VYRE: Company - Customer Details

Society of London Theatre

The Society of London Theatre was founded in 1908 and is the trade association that represents the producers, theatre owners and managers of the major commercial and grant-aided theatres in central London. It combines its long-standing roles in such areas as industrial relations and legal advice for members with a campaigning role for the industry, together with a wide range of audience-development programmes to promote theatre traffic from around the globe.

Business Overview / Background

• Company: The Society of London Theatre (SOLT)
• Industry: Publishing
• Domain: http://www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk including its associated micro sites and promotional sites
• Content Management Solution: VYRE Unify

Founded in 1908 by Sir Charles Wyndham, the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) is the trade association that represents the producers, theatre owners and managers of the major commercial and grant-aided theatres in central London.

Today the Society combines its long-standing roles in such areas as industrial relations and legal advice for members with a campaigning role for the industry, together with a wide range of audience-development programmes to promote theatre-going.

Project Summary

When the Society of London Theatre (SOLT) approached VYRE, their online presence and supporting Content Management solution was restricted by dated architecture; negatively affecting business innovation, speed to implementation and site impact.

After a tender process; where a number of vendors were assessed, VYRE professional services and the VYRE Unify platform was chosen to re-launch the main public facing SOLT site: The Official London Theatre Guide.

The project timeline was pressured, with just 12 weeks from the commencement of discovery stage to the launch. Since the launch of www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk the deployment has grown with the addition of microsites, such as Kids Week and the soon to be launched Learn About London Theatre.

Challenges and objectives of the project

The Society of London Theatre (SOLT) required a new content management solution to re-launch their main and promotional micro sites. To fulfil this requirement, the new solution needed to cover a diverse range of needs out of the box and allow content and images to be easily re-purposed across sites.

In the past, administering the various sites was very repetitive and slow; as each site was managed by a separate content management system. This led to high volumes of duplication and poor re-purposing of content and images; which in turn contributed to a great deal of extra time, work and resources.

In addition, all template updates to the Society's sites had to be done by a third party. This not only had cost implications but also time implications. For example making changes to templates would take approximately one week.

Even though SOLT's micro sites were part of the main site, they retained distinct branding and messaging. This resulted in poor navigation and confusion; as visitors were presented with an information overload. On the new site SOLT's ambition was to create a site that directly talked to its two key audiences: the general public and the theatre industry, and increase the relevance of content by running micro sites for specific services.

SOLT's mission is to serve and promote the London theatre industry as a whole. As part of that directive - whilst SOLT is not a ticket agency - it does promote and sell tickets via a third party for all West End shows. Therefore a key priority was to streamline the processes of buying tickets; by reducing the number of clicks needed to purchase.

Furthermore, SOLT wanted to make significant improvements to its SEO processes. The SEO aims included: making it easier to maintain and build on its SEO success, increase traffic to its sites, effectively promote London theatre and ultimately boost ticket sales. On the old system maintaining SEO involved a great amount of work, and although SOLT had been able to do limited search engine optimisation it was very difficult to influence SEO in great depth. For example, the Society could not tag images and neither did it have direct control over URLs; which were rather long and unclear for search engines.

SOLT also needed a solution that could help to maximise inventory for commercial ad sales and this included the placement of Message Plus Unit or MPUs for short. MPUs are a popular format due to their small size, which at 250 x 250 allows them to be placed within articles, heightening the hope that the visitor will pay greater attention to the advert.

In terms of design and branding, the Society needed a system that would deliver consistency, whilst also allowing for different branding and messaging on micro sites. In relation to accessibility, SOLT; as the voice of the industry needed to set the benchmark for good practice. Hence SOLT was looking to move to a CSS driven layout to take full advantage of the accessibility and usability improvements this would bring.

Finally, the new content management system had to ensure that the Society's sites could be easily updated, managed and developed by SOLT itself to provide a richer level of service to users and provide maximum autonomy for in-house teams.

VYRE Unify and its benefits

The VYRE Unify deployment of SOLT's websites has delivered on the projects stated key objectives.

Reducing the information overload risk for visitors was a key priority and now specialist needs, such as Kids Week or Theatre Tokens, are quickly accessed through a distinct URL or from the main site through a quick link option. The micro sites also have their own distinct design, branding and messaging; which strengthens their individual identity, whilst not diluting the branding of the main SOLT site.

The introduction of Unify to manage the sites has also allowed SOLT to enhance the user experience through the introduction of dynamic publishing, related content linking and rich media elements.

Furthermore the number of clicks required for buying tickets has been greatly reduced down to only two. Improvements in navigation have contributed to this reduction, as through the drop down feature on the home page, visitors can go straight to buying tickets.

These improvements have translated into measurable increases in sales for SOLT, as after launching the first annual ticket promotion micro site Kids Week, the Society experienced more than 40% increase in ticket sales from the previous year. Additional revenue generating benefits have been gained as the Society can now take full advantage of selling a variety of advertising space on its sites.

The Unify platform has also delivered greater control over SEO for the Society, with SOLT stabilising top two rankings on key terms such as ‘London theatre' and ‘theatre news'. There are a number of features in Unify that have contributed to this improvement and key measures include:

• Automatic image/alt tagging, keyword, titling and descriptions for pages ensure that search engines pick up on critical keywords throughout the whole site.
• Stylesheets ensure critical content is correctly placed in website pages - this increases SEO rankings due to search engines understanding the importance of search terms being placed higher up in the code.
• Friendly URLs are automatically generated within Unify and this ensures that they can be indexed by search engines, are memorable to website visitors and allows you to set easy-to-remember virtual paths to key areas.

The day-to-day management of sites has also greatly improved. SOLT now manage all sites with the VYRE Unify platform. This allows for easy re-purposing of content and rich media, which in turn streamlines processes; reducing costs and freeing staff to concentrate on more profitable tasks.

Further benefits have been delivered to SOLT's in-house web team. The team now has maximum autonomy over the Society's sites, as they are able to quickly and easily make changes to templates, add new features and extend and build as needed. This not only reduces costs; as SOLT no longer has to outsource; but it also means that changes can be completed more quickly, improving response times and supporting business innovation.

In fact, the VYRE Unify solution has been so successful in this key criterion that the next promotional site (Get Into London Theatre) has been entirely built by the SOLT team on the Unify platform. Further launches are planned and this includes Theatre Fix - aimed at the under 26 market.

Future

The Society of London Theatre is planning to extend the use of personalised content, rich media and dynamic publishing of content to further improve the visitor experience. Additionally, due to the successful roll out of the initial sites, new projects, such as SOLT's intranet and a site for members are under discussion.