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- The Cedar Cultural Center - World Understanding Through Music
The Cedar Cultural Center - World Understanding Through Music
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
The Cedar Cultural Center brings musicians from around the world to the Midwest to provide an exchange of cultures. We propose improving our theming, doing in-house online ticket sales, and adding an on-line member and donation tracking system.
Supporting organization:
The Cedar Cultural Center
URL:
http://www.thecedar.org
City:
Minneapolis
State/Region:
MN
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
The Cedar (also known as the Cedar Cultural Center) is a highly eclectic music venue located in the vibrant West Bank district of Minneapolis. Renowned for hosting some of the best acts in folk, blues, jazz, indie rock and world music in an intimate space, the Cedar is a 501(c)3 non-profit, largely volunteer-driven organization.
The Cedar's mission is to promote inter-cultural appreciation and understanding through the presentation of global music and dance. The Cedar is committed to artistic excellence and integrity, diversity of programming, support for emerging artists, and community outreach. Music is a universal language, and The Cedar brings performers from around the world to the Midwest, improving our understanding of other cultures inside and outside of the United States.
The Cedar has used its web site to provide more information on upcoming concerts and to provide an educational outreach on different performers and genres of music throughout the world. We are currently using several different technologies for this, and hope to expand their use:
- We collect monthly recordings of upcoming performers and feature them in a flash player on the site that lets people hear who is coming in the next month (and to review previous performances).
- We aggregate news on world, folk, and jazz music from different sources around the Internet and present them on the site.
- We invite comments from our audience on the site, and requests for performers who should come in the future.
- We are beginning to make blogs available to The Cedar's staff, and we collect these in a news blog on the site.
- We send a monthly newsletter from the site to members who sign up for it on the web site. We also allow people to sign up on the site for our monthly paper newsletter.
- The calendar of upcoming performers is available as an RSS feed from the site, as well as in ical format so that people may subscribe to upcoming events. These events are also now exported to a public calendar on Google Calendar.
- Part of our proposed improvements to the site will include starting an on-line discussion forum, and increasing user interaction with the site.
Sustainability (financial) model:
The Cedar Cultural Center is funded by a combination of memberships, grants, ticket sales, and other funding sources. Currently we are conducting an experiment of selling Compact Disks of Cedar Artists through the Amazon Associates program.
We hope to increase ticket sales through improvements in the web site, and increasing our outreach commitment to the community. Part of this project involves moving our ticket sales in-house (to be managed as part of our Drupal CMS system, using a modification of the ecommerce module).
Bringing in more audio and video content to the current site will help ticket sales by increasing our outreach and educational program to the community.
Potential obstacles:
Although ticket sales do not come close to providing enough funds for The Cedar to keep it financially afloat, ticket sales are an important part of our funding. Additionally, we need to attract more donations and grant money. We hope that site improvements will help with this by making it more obvious what the Cedar does, and by helping us to track our current and potential donors more effectively.
We currently have a donor tracking system, but building a system that is integrated with our ticket sales and web site would bring all of our systems into one place, giving us more accurate tracking.
Resource Needs:
The Cedar would like to fund several tech-based improvements:
- Improvements for design and delivery of our monthly events newsletter.
- Integration of CiviCRM to our Drupal-based web site, allowing us to track potential donors, and donations more easily than we do currently in an external database and integrate our tracking of donors and ticket sales.
- Moving our ticket sales completely in-house, and selling tickets on-line on our newly redesigned web site.
- A re-designed volunteer tracking system that is integrated in to the current web site. This would allow us to more accurately track volunteer hours, and which volunteers will be working at which performances. Volunteer management is very important to The Cedar, and we need a more effective way of handling volunteering. The Cedar has a very active group of several hundred volunteers.
Key Milestones:
- Improve the theme of the web site.
- Integrate the CiviCRM database system to the site for purposes of tracking ticket sales to members, donations, and other information in a single integrated database that is closely linked to our current web system.
- Develop a system for on-line ticket sales, allowing sales to occur on our own web site and at branch ticket outlets throughout the metro area. Integrate this system closely with the current web site, and contribute this package back as part of the Drupal E-Commerce package.
- Build a volunteer management system integrated in the current web site and upcoming CiviCRM integration. This will require some customized Drupal module development to handle the established volunteering methods at The Cedar.
Project Summary:
The Cedar (also known as the Cedar Cultural Center) is a highly eclectic music venue located in the vibrant West Bank district of Minneapolis. Renowned for hosting some of the best acts in folk, blues, jazz, indie rock and world music in an intimate space, the Cedar is a 501(c)3 non-profit, largely volunteer-driven organization. In the past year we have re-built our web site from a simple static set of pages to a system based on the Drupal Content Management System, allowing multiple people within the organization to update the web site, and add audio and video content, surveys, polls, and other new content forms to the site.
We have completed the initial phase of the new web site, and are looking toward making further improvements that would allow The Cedar to increase its ability to bring stunning music from around the world to the Midwest.
Our project for this year is to improve the re-designed Cedar Cultural Center web site to include in-house ticket sales, integrated tracking of ticket sales and donations, and to improve our monthly email newsletter service.
Comments
Community building online and offline
Very cool project! I was wondering if you had considered any community-building initiatives online to support the community-building your clearly doing offline.
For instance, what about user blogs or comments on the featured music? A community rating system for the songs? A collaborative tagging system that will generated "if you like X band, you'll probably like Y band too"? It may increase the "buy-in" from users -- not only will they go to your site to receive content, but to create it as well. Ultimately, depending on the licenses of your songs and the position of the bands, you may want to venture into user-generated musical content...
Just some ideas. Interesting proposal.
--ivan (quixotic1.com/Genocide Intervention Network)