Arts & Cultural Alliance of Sarasota County

Client background

The Arts and Cultural Alliance of Sarasota County is a member-powered organization that serves as an advocate for arts and culture in Sarasota County. Founded in 1986 by a group of committed citizens, the Alliance has administered more than $26 million in grants to area artists and arts organizations. The Alliance works to ensure arts and culture remain essential to the continuing development of a vibrant, creative community. This is achieved through arts advocacy, education, and community outreach.

They needed a site that highlighted its programs, also provided much-needed services for its member, and provided information to visitors to the Sarasota area.

We began by holding several brainstorming sessions with the Executive Director, board members, staff, and volunteers to discuss the problems with the existing site and the need for the redesign. During this process, it was also agreed it was important to rebrand with a new logo and colors.

After finalizing the overall look, we build the site with a robust membership area including an event calendar, event submission form, and membership renewal forms. We also added a section that allows the Alliance to offer profile pages for individual artist members providing artists with an online marketing platform.

Another major change was creating sections on the site that showcase the Alliance’s multiple initiatives and programs. Our brainstorming sessions also identified a need to create a way for visitors and those planning to visit to easily find events, venues, and things to do while in Sarasota. We added a “visitors” button to the home page which links to the event calendar. In less than one year the site visits have increased by more than ten times the amount from the previous site.