The Playwrights' Center

About Playwrights’ Center

Playwrights’ Center serves more playwrights in more ways than any other organization in the country.

One of the nation’s most generous and well-respected theater organizations, the Center focuses on both supporting playwrights and promoting new plays to production at theaters across the country. Based in Minneapolis/Saint Paul, the organization has helped launch the careers of numerous nationally recognized artists.

Studios Involved

Marketing

Apps

//

Industries

Playwriting

Non-profit

//

Status

Complete

The View From Space

Playwrights’ Center had to transition their website and member platform away from an outdated version of Drupal that loaded slowly and was a headache to manage on the backend. They needed a CMS that was a joy to use and a frontend experience that would delight all stakeholders, including over 2,500 playwrights.

‍

The outcome

Pathfinder over-delivered on every front. Design of their new digital property has captured the imagination of the public and playwrights across the country. Here are some tangible wins for the Playwrights’ Center:

A strong WordPress backend that the Playwrights’ team enjoys managing
Increased member platform functionality
Dramatically faster load times
Delightful mobile experience
Expected increase in donations and new member signups

On The Ground

The Backstory

The Playwrights’ Center’s website and member platform was in rough shape.

Built on an outdated version of Drupal, the Playwrights’ internal team spent too many hours wrestling a frustrating backend. In theory, Drupal architecture is powerful and flexible. But we’ve seen this type of situation before. Outdated versions of Drupal are brittle and seldom do developers build in such a way that is easy for an organization to take stewardship.

The frontend experience and design were woefully lacking. The site loaded painfully slowly, which caused higher than normal bounce rates. The mobile experience was tough to use and mobile visitors were increasing every year. And importantly, Playwrights’ Center is a world-renowned creative organization, but their digital property did not reflect this.

The Mission

Playwrights’ Center wanted a brand new public-facing marketing site and member platform, built on a new CMS.Design **and** function were important to them.They wanted a style that felt really fresh and would remain timeless for many years. As an organization with roots in the theatre, they knew visual storytelling was going to be a powerful tool to move people to take action.They needed everything to be highly functional. This meant retaining or even gaining more functionality than they had before. All aspects of the site and member platform had to be easily managed on the backend. The finished product had to be fast loading, performant, and delightful to use on mobile.

Mission KPIs

Fresh & timeless design aesthetic
Visual storytelling
Match or exceed previous functionality
Easily managed backend that saves time
Fast loading page speeds
Delightful mobile experience

The Fit

Why Pathfinder

Playwrights’ Center approached us because of a trusted referral. They knew they needed a seasoned team with design and engineering depth, which Pathfinder had in spades. Pathfinder also brought in Ciampa Creative, a small but mighty studio that would help oversee user research and experience. Playwrights’ also loved that Pathfinder and Ciampa had ample non-profit experience.

‍

Why Playwrights’ Center

We knew working with Playwrights’ Center would be a dream. The Center was making a positive dent in the playwrights universe, which was appealing. The project also needed a number of things we love to do: synthesizing a new industry, visual storytelling, converting a legacy product into something newer & better, and creating a web app that would be used by thousands.

The Process

01 Discover

Our Supercharged Discovery™️ with Playwrights’ was substantial.

This was largely because of the multiple stakeholders inside their organization and playwrights network. So we brought in the big guns. In this case, this was one of our long term partners, Ciampa Creative. Renessa led in-depth interviews with the multiple audience personas that have a vested interest in the marketing site and member platform.

Other parts of this phase included a complete re-work of their information architecture, a market landscape audit, a brand audit, a deep dive into color & typography, exploring a new visual aesthetic inspired by brutalism & antidesign, and forming strategy on how exactly to tell a visual story that would drive viewers to donate or join the playwrights network.

02 design

For design, we began by rapidly creating wireframes of every screen and page of the new website and member platform. Over multiple iterations, we worked in feedback from the Playwrights’ team, refining until we felt sure the combined result would hit our Design KPIs.

We then finalized a Design Foundation, tying together existing work done in the Discover phase. We also developed a library of core UI elements that served as ‘atoms’ in our design.

From there, guided by our Lo-Fi mockups and Design Foundation, we crafted Hi-Fi mockups in Figma for every screen, page, and UI element. And as for most projects, we held internal design and development meetings to talk through the nuances of animations and interactivity.

03

build

For this digital property, we realized it would be incredibly efficient to build the new marketing website and member platform together as one instance, powered by a single CMS.

So we turned to WordPress, which happens to be a Pathfinder ‘bread and butter’. We also chose to use MemberPress, a powerful kernel for membership functionality, as a starting point. This allowed us to skip re-inventing the wheel for dozens of core features, and focus on extending an incredibly valuable feature set unique to Playwrights’ needs.

On the front end, we used modern CSS and JS libraries one might expect, save for one exciting addition: Three.js. This allowed us to create a highly interactive scroll experience for a key page in their new marketing site: Why Join.

During this phase, we followed our typical process for marketing sites and lighter web apps: scaffolding, development first pass, internal review, development second pass, and final QA / QC. One interesting twist was a phased launch, where we first launched the marketing site, followed by staggered batches of users for the member platform.

‍

Final technology stack

WordPress

MemberPress

Three.js

04

evolve

As we discovered, designed, built, and launched the new Playwrights’ Center platform, it became clear that there were many potential future features that should be compiled into a product roadmap.

So in collaboration with Playwrights, we prioritized and organized these features for future work and releases. We’ve now entered a mode of platform evolution. Every month, the marketing site and member platform will become better. Future features include quality of life improvements, ways for Playwrights Center to operate more efficiently, and innovative enhancements that will add value to their network of playwrights.

Not only that, we’re helping dream up some bigger ideas that Playwrights’ Center may explore in the next few years. Spoiler alert: imagine a mobile app for playwrights globally.

The Outcome

The new Playwrights’ Center marketing website and member platform has been a smashing success.

All mission KPIs were hit and Playwrights’ now has something of great value — an extendable and scalable platform that they can continue to evolve and build upon. Before Pathfinder, they were an organization that had to ‘deal’ with technology. Now with our help, they have become an organization that harnesses technology and treats it as a core pillar to their strategy.

If Pathfinder is lucky (as we have been so far), our team will get to continue partnering with Playwrights’ Center for the next decade. We hope to build further with them, as they empower playwrights nationally, and eventually around the world.

‍

Inspiration thrusters 
at maximum power...

Playwrights' Center

Studios

Services

Strategy

Design

Engineering

Case Studies