About National Opera Studio
Established in 1977 and run in partnership with the UK’s largest opera companies, the National Opera Studio provides world-class training to opera singers and repetiteurs who are on the verge of embarking on their professional careers.
The Studio also provides a range of short courses, workshops and smaller training programmes, online resources, and live events around the UK.
Their flagship Young Artist Programme sees hundreds of applicants every year, with alumni that have gone on to become world-renowned performers.
We especially loved the commitment that NOS has to improving representation of diverse audiences in the artform, and were delighted when they selected Splitpixel to support them with a new website.
Multiple CRM integrations in one place
The Young Artists Programme is highly competitive – hundreds apply for limited spaces each year, and until recently, all of the applications were handled through a third party platform. This platform came at a cost, with NOS paying a regular fee for its use.
We’re pretty good at building complex application and enquiry forms, though, so we rebuilt the whole thing for them from scratch using WordPress and Gravity Forms. It’s a multi-step form with file uploads, equal opportunities monitoring, and integrated on-site payments.
Notifications are sent to any referees cited in the form, and anonymous PDFs are generated for the judging panel. Entries are also automatically mapped to an external database.
Elsewhere, the site uses the Beacon CRM for event ticketing, donations and mailing lists, as well as Jammed for venue hire bookings, all implemented as seamlessly as possible. With a lot of different systems in use, it’s essential to ensure that user journeys aren’t disrupted – shoving people from platform to platform is a great way to harm user confidence.
Putting the spotlight on Young Artists
While we think the site’s main design is very nice indeed, it’s admittedly fairly straightforward – albeit enriched with plenty of colour, lots of room for vibrant images, and welcoming, easy to read typography – with the priority on being able to find things easily rather than on something too flashy.
But as you dig deeper into the site, you’ll find all sorts of exciting things going on. One of our favourites is the Young Artists section of the site – the NOS team were determined that this would have its own look and feel, setting it apart from the rest of the site.
We stripped things right back for the Artists and Alums listings – stark black backgrounds to match the Studio’s house style for artist portraits, with sharply contrasting white text. Each artist’s profile page features a full size photo that blends seamlessly into the background for a very impactful introduction to each of the latest cohort of Young Artists.
The main page also features advanced alum filtering to help users find any of the artists who worked with the Studio in the near-50 years since its first Young Artists Programme.
Creating a thriving content hub
The site’s Learn and Explore section features a huge range of articles, podcasts, videos, training resources, and masterclasses in a content hub that’s easy for users to dig into, and very straightforward for the team to update.
There really is a surprising amount hidden behind the scenes of the site, yet it manages to never overwhelm users while navigating around.
The National Opera Studio had a clear vision for what they wanted from their site, and we really were delighted that we could help them realise it.
Impact
We’re confident that the new site has made a big impact on National Opera Studio’s online performance. Anecdotally, the team have told us that they’ve had some of their highest numbers of applications for the Young Artists Programme ever thanks to the new site – but we can also look at some real data!
In the first year after launch, when compared to the year before launch, we saw the following improvements:
- 160% increase in key on-site events and conversions
- 497% increase in engagement time per active user
- 157% increase in event count per user
This tells us that users are doing a lot more on site, spending more time and interacting with NOS more frequently. Thanks to our new design and build, and the Studio’s fantastic new content, the site has become much more of a destination that users want to browse around and explore.
As for the amount of users, they’re seeing consistent growth, with a 45% increase in search traffic in the last nine months compared to the previous period.
All in all, our work with National Opera Studio has been a great success, and we’re so excited to keep supporting them in the years to come.