Most websites are built once, launched, and left to slowly fall behind. That's a real cost: a cultural institution that keeps evolving deserves a website that moves with it, not against it.
That's the entire reason CultureSuite exists. Before working with us, Zara Foxcroft, Head of CRM & Digital at Lowry, described her venue's old website as something that had "a number of restrictions, with content updates often needing agency support." Since moving to CultureSuite, her team has "the creative freedom to craft engaging digital experiences," with a platform that "responds quickly to opportunities."
Here's exactly how CultureSuite helps you showcase your programme, grow your audience, and share your mission, year after year, without ever needing to rebuild your website again.
Showcase your programme
Cultural organisations never stand still. A new show gets announced, an exhibition gets confirmed, a community event gets added a week before it happens. CultureSuite is built so your website can keep up with all of it, without needing a developer standing by every time something changes.
Flexible building blocks
CultureSuite CMS uses flexible building blocks to simplify web page construction. With a drag-and-drop interface, you can structure and rearrange pages yourself, simply and quickly. Each block can be scheduled and personalised for specific audience segments, giving you real versatility in how you manage the site day to day.
Say you've got a major event coming up that deserves more prominence on your homepage. Rather than remembering to make the change yourself, you can schedule it to go live at a specific date and time. This is particularly useful if updates need to land over a weekend or at a time that's inconvenient for you.
There's a lot of flexibility in how these building blocks work. We like to think of them like lego bricks. You pick and choose what you want to use, and rearrange them however you like. The goal is simple: less time reacting to your website, more time managing it on your own terms.
Event filtering
CultureSuite CMS lets you organise events by genre, type, or any other category you use in your ticketing and event management system.
This matters most for venues hosting a wide variety of programming. It turns what could be an overwhelming list into something a visitor can navigate in a single click.
Building your website with CultureSuite
CultureSuite websites are structured around four main content types: pages, stories, performances, and people. Together, they give you the flexibility to build dynamic, engaging content without starting from scratch each time.
- Pages. Your main, evergreen page content.
- Stories. Your storytelling content, whether that's written articles, videos, audio clips, or interactive graphics.
- Performances. Your events, pulled in via ERPs or event management systems like YesPlan or Salesforce, then combined with ticketing data like pricing, availability, seat maps, and tickets sold.
- People. A central database for cast members, performers, and anyone else involved in a production.
You manage each block in one place, but they can appear anywhere across your site. A performance page might pull in related trailers via Stories, alongside cast members via the People block. A People page, in turn, might show the Stories a cast member features in, and the Performances they're part of.
The rest of a CultureSuite website is built from our Parts library: newsletter sign-ups, sidebars, banners, media galleries, read-more widgets, and everything else that helps engage your visitors. Parts can be reordered to suit you, and they can pull live data from your other systems, so a button can switch to "selling fast" or "sold out" automatically, based on what's actually happening in your ticketing system.
Grow your audience
A website that just displays your events is only doing half the job. The other half is understanding who's actually visiting, and making sure the experience feels relevant to them, whether that's a first-time visitor or someone who's booked with you for twenty years.
Personalisation
CultureSuite's personalisation tools let you tailor your website to different audience segments, delivering relevant content and promotions rather than a single generic experience for everyone who visits.
This works through visitor tags. There's a wide range available, including members, donors, and returning visitors, right down to detailed tags like labelling someone as a classical music lover based on what they've booked before.
You can also control access to entire pages based on these tags. Early-bird tickets might be restricted to members only, donors might get access to exclusive livestreams, and whole sections of the site could be reserved for internal staff.
Analytics
Understanding your website traffic matters for ongoing updates and editorial decisions. Knowing where visitors come from, and which content or events they engage with most, gives you the information to shape future strategy properly.
CultureSuite includes GA4 integration, Google Ads support, Meta Pixel tracking, and cookie management, all built in and ready from day one. But getting analytics properly configured, and actually using the data well, often takes more specialist expertise than most marketing teams have time for. That's why CultureSuite partners with analytics experts who work exclusively with cultural organisations, so you can get support at whatever level suits your venue. Find out more about our analytics partner services.
Integrations
CultureSuite integrates with all major ticketing systems, payment providers, event planning tools, CRMs, and ad platforms. If there's a tool we're not connected to yet, we'll set it up for you at no extra cost.
Syncing your website with your ticketing and event management system removes the need for reactive manual changes. When tickets sell out, or an event's details change, your website updates automatically, freeing you up for more strategic work.
Accessibility
Growing your audience means removing barriers that keep people out, not just reaching more of the people already engaged. CultureSuite follows WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.2 Level AA, so nobody's left behind when it comes to enjoying arts and culture.
CultureSuite websites meet text contrast guidelines, provide appropriate alt text for images and buttons, offer alternative content for video-only or audio-only elements, support keyboard-only navigation, and meet a wide range of other technical accessibility standards.
CultureSuite has also completed a full accessibility audit in partnership with Accessibility Desk, with improvements rolled out to every venue on the platform at no extra cost, not just the ones who requested it. It's an ongoing process rather than a one-off certificate: as standards evolve, so does the platform. Read more about our accessibility audit.
Share your mission
Ticket sales and programme listings only tell part of a venue's story. The other part is what the organisation stands for: the civic impact, the community work, the mission beyond the box office. CultureSuite gives that story a proper home on your website, not just a page nobody clicks through to.
The same Stories and People content types that help showcase a programme work just as well here, just with a different job to do. Instead of trailers and cast bios, Stories can carry your impact reporting, community initiatives, and behind-the-scenes work, cross-linked to the people and events they relate to, so your civic story sits inside the same site visitors already use to book tickets, not off in a separate silo.
Fundraising
For venues focused on fundraising, CultureSuite offers personalised fundraising campaigns tailored to each audience segment, helping you get more out of every appeal.
Whether it's a general visitor, an existing donor, or a member, you can show each of them different messaging designed to make the ask feel relevant to who they are, rather than one generic donation page for everyone.
Why CultureSuite makes this possible
Everything above is what CultureSuite helps you do. This part is how, and why it keeps working long after most websites would have started falling apart.
Community-led roadmap
CultureSuite has a vibrant community behind it. That shows up most in our webinars, roundtables, and events, where venues share what's working and learn from each other. A lesson learned by a major venue in New York, London, or Amsterdam can be passed down to a much smaller venue anywhere else in the world, helping the whole sector move forward together, not just the venues with the biggest budgets. Explore our upcoming events and webinars – anyone is welcome!
There's also a Knowledge Base for documentation and resources, whenever you need to look something up directly.
Beyond peer learning, anyone in the CultureSuite community can request a new feature or quality-of-life improvement for the platform itself. Once released, every venue gets access to it, whatever size they are or however long they've been a customer.
Choose a design approach that suits you
Design isn't one-size-fits-all, so CultureSuite offers a few different routes, depending on how much time, budget, or appetite you have for a new look right now.
Full UX Discovery and Customised Design
Our most thorough option. We start with real-time user experience research to understand your audience's behaviour, then build a tailored design and website experience around what we learn.
Customised Design
We design your new website, then sit down with you in a live feedback session to walk through it together, refine the details, and make sure it's exactly right before it goes live.
Lift and Improve
The fastest and most affordable route onto CultureSuite. If you're happy with how your site looks now, or just want the platform's features working before you think about a redesign or rebrand, we'll bring your existing design across as it is, so you can start using CultureSuite right away. Migrating your existing content is a separate step, which we'll help you plan for.
Whichever route you choose, you can work with our in-house design team or bring your own agency along. See our design packages in full.
Always included, right out of the box
Every feature of the CultureSuite website builder comes as standard, with no hidden costs or retainer fees. Our Professional Services team guides you through setup, training, and ongoing support, so you get real value from the platform from day one, not just after a long onboarding process.
Multi-lingual support is available round the clock, particularly useful during on-sales and other high-pressure periods, when you need help fast rather than during office hours only.
Some of our clients have been with us for over 25 years, not because nothing's changed, but because we've built a genuinely collaborative partnership that keeps their website evolving, year after year.
Next steps
Not sure what to do next? Here are two easy options, depending on where you're at.
- Ready to see it for yourself?
The best way to understand CultureSuite is to actually look at it. Book a personalised demo, and we'll walk you through it. - Not ready for that yet, and just want to keep learning?
That's completely fine. Have a look through our resources page, our YouTube channel, or subscribe to our newsletter for occasional updates.
