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Association of British Orchestras website

This project has been assigned the following categories: Websites,

  • Membership website
  • Members’ area
  • CRM integration

Client overview

The Association of British Orchestras is the national body representing the collective interests of professional orchestras, youth ensembles and the wider classical music industry throughout the UK. Founded in 1948, ABO celebrated its 70th anniversary in March 2018.

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Project overview

Association of British Orchestras’ mission is to enable and support an innovative, collaborative and sustainable orchestral sector by providing advice, support and information to the people who make British orchestras a global success. They do a lot of this via their website, so Scaramanga was asked to help develop and maintain their digital presence and, with a small team, they wanted to drastically reduce the administration of managing their membership.

Their old website was built in 2011 and was showing its age. As such, it was the right time to rejuvenate the website with a fresh new look with more streamlined functionality.

During our kick-off meeting with the ABO, we identified the organisational goals and the issues that they face with their current site – with the primary goal to make the user's journey much simpler. This process included auditing and organising their content, developing site plans, user journeys and basic wireframes.

An animated version of the ABO logo

A creative challenge

ABO produces a lot of content that is rich with information and text-heavy, but rarely contains images. Our challenge – and a challenge it was, given images are often used to provide visual interest – was to create a design for their website that presents the content in an engaging way, is easy to locate and easy to read.

We agonised over the little details of the UI (User Interface), carefully selecting new colours, icons and typefaces – developing a robust design system that, when deployed, has real clarity and consistency. Our goal was to create a design system that could be rolled out both on and offline, and one that would increase brand recognition.

Looping animation of the ABO website displayed on a mobile phone

Custom Craft plugin

The Association of British Orchestras use an uncommon CRM platform with which the website needed to communicate with. Luckily, the website had an API so we created a custom Craft plugin that allows the website and the CRM to share data. From managing the members’s profile information to retrieving event booking information, the website works in harmony with the CRM.

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