Rich Mix is a multi-space arts venue and multi-screen cinema in London’s East End.

It offers a hugely varied programme of live music, theatre, dance, film, visual art and educational events. It also provides a creative home for artists and resident creative enterprises as well as serving as a community hub for a socially and culturally diverse local audience.

Its overarching aim is to build links between the arts and the local community to bring people from East London into life-changing contact with the arts. It’s a wonderfully diverse, relaxed and creative place.

The management team at Rich Mix were clear that they needed a quick overhaul of their website, a way to resolve the complexity and simplify the Spektrix ticketing integration that a previous website project had introduced (only a year or so before). Through a credentials pitch process, we were appointed to make that happen.

We started the process by meeting with the senior management team to scope out the project and learn more about the future ambitions of the venue.

Then we set up workshops and discussions with the staff teams. We involved as many people as we could, to get a broad overview of the challenges and opportunities from across all areas of the organisation.

As well as a desire for a much smoother booking journey, via Spektrix, other recurring themes emerged in the feedback, particularly around the existing logo and brand.

In fact the existing branding became such a a barrier that we spun-off a separate project to address that. You can read more about that project, elsewhere in our site.

Being able to work simultaneously on the brand and website has allowed us to deliver a site that brings to life Rich Mix’s vision, culture for a changing city.

A desire to smooth out the booking journey was the key feedback from the website, with the differences between cinema and event booking, coming up again and again. Those booking blockbuster films don’t need the same types of marketing information, they need a quick route to the times on offer. We developed a quick system to bring them into the booking process without going through to a full event page. It allows booking via dates or choice of film to give users lots of choice.

Other key features include live events displayed in themes and festivals; large imagery and clear information for hires; and a modular system that allows for fundraising messages interspersed between the content.

And because fundraising is so vital to the success of Rich Mix, we focused on that.

Working with Spektrix we were able to combine a number of different background functions and workarounds into what appears to be a super-simple donation widget for audiences.

The widget allows people to give fixed or variable amounts, as one off or regular donations, and to specific ‘funds’ or to a more general fundraising pot.