Tosa Tonight | Summer Concert Series
Rebrand & Website Design
About the Organization
Every summer since 2000, Tosa Tonight, a Wauwatosa non-profit, has hosted a Concert Series, which features bands and musicians from all over the globe. Wednesday summer nights at the Pavilion are now a staple for fans and fams all over Milwaukee to chillax, sip some wine, chat with neighbors and friends, and dance into the sunset. Tosa Tonight also manages the Rotary Performance Pavilion that can be reserved by the public for events. This means the board members juggle musicians, bookings, event management, rentals, structural upgrades, sponsorship, marketing, social media, and a wealth of other responsibilities throughout the year.
Website: Tosa Tonight
My Objective
My objective as the brand/user experience creative director and web designer for this website initiative:
Improve Tosa Tonight’s logo, brand, and website’s overall visual look-and-feel, content architecture, and administrative capabilities by transitioning from client’s old platform to WordPress platform.
Process At-A-Glance
- Learned about brand and content requirements through Discovery.
- Designed several new versions of the logo for the client to approve.
- Created ‘Style Tile’ to narrow in on new brand look-and-feel.
- Mocked up homepage based on the approved Style Tile to further solidify the new brand.
- Indexed all pages and content to ensure any obsolete pages would be redirected to new ones.
- Worked together with Tosa Tonight to reorganize entire content structure with copy suggestions and improved calls-to-action within a shared spreadsheet, so they could easily see the website come together without waiting for development.
- Created detailed workflows for the sponsor and Pavilion rental application workflows in order to optimize WordPress plugins to automate various processes.
- Built website on WordPress page-by-page with frequent client review.
- Optimized titles and meta descriptions for search engines, and coded redirects to ensure obsolete pages still indexed by search had a new home.
- Conducted final QA testing across several devices to ensure the website looked perfect at every size.
- Provided a “quick-start” guide and training session to ensure my client could make any adjustments and updates if necessary.
How can I help make their lives way easier?
First, refresh the entire Tosa Tonight brand to entice bigger sponsors, the best musical acts, and patrons to visit. Second, design and develop a new website that is modern, responsive, easy to use, and could automate a lot of the board members’ and admins’ responsibility. Instead of existing as a place people have to visit, I can turn this website into something people want to explore.
The Trigger
Client challenges that sparked this initiative
The original Tosa Tonight website served three main functions:
- Display the summer concert series schedule
- Display sponsor logos
- Provide a way to for people to rent the park’s Pavilion for non-concert related events
What the original website did NOT feature were individual event detail pages (great for weekly social posts), nor did it provide an easy way to apply for Sponsorship, nor was it particularly easy to update. And it definitely was not mobile-friendly (yikes when you’ve got a lot of people checking their phones for info/concert details while sitting in lawn chairs outside). The entire experience–from the internal mechanics of the website itself, to the external visual brand, design, and usability–needed an overhaul.
Katie to the rescue!
My Solution
A glimpse into my project lifecycle
Better Branding
First, Tosa Tonight needed a logo that the non-profit and its fans would be proud of, a logo that people want to be emblazoned on tshirts. Tosa Tonight is not just a “neighborhood concert series and venue.” Tosa Tonight is world-class, featuring renowned international acts. Its visual design needed to reflect this; a refreshed logo and brand identity would give Tosa Tonight an added boost of modern professionalism. The trick though was that the original logo held quite a bit of legacy in the ‘hood, so it needed to remain somewhat similar, just modernized. No problem!
I began the brand explore with an updated logo (revising the simple “G” treble clef with an amp cord), as well as a design “style tile” (more than a mood board, not quite a website) and a new concert series poster. Before I even cracked open WordPress, I reviewed these pieces with the Tosa Tonight board. The only revision I received from the board was to lighten the design a little to give it a more “family-friendly” feel.
style tile
concert poster
content
Throughout the project, in order to keep things moving in an orderly fashion, the Executive Director, Marketing Chair, and myself, worked closely via a multi-tabbed, interactive content spreadsheet in Google, which made content writing and updates much easier than sending emails and Word docs back-and-forth.
workflows
In order to figure out the complex automated processes, I pulled together various workflows for both the Sponsorship and Pavilion rental experiences. What made Sponsorship extra complex was the multi-tiered set-up in which higher tiers needed to be vetted before payment, while lower tiers would pay their fee via the website right away.
integrations
Sponsor details (contact, description, even their logo) had to load into an administrative spreadsheet once submitted through the website forms. In order to develop this experience, I leveraged external plug-ins Formidable Forms and Zapier. Likewise, to improve the Pavilion rental experience and allow patrons to pay upfront, I leveraged the external plug-in Pinpoint Booking.
the new responsive website
Marketing Collateral
Marketing collateral for Tosa Tonight included the following items: Newspaper and Magazine ads, Concert Schedule Posters and Handouts, Business Cards, Featured Sponsor Cards, and Facebook/Instagram social banner images for profiles and individual post images for each concert.
more work. check it.
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