CENTRAL CITY OPERA CASE STUDY
How does a historic opera house stay relevant in the digital age?
Challenge
Central City Opera, the nation’s fifth-oldest opera company, faced the dual challenge of expanding their audience while streamlining their complex internal operations. Their existing digital platform couldn’t support the multifaceted nature of their organization, where staff members often held multiple roles across education, training, fundraising, and historic preservation departments.
Strategic Approach
Our process began with extensive stakeholder engagement across all departments – from education and training to fundraising and historic preservation. By understanding how each division operated and intersected, we developed a strategy that would unite their digital needs under a single, efficient system.
This deep-dive approach revealed opportunities to streamline workflows while ensuring the platform could support the organization’s unique staffing model, where team members often serve multiple roles. Our focus remained on creating a solution that would both modernize operations and respect the institution’s historic legacy.
Solution
Our comprehensive digital platform unified Central City Opera’s diverse needs into a cohesive system. At its heart, we developed an integrated content management system that seamlessly connects events, calendars, and showtimes across all departments, eliminating previously redundant workflows. The platform’s flexibility supports the organization’s unique staffing structure, allowing team members to manage multiple roles efficiently. We balanced modern functionality with respect for the institution’s historic character, creating an interface that serves both administrative and audience needs while providing robust tools for education and fundraising initiatives.
Impact
The new digital platform transformed Central City Opera’s operations, dramatically reducing administrative overhead while expanding their audience reach. By eliminating redundant content entry and streamlining workflows, we freed staff to focus on their core mission of artistic excellence and community engagement. The system continues to serve as a robust foundation for their growth and evolution.
