DCA Theater

In 1984, The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) was established as a municipal department to promote the arts and market the city’s abundant and diverse cultural resources and attractions to a worldwide audience. The DCA Theater is designed to foster the growth of Chicago’s theater companies as well as to encourage public awareness and cultural appreciation of the performing arts.

OUR APPROACH

The DCA Theater team required integration of numerous existing third party systems for donations, ticketing, events, and so on while also expanding the site’s functionality with new features, such as a blog and email marketing. Thus, the project’s discovery phase focused on how best to create a cohesive, DCA-branded interface that brings together these disparate systems into a unified front-end user experience.

IMPLEMENTATION

During the design phase, we incorporated a number of requested elements, such as rich colors, photography, and a red curtain background to help visually bring the site to life while also focusing on dynamic features requiring important interface real estate, like ads, news, shows, and events.

For production and programming, we integrated an ExpressionEngine CMS with TicketSage, MailChimp, and other third party tools to make the site admin experience as friendly as possible with multiple systems.

THE RETURN

In the first year after its launch, DCA Theater saw an increase of 120,000 unique visits with a proportional increase in ticket sales and donations. In addition, our site won four awards (check out the list above) and earned us a letter of recommendation that bears the City of Chicago seal.