Seven people, four departments, one calendar entered four times
Central City Opera is the nation's fifth-oldest opera company. Its problem was not audience or artistry. It was that a small staff wearing several hats each had to publish the same production information into education, fundraising, historic preservation, and the box office, separately, every season.
The site had been built for an org chart the company does not have
Most content systems assume a clean division of labor: one person owns one section, permissions follow the boxes on the org chart. An opera company of this size does not work that way. The person who runs the apprentice training program also writes the grant copy. The person managing historic preservation also handles part of the season announcement.
Their existing platform could not express that. Because it treated departments as separate properties, the same production — dates, cast, synopsis, imagery, ticket links — had to be entered wherever it appeared. Every duplicate was a chance for a matinee time to be wrong on one page and right on another, which for a ticketed event is not a cosmetic problem.
So the brief we accepted was not "modernize the website". It was: make the system match how these seven people actually work.
We interviewed every department before proposing anything
Four constituencies with genuinely different needs, all publishing about the same handful of productions. Understanding where they overlapped was the whole design problem.
A production is entered once and appears wherever it belongs
We built a content management system around the event as the central record, connecting events, calendars, and showtimes across every department. Education programming, apprentice listings, donor appeals, and the box office all read from the same source rather than keeping their own copies of it.
A production's dates, cast, synopsis, and media are published once. The season calendar, the event page, the news feed, and the department pages all derive from it.
Permissions follow what a person does rather than which box they sit in, so someone holding three responsibilities works in one place instead of three logins.
Matinees, evenings, festival events, education events, and special events filtered in one view, with the buy path attached to each performance.
Administrative time returned to the work
Removing duplicate content entry cut the administrative overhead of every season announcement and freed a small staff to spend that time on programming and community engagement instead of on retyping showtimes.
The project also changed our own direction. It was the work that established our practice with nonprofits and arts organizations, and it taught us the lesson we have applied at much larger scale since: the expensive problem is rarely the website. It is the same information being maintained in several places by people who have other jobs to do.
Small team, too many places to update?
Tell us where the same information lives more than once. A reply within two business days.
