Carnegie Hall

Reinventing digital at a world-famous institution.

AGENCY: Blue State Digital
YEARS: 2009–2010

In 2009, Carnegie Hall hired Blue State Digital — where I was then the director of content strategy — to conduct a full-scale assessment of its entire online program, from ticketing flows and fundraising strategies to site content, social media, staff infrastructure, and list acquisition techniques.

Over the course of three months, a colleague and I met with more than 100 staff members across the entire institution to delve into Carnegie’s objectives and strategic priorities. When we were done, we presented an extensive action plan containing strategic and tactical advice in dozens of areas, including audience growth, patron loyalty, fundraising, site design, content approach, and technology.

Following the audit, Carnegie retained BSD to lead the content planning and IA/UX for the first redesign of carnegiehall.org in more than a decade. I set about the daunting task of cataloging and analyzing Carnegie’s reams of digital content. I dove deep into every corner of the site and catalogued my findings, and I also studied other offline material, like brochures. My work on this intensive, months-long process was deeply informed by our prior strategic efforts, and I ultimately generated stacks of sitemaps, wireframes, content strategies, and an elaborate faceted search scheme for browsing performances and buying tickets.

The site’s visual design and tech buildout were ultimately handled by other firms.