La Jolla Music Society, a performing arts presenter and producer, had recently moved into its new, state-of-the-art venue in San Diego. The non-profit needed to bring its website, which hadn't had UX/UI updates in nearly a decade, into the 21st century and create a digital brand that reflects the world-class artists that it hosts.
During the full-scale website redesign, we enabled online ticketing, season subscriptions, and donations. This case study focuses on the “Compose Your Own” package flow, which gives users subscription discounts when purchasing tickets to multiple events, and helped us surpass subscription revenue goals by 68% (over $200,000) in the first post-launch season.
UX Designer
Project Manager
Service Designer
Convert “single-ticket” (really single-event) buyers to multi-event buyers.
Find new ways to attract new audiences and retarget one-off attendees, converting them into long-term supporters.
Increase overall ticket revenue and subscriptions.
No financial benefit to purchasing multiple concerts (outside of curated, genre-specific subscriptions).
No flexibility in the subscription programming for genre-agnostic ticket buyers.
Concertgoers couldn’t purchase season subscriptions online.
Concertgoers could only subscribe through the box office by visiting in person, calling, or returning the form by mail, which still required phone calls. This placed a large burden on customer service staff at the beginning of each season.
LJMS was struggling to bring single-ticket concertgoers into the subscription pipeline.
LJMS was struggling to bring in younger audiences and ensure the long-term success of the organization—the average age of attendees is 62.
LJMS was not meeting subscription sales goals, which placed an immense burden on the fundraising team to cover the gap in organizational revenue.
The redesigned website was launched immediately after the COVID shutdowns, when in-person events were just starting up again, which necessitated new disclaimers and event rules.
The majority of patrons are not tech-native and require high levels of onboarding.
Limitations in design and functionality of Tessitura, LJMS' CRM, and TNEW, its ticketing API.
Adam, the Director of Marketing, launched LJMS’ website redesign project soon after he and I joined the marketing team in the autumn of 2019. The website was built in approximately 2010. It was full of bugs, had confusing and inaccessible UX, and patchwork fixes that regularly broke or crashed the site. The organization was well overdue for a refresh.
Compose your own package Flow
Rae was a wonderful collaborator throughout the process of building a new website for La Jolla Music Society. She was an excellent communicator, and was skillfully able to translate the company's desires across all departments into a plan for a website that prioritized user experience. In addition to being a very organized and reliable project manager, Rae had a sharp eye for design and also spearheaded much of the website's content creation.
Kind words
from my colleague

michelle yagi
account manager
substrakt