Who are The Arts Society?

The Arts Society, formally NADFAS, is a leading arts education charity with the mission of bringing people together through a shared curiosity for the arts. The Arts Society operates through a global network of local Societies that host events and trainings throughout the world.

The challenge

With over 90,000+ members and 395 member societies, NADFAS already had a huge presence. Their existing CiviCRM instance was large with huge amounts of historical data and heavy customisation. But their brand was fragmented, with many local societies making their own websites. This led to confusion among members and their broader audience, alongside a system which was struggling to keep up with the organisation’s ever expanding needs.

NADFAS therefore embarked on a courageous project to unify and modernise their global brand under a new banner: The Arts Society. 

A key part of this rebrand was to replace their legacy website, which would require a digital partner who could work closely with their branding agency. The organisation wished, however, to retain their existing CiviCRM setup and set themselves an ambitious timeline in which to complete the project.

Compuco stood out as an ideal partner to help the Arts Society in this project not only with their creative flair and knowledge of building intuitive and engaging user experiences, but also their highly flexible self service portal. The Society was insistent that while it wished to unify the brand and technology and create a brand new website as the centrepiece , it also needed to empower local societies with control over their own digital footprints. The portal provided the answer, fulfilling the key role of supporting the Society’s managers being able to post events that could then show up on the website. 

The solution

Compuco uniquely helped redevelop the existing Drupal website for the Society, refreshed for their new brand identity and integrated with their CiviCRM instance. The creative design and layout were carefully curated to reflect the Society’s important brand theme of putting people at the very centre of the work that they do.

From just this one website, it would now be possible to seamlessly search and connect to the hundreds of Arts Societies up and down the country. Each society would also have access to their own microsite on the main site. This would be where they could post new content and retain their all important autonomy while remaining under the same unified brand umbrella.

The new self service area was also implemented with ‘manage my society’ features, which empowered the staff at the different societies to add members for increased data capture opportunities. This opened up new growth opportunities and the ability to better address the needs of their audience at a local level.

The results

The Arts Society’s rebrand was an immediate success, seeing an increase in new member growth thanks to their powerful new digital infrastructure centred around their new website. This increased patronage meant a greater awareness of the amazing work they do, increased participation and additional resources to support their activities.

It also provided the much sought after unification of the brand across the hundreds of different societies, while recognising and addressing the reasons many of them had built their own sites in the first place. The self service portal also succeeded in supporting local societies in managing their memberships and most importantly provided them with the autonomy they needed while operating under one stronger, unified brand.