garden (with fishpond). Talk to us about access needs, environmental factors and any accommodations we might make to enhance your visit. Pop-in for tea and stay to use a spare desk for as long as you need.

11 Greenwich Centre Business Park,
53 Norman Road, Greenwich
London SE10 9QF

Cog is a Certified B Corporation

020 8269 1800 hello@cogdesign.com

Get in touch

We’d love to hear from you. Use whichever medium works best for you.

11 Greenwich Centre Business Park,
53 Norman Road, Greenwich
London SE10 9QF

Cog is a Certified B Corporation

020 8269 1800 hello@cogdesign.com

A cultural beacon with global reach

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra website

Website

They (usually) perform 140+ concerts in a year. They do incredible work with their local communities, including innovative work in tackling isolation amongst older people. They commissioned us to create a new website, from scratch, integrating with their new box office and CRM system, Spektrix.

We worked through a full process of: Discovery, Design, Development and Deployment. Through our Discovery process we identified key audience types, including – regular concert attenders, potential donors, future audiences, aspiring musicians, retired professionals, press etc.

Specific areas of focus included:

a) accessibility particularly as BSO have an older audience (who have needs but may not identify as disabled),

b) fundraising as BSO rely on earned income and donations.

c) community engagement. Work that needs to be recognised and visible to funders and donors.

d) international quality music making. They attract the world’s best performers and conductors and the website needed to reflect that quality throughout.

Plus, of course the need to sell tickets and communicate their personality.

BSO have seen a significant upswing in positive interactions: ticket booking, making donations, reading articles and downloading documents. Site visits have increased significantly, from an average of 7052 to 11,964 per month (pre-Covid). And page views have increased from an average of 2.72 to 3.55 pages per site visit.

One of the big successes has been the much smoother, frictionless interaction with audiences who can now easily find all that they need from the site, and don’t need to call or ask to confirm running times, travel information, programme details etc.

“Thanks for your ongoing support with the website – it has been a massive step forward for us – thank you.”
Dougie Scarfe, Chief Executive

We’ve been able to do some really interesting work with their ticketing and CRM provider (Spektrix), via their API (application programming interface) including displaying dynamic pricing and availability messaging; selling memberships and seasons so patrons can book the same seat for multiple concerts; donation sliders and messaging throughout the site; upselling messages in the booking path etc.

And we did some fun stuff with geo-locations so audiences can easily see what’s going on near their location.

We continue to be their partners. More recently we developed a paywall integration, allowing BSO to sell and stream video on-demand. Remarkably, they sold more than 10K tickets to live-streamed shows, significantly more than the capacity of the concert venues they played.