Website Reviews: A Word To The Wise

Today marks your orchestra’s final opportunity to make sure its website is ready for the 2008 Orchestra Website Reviews. In particular, it would be wonderful to see each organization make certain they do everything they can to make sure they meet the following criteria to improve the three sub categories which garnered the lowest average scores from the 2007 reviews…

1. 

   Institutional Transparency (avg score 0.82/10): include copies of your 2007/08 Annual Report AND IRS Form 990 (for the latter, a direct link to your organization’s GuideStar page will suffice).

2. Press Contacts (avg score 3.12/10): make sure you have your primary press contact name, mailing address, email address, and telephone number listed in an easy to find location among your press pages. Make sure there is some sort of contact information for the designated players’ representative as well.
3. Seating Charts (avg 3.88/10): include an interactive seating chart with photos (at least) and videos (at best) from each seating section of your primary venues.

Items #1 and #2 are particularly easy to improve and should take less than 30 minutes to adjust and/or update but if you don’t have the third item in place already, it will be “challenging” to get something in place by the evaluation period.

Other quick fixes of note that will improve your orchestra’s review score include:

1. Remove any outdated content (you might be amazed at how many orchestras don’t check all of their webpages).
2. Include contact info for staff members and executive board members (at the very least, a single dedicated board contact email filtered through an admin assistant is sufficient).
3. Include contact email for the entire conducting staff (like the board email, even if it actually goes to an admin assistant first, that’s fine).
4. Make sure your copyright, privacy notices, and legal boilerplate notices are up to date and easy to find from the home page.
5. Verify that all payment links from donation and concert event pages are functioning properly and that up to date security notices are present.
6. List your box office hours of operation and telephone contact info from the home page and/or concert info pages.

Making sure your website contains the above criteria can make the difference between a “C+” and an “A-” in your overall grade. With that much advance aid, there’s no reason any orchestra should have a website that garners a score lower than 70/100.