Ravinia Festival of Chicago, the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is the oldest outdoor music festival in North America. It is recognized for presenting world-class music, a beautiful setting, and wonderful visitor experience. Like many leading performing arts venues, Ravinia required an online ticketing box office to streamline the ticketing process and drive Internet sales, as well as a simple, usable event management system. Ravinia engaged IdeaStar, partnered with AMN New Media, as part of its effort to create a site primarily to sell tickets and fill their venue.

Ravinia Festival looked to IdeaStar to create a fully content-managed Web site that provided the site’s visitors with event information and calendar capabilities. The site needed to use the newest information design technologies and techniques, in order to seamlessly integrate it with Ravinia’s existing ticketing software package - real-time ticketing system ENTA by Galathea STS of London. Additionally, the administrative portion of the site needed to be uncomplicated enough for non-technical staff members to use.

IdeaStar worked closely with Ravinia and third party provider teams to implement the event management capability and content management system. Ravinia site administrators find it easy to add, move, and delete content as business needs dictate, or as seasonal performance schedules change. All events have detailed descriptions and highlighted information.

Integration of ravinia.org with online box office purchasing process has streamlined ticketing for the festival and increased the site’s value. Navigation remained simple, and pages throughout the process remain clean and uncluttered.

IdeaStar’s development team approached the Ravinia Festival project with excitement and motivation to create an integrated process that met the specified goals. Ravinia has a streamlined process that promotes ticket sales, and is still exploring opportunities to individualize user experience even more.

Angus Watson, Director of Ticket Operations at Ravinia says, “We look forward to continuing to work with IdeaStar in the future evolution of the site. They have provided us with quality service and are committed to a successful project from beginning to end.”