Our continued partnership with Peppered

Last week, the After Digital team ventured to Rotterdam to meet our friends and partners at Peppered, a CMS for arts marketing.

Like After Digital, Peppered is a well-established digital provider in the arts, culture and entertainment sectors— offering a variety of services including websites, email marketing, CRM automation, and content platforms to handle narrowcasting.

Peppered has over 70 clients across Europe, supporting some of the biggest names in the sector with their digital platforms.

What exactly does Peppered offer?

Peppered has worked for over 20 years to refine and build a solution to the most common requirements and integrations for ticketed venues such as Het Nationale Theater, Nationale Opera & Ballet, de Doelen, Theater Rotterdam, Chassé and Antwerp Symphony Orchestra. 

Peppered’s primary service is an “out-the-box” solution for websites which features a robust, flexible approach to website creation. Giving brands control over their branding, content, and marketing on a reliable platform—built with their needs in mind from the start.

Just some of the features included out-of-the-box:

• Built-in integrations with multiple planning and ticketing systems such as Yesplan, Eventim and Tixly.

• A highly-flexible parts system featuring a vast range of components to build content how you see fit: banners, grids, galleries, calendars, event pages, and ticketing pages.

• A platform built with accessibility and mobile-first at the forefront.

• Intelligent agenda and calendar functionality to display events to users effectively.

• Personalisation options and analytics built-in.

• Multilingual support that propagates across the site.

• An easy-to-use CMS.

How we work with Peppered

Whilst Peppered offers their customers a powerful tool with lots of features and some design customisations, a number of organisations can require a more bespoke design to support their requirements. Some organisations also recognise that they first need to take a more holistic view of their requirements, audience, and content before delivering a new solution.

This is where After Digital comes in. We have amassed a wealth of experience in designing and building websites in the sector, and our design team have developed our own discovery process to help organisations better define who their audience is, what their requirements are and how best to deliver digital solutions that meet their needs.

We work as an intermediary between Peppered and the client in the early stages of the project. We help define the best way for the organisation to structure their content in a user-friendly manner. We also provide advice on how to best portray their brand online with captivating UI design which works within the Peppered system. 

We’ll typically conduct a range of desk research with the clients, looking at their analytics, and session recordings to uncover how users interact with their existing websites. Then we undertake a UX review, comparing against best practices to highlight our recommendations.

We’ll then use these findings in combination with a series of on-site workshops we call “discovery”. These sessions help define concepts such as personas, jobs to be done, information architecture, and content hierarchy that can be used to help determine the best approach for the new website. We’ll use this to inform our UI designs and collaborate with Peppered to make sure any bespoke parts are integrated seamlessly into the platform.

Our most recent work with Peppered, saw us work with de Doelen in Rotterdam, which you can read more about here.

Continuous improvement

As part of our commitment to continuously improve our processes and relationships with partners, we spent several days working together. Sharing learnings from our own experiences, clarifying a bit more about what we do, and how we might better continue to work together and deliver value for our clients.

We’re excited to continue collaborating with an organisation that shares our values and interests and look forward to our next joint project— working with Antwerp Symphony Orchestra in Belgium.

If you’d like to hear more about what Peppered can do for your organisation, or would like to hear more about our UI/UX process, get in touch! Additionally, you can watch our joint webinar!