Case Study Project: Youth Music
Sector: Education
Youth Music is the UK’s largest children’s music charity and since 1999 has helped to transform over 2 million young lives through music. Its target is to reach out to over 3 million youths by 2010, which includes some of the UK’s most disadvantaged young people. Traditionally backed by lottery money there is now an emphasise on participating in fundraising.
This is achieved through the distribution of £10m per year of lottery funding for musical projects run by formal and community-based sectors involved in music making and training. Youth Music is now also actively involved in fundraising activities, kick-started by a high profile auction involving 70 artists and the photographer Rankin called Destroy Rankin.
What was needed:
- Re-design adopting the new powerburst artwork
- Flexible design framework that integrates with microsites
- Publishing tools to enable moderators and external teams to create and submit content for approval prior to publishing to the main site
- Content syndication with micro sites
- Tools to encourage communication, collaboration and foster an online community culture
What we did
First phase involved the integration of the new funding design templates into the customised Content Management System (CMS). The existing Music is Power microsite was also incorporated into the CMS thereby enabling content generation and sharing across the two sites.
A user-friendly map generator enables project updates to be imported for visualisation through a Google Maps interface. Ongoing events created through the CMS also integrate with the generator enabling events taking place within an area to also display.
The second phase culminated in the integration with the Youth Music Box. Video content and music created by visitors to the Box at hosted venues are uploaded to an interactive timeline where visitors can search for their jamming session at the Box. Visitors can then tag their videos, and share with friends who in turn can rate their musical prowess.
Communication tools enable users to provide comments and discussions around funding activities. A competition manager enables rolling competitions taking place within the Music is Power site can also be blogged and even rated.
Future phases include content harvesting and dynamic searching across vocational and training sites advising on career opportunities to enable youths to fulfil their goals in the music industry.
The outcome
- The user-friendly and intuitive architecture of the re-design with its strong emphasise on the powerburst has helped to deliver the brand experience and communicate the site’s key message of fundraising activities and promoting the open programmes to organisations looking for funding
- Incorporating the Youth Music feedback magazine into the site as an online blog has created engaging and interactive dialogue with users. This has resulted in better user profiling as Youth Music can see a merging picture of user interests in music educational topics and reflect this in the type of materials promoted
- By incorporating the Youth Music feedback magazine into the online blog and a reduced circulation of the remaining copies has resulted in significant print and distribution cost savings
- Visualisation tools incorporated into the search facilities allow users to get a quick and comprehensive snapshot of the types of funded projects in their area and thereby assess the types of musical projects applicable for funds
- The site serves as an online legacy of music-making opportunities in areas of social and economic need and is a vocal platform for introducing youth to music education