A Great Museum Relaunch for The Broad

Sometimes, a strategically placed CTA button can be the key to securing more museum visits. The Broad, a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, CA had that task on deck to enhance digital presence when they engaged the web development agency Urban Insight. 

Thebroad.org website's strategic redesign, a mobile app overhaul and new features helped the museum meet and exceed its visitor attendance goals. Ticket sales increased by 17% year-over-year, a great metric in support of the museum’s expansion plans. Here is The Broad’s digital transformation story on Pantheon with Urban Insight. 

From Contegix to Pantheon for Better Development Tools

Image

The Broad began a collaboration with Urban Insight by supporting their Drupal 7 website hosted on Contegix. This initial engagement laid the groundwork for a strong working relationship and led to the next Drupal upgrade and a comprehensive website redesign. The transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 was relatively smooth due to the continuity within the Drupal ecosystem, although it did come with its own challenges.

The migration process required the handling of considerable tech debt and unused resources, which complicated the task.

Having launched the new Drupal 8 site, performance issues arose. These challenges underscored the need for a more robust and efficient deployment and hosting platform.

We launched on Contegix and ran into a lot of problems. Our team was slow with deployments and things were falling through the cracks. We knew Pantheon’s WebOps tools would make us so much more efficient and decrease the total cost of ownership for the site. We got The Broad on Pantheon, and that was a new era of efficiency of working with the client.”  

- Mark Dischler, CTO at Urban Insight

Upgrading The Broad to the latest Drupal version, Urban Insight relied on Pantheon's Multidev feature to maintain stable environments while actively developing and deploying mission-critical features on the live site. 

Once the Drupal upgrade was tested and approved, Multidev simplified merging updates back into the production deployment workflow. Since migrating The Broad's Drupal site to Pantheon, the average page load time has decreased by over 24%.

Progressive Web App to Replace Unwieldy iOS and Android Apps

The Broad houses over 2,000 works of art in its collection. In an innovative move, Urban Insight developed a Progressive Web App (PWA) with Gatsby, leveraging the Drupal site as the data source. This app replaced the separate native Android and iOS apps, providing an enhanced in-gallery experience that looks and feels like a native app, but with no installation required. Visitors could now scan a QR code to instantly access audio tours, a kids' tour or detailed information about the collection directly on their mobile devices. 

“When we launched their Drupal site, we learned that The Broad was paying a subscription fee for their native apps. Moreover, the collections’ data for the apps was stored in a separate database, requiring them to enter all of their data twice. By developing a progressive web app, we made the content team’s jobs easier and kept all of the data in sync. Marketers can update the Drupal site once and the information will instantly feed the website and the app, for a seamless UX,” explained Dischler. 

Freedom to Experiment

Image

By switching to Pantheon, the museum cut costs and saved time on routine development jobs. Urban Insight gained the freedom to design high-value features.

To support high-profile exhibitions like that of artist Mickalene Thomas, Urban Insight built flexible components to highlight press clippings, a looping animation feature and in-gallery photos. They also introduced a way to promote multi-day workshops within individual events, further enhancing visitor engagement.

“This was another innovation,” said Dischler. “Previously we built a feature to create an event series and attach it to the events. But for Thomas’s exhibition, the marketing team wanted to create a single event page for multiple workshops that span over a weekend, and then be able to promote it that way.”

However, basking in this creative freedom is a challenge in itself. The website's design has to balance between being visually appealing and not overshadowing the museum's artwork. Urban Insight delivered an elegant design that has stood the test of time. A versatile carousel allowed easy reordering of items, adhering to a "less is more" philosophy to highlight key content effectively. Notably, the introduction of a "Get Tickets" button in the top navigation significantly boosted ticket reservations and sales, resulting in a 17% increase in checkout completions compared to the year before. 

During the pandemic, The Broad launched the Broad Digital section, featuring a rich library of performances, talks and workshops. This section became a vital part of the website, offering engaging video content and serving as a learning resource. 

Although society has returned to physical spaces, our website remains vital. It's not just about promoting events or exhibitions; it's about encouraging engagement and ensuring accessibility. Our collaboration with Urban Insight and Pantheon keeps us at the cutting edge of technology, delivering a seamless, innovative experience for our audience." 

- Nathan Alvarez, Director of IT at The Broad