Connecting Canadians through culture

Managing Multiple User Profiles and Needs

How do you bring together 2 million participants, 7,000 annual events, 800 Canadian cities, an enthusiastic group of volunteers, and citizens across the country? With one great website. Over three days each autumn, Culture Days promotes community organizations, professional companies and individual artists hosting free activities from coast to coast to coast.

Audiences of all ages are given the opportunity to experience visual art, theatre, dance, storytelling and so much more. Plank created a one stop portal for organizers and audiences to come together and share their love for culture. And we’ve been making it better year after year.

A Place for Everything…and Everything in its Place

With event organizers spread across the country, the Culture Days team needed a simple way for artists and organizations to register their activities – regardless of their technical know-how. To make it easy on everyone, Plank created a central digital platform with a simple interface backed by accessible event management tools. Registering an event online is painless thanks to clean design that allows organizers to upload content and images into a framework that showcases their event to local audiences.

Event organizers can also access marketing materials and promotion tips to boost awareness of their events in their communities. Audience members are treated to a simple path to finding events near them and can add them to a personalized schedule for a full weekend of discovery. Clear-cut navigation makes sure users of all kinds find exactly what they’re looking for.

Making it Better Year After Year

Culture Days may only take place for 3 days of the year, but in between, we’re consistently improving the experience for the next edition. Since the beginning of our partnership in 2009, we have worked with the Culture Days team to improve the site year after year.

We’ve improved the user experience for both event attendees and organizers with tweaks to the CMS, a toolbar for organizers, and a content platform that can be easily updated and adjusted by the Culture Days team. We brought the website to a completely responsive experience across browsers and platforms, and connected it to email and social platforms to send automatic alerts driven by user preferences.

Contest Zone

Each year, Culture Days drives user engagement with an online contest. In 2018, we redesigned the featured contest to embed YouTube videos in a popup module where users answer quiz questions following a video about drumming traditions from different cultures.

Over the years, Plank has increased site traffic to over 600,000 page views annually, facilitated thousands of events and connected millions of community members every year. We love what we do, and can’t wait to do it again.