Good Busy

It was a busy day and I’ll need to circle back to the blog originally planned at another time. What’s keeping me busy is two new website launches in as many weeks. The first was New York Choral Society’s new site and yesterday saw the Lakes Area Music Festival site go live.

Both projects were a great deal of fun and these are among our very first that were designed from the ground up during the pandemic. While that didn’t dominate the process, it certainly impacted a number of considerations, especially how both groups use and feature media.

Both groups decided to spend time developing media libraries with both video and audio content. LAMF opted to segment content into categories while NYCHORAL kept everything organized as video or audio. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have both been generating a great deal of content over the last year and they’ve discovered ways to feature it across their sites.

I really can’t underscore just how wonderful the teams from both groups were to work with. For all the adversities the pandemic has thrown at us, the amount of positivity and creativity arts administrators bring to the table for projects like this never ceases to inspire. I love the time and effort LAMF put into building an extensive musician profile directory. You can’t go wrong with highlighting your talent. Likewise, NYCHORAL’s performance archive contains a wealth of information meticulously detailed in searchable, response tables.

Take some time to visit both sites!

About Drew McManus

"I hear that every time you show up to work with an orchestra, people get fired." Those were the first words out of an executive's mouth after her board chair introduced us. That executive is now a dear colleague and friend but the day that consulting contract began with her orchestra, she was convinced I was a hatchet-man brought in by the board to clean house.

I understand where the trepidation comes from as a great deal of my consulting and technology provider work for arts organizations involves due diligence, separating fact from fiction, interpreting spin, as well as performance review and oversight. So yes, sometimes that work results in one or two individuals "aggressively embracing career change" but far more often than not, it reinforces and clarifies exactly what works and why.

In short, it doesn't matter if you know where all the bodies are buried if you can't keep your own clients out of the ground, and I'm fortunate enough to say that for more than 15 years, I've done exactly that for groups of all budget size from Qatar to Kathmandu.

For fun, I write a daily blog about the orchestra business, provide a platform for arts insiders to speak their mind, keep track of what people in this business get paid, help write a satirical cartoon about orchestra life, hack the arts, and love a good coffee drink.

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