A powerful platform for the arts

Tāwhiri – the creative force behind the New Zealand Festival, Wellington Jazz Festival, Song Quest and Second Unit – needed to simplify the way they manage their portfolio of websites. In the past, each festival website was built by a different agency using different technology platforms. By bringing these sites together into one platform, Tāwhiri now benefits from system updates and functionality efficiencies while keeping each festival brand unique. It’s about working smarter, not harder.

We consolidated all of Tāwhiri’s websites into the Wagtail content management system (CMS) to significantly reduce the cost of producing new websites for each festival. We began with the 2018 NZ Festival site, stripping it back to its core features and functionality to frame up how this new super-CMS would be structured. We then developed a UI pattern library that Tāwhiri could use across all of their festival websites.

“The incredible team at Octave have been instrumental in the successful implementation of Tāwhiri’s digital consolidation project. Along with clear technical skills, each member of the team – from all levels and functions – has contributed professional and personal insight and experience to the development of our sites, bringing fresh perspectives, original ideas and essential solutions to the project.”

Stefan Treyvaud — head of marketing and story, Tāwhiri.

The New Zealand Festival boasts performances from various artists, musicians and writers from all over the world. It’s truly a world-class festival, and it goes without saying, a world-class festival should have a world-class website. Features like saving events to a shortlist, filtering events any way you like, rich media content, and booking integrations give festival-goers loads of tools to play with.

The 2019 Wellington Jazz Festival was the first site that went live – the guinea pig. This first iteration began by mapping out the fundamentals of each festival Tāwhiri own to ensure we had a solid, reusable data model for all future festival websites. We leveraged the vivid, new brand, riffing off work by the clever folk at Inject Design, and launched on time with a very slim budget.

After the success of the Jazz Festival site, our first question was; “did we manage to create ongoing efficiency for Tāwhiri?” We went on to deliver the website for Second Unit – a blood-spattered, vampire-themed, immersive theatre event – in just two weeks. Pretty efficient, we thought. Tāwhiri’s Marketing Manager agreed and sent us this message: “BTW, sooooooo good having Second Unit and WJF sitting on the same CMS. Amazing!!” We couldn’t agree more.

Is four too many websites to have on one CMS? It should be, but with this new set-up on Wagtail, it’s no problem at all. In the CMS, content managers can switch between websites quickly and simply, with no compromise to security. Unfortunately, the Lexus Song Quest was victim to the Covid pandemic, but Tāwhiri are good to go this year!