Northern Lights Chorale
Role
UX Researcher, UX Strategist
Team
A team of 3. Myself and two others
Client Intake, Stakeholder Interview, Research, Guiding Strategy Statement, Touchpoint Strategy Map, Touchpoint prototypes
Methods Used
The mission
The Northern Lights Chorale is a non-profit chorale in the Twin Cities that offers free admission to their audiences. Their mission is to create inspiring musical experiences that foster connection and personal growth within a diverse community.
Intake and research
Prior to meeting with our client, my team came together to organize ourselves by using a KanBan standup method for our daily tracking of where we each are with our individual work for this project.
We also took time to explore what we already knew or didn’t know about the Northern Lights Chorale, as well as any assumptions we may have had.
Creating this list helped to generate questions and talking points prior to the interview with the client.
After meeting with the client, we needed to create a strategy based on the clients goals. Before we could make any decisions or move forward with any ideas, it’s important to first do our research to see what is already out there.
Northern Lights Goals
One of the main goals our clients shared with us is wanting to expand their audience reach within the Twin Cities by attracting a wider range of attendees, specifically those who are 55 and younger.
Strategy Goal Statement
The start of group touchpoint strategy map
Defining our strategy
Once our research was completed, my team compared our findings to further understand where the potential problems with the chorale may be, as well as what our strategy goal is. This goal then led us to be able to create the touchpoint map which expresses the journey a user takes when finding, going, and donating to the Northern Lights Chorale. To create this map, as a group we defined and came up with each touchpoint by brainstorming together on a whiteboard.
Touchpoint Strategy Map
Using our whiteboard brainstorming session as our guide, as well as the goals of the Northern Lights Chorale, we were able to create a Touchpoint Strategy Map. This map has four phases - Attract, Engage, Retain and Attend. The map is shown in a circular motion, as it’s a never ending journey to attract new concert attendees.
Attract - The use of social media and physical marketing will help bring more awareness to the community about the Northern Lights Chorale.
Engage - With a clear and engaging website, users that land on the Northern Lights Chorale website will be able to understand the website’s purpose as well as be able to find any information they need about Northern Lights Chorale.
Attend - Creating an immersive experience, as well as making it easy for community members to donate while at a show will help create that memorable experience that will bring audience members back again.
Retain - With continued support and donations as well as word of mouth about this local chorale group will bring audience members new and old coming back.
As a team we divided the work of each touch-point. The touch-point experience I took was Attend.
Touchpoint Strategy Map
Attend
Taking the touchpoint Attend, I thought about one of The Northern Lights Chorale goals, which is to reach and attract younger audiences than they traditionally have had. When exploring how they could go about this, my team decided that to achieve this, having immersive experiences could really help.
One idea I brought forward to the Northern Lights Chorale is to have a few candlelit concerts. This would give the concerts an immersive experience that leaves a memorable impression and creates buzz around attending their concerts.
I created a mood board to show the feeling that having a candlelit concert would give an individual. I then created two storyboards that depict an individual attending a candlelit concert.
Lastly, being that these concerts are free, I suggested another way they can collect donations, especially as they gain younger concertgoers. My suggestion was using tiptop pay for their concerts. Tiptap pay is a small stand alone payment receiver that makes for quick transactions. It is helpful for those who don’t have cash or check with them and would like to donate. According to the tiptap website, on average, their customers collect 4 times more than cash, 3 times more than paypal, 6 times more than QR codes — therefore I thought this could be a great way to bring in more donations.
Our deliverable
To deliver our strategy and report to the client, my team members and I each video taped ourselves speaking about our portions of the project. We then combined those videos together into a final video for our client to watch. We also provided the client with all of our annotated prototypes, in the event they want to look at those in more detail.
Please note that in the introduction of the video I am speaking, but this work belongs to all three of us.
Future Ideas
I believe my team gave the Northern Lights Chorale great ideas for moving forward in reaching their goals. If I had more time and could expand further on my portion of the project, I would want to suggest more immersive concert ideas they could do to stand out in the Twin Cities chorale landscape. I would also want to strategize further how they could gain more concertgoers and people who would donate to their chorale.