Role: Volunteer Social Media Associate | Organization: Filipino American Symphony Orchestra
The Filipino American Symphony Orchestra (FASO), the first Philippine orchestra outside of the Philippines, was founded in 2008. I've been involved with this organization from 2009 as a solo vocalist onstage to the present as a volunteer Social Media Associate. I wanted to bring what I learned from my past internships for nonprofits to support this extraordinary organization, which champions works by Pilipinx composers and sustains music education programs for aspiring musicians.
Background
In 2020, I joined the team in charge of redesigning the FASO website. I owned curating and retouching website images, and editing the site's copy. I also joined feedback loops for website drafts.
The old FASO website, designed by a creative agency in 2016, was long due for a glow-up.
With its cluttered use of text and images, the old website was more confusing than exciting to viewers. And the copy that the board agreed upon back in 2016 was also in need of some heavy editing.
Below are a few highlights from the website's redesign process.
Image-Music-Text
While working on this project, I thought back to advice a voice teacher shared with me before I gave a recital. She told me that all performances are parties. As a performer, it was my job to invite my audience to that party onstage. A similar idea applies to an orchestra's website. Such a website should get prospective donors and audience members excited about the organization's mission and work. Unlike most performances, however, the orchestra must invite these folks via the careful curation of images and text.
Image
Here are a few images I contributed to the new site alongside their equivalents on the old website.
Education & Outreach
For the site's new Education & Outreach page, I chose a candid photo I took of FASO's Youth String Ensemble before their 2019 performance at "Manila 2 MacArthur Park" at Levitt Pavilion in Los Angeles. Since sharing this image as the cover image of a Facebook post on the ensemble's performance, this image has become a fan-favorite. The post has a 21% Facebook engagement rate, which far exceeds most of our other posts and the 0.13% average engagement rate per post for nonprofits. This un-staged moment of play and these smiles also feel buoyant and joyous. Much more so than the posed photo taken backstage during FASO's 2018 Holiday concert on the old page. In addition, the children's instruments in the new image imply that these kids were making music as a part of their play, which bolsters the Education & Outreach page's messaging. While the 2018 image is endearing, I decided that the image, which had nearly all of the children confronting the camera and the image's viewers, functioned better on the website's homepage alongside a "Thank You!" message to donors.
FASO Logo
The glow-up team felt that FASO's logo, made back in 2009, needed a glow-up too. Folks found that the text at the bottom was very difficult to read, making it hard for some viewers to decipher the meaning of the huge initials up top. We floated the idea of organizing a logo design competition in a similar spirit to our annual International Composition Competition for Philippine Folk Music to engage with the design community and promote rising designers, but we needed to speed the process up. This website needed to be functional once we started marketing our virtual holiday concert in December. I quickly designed a new, temporary logo for the website instead in time for the concert's announcement.
It retains the FASO "block" from the previous logo to help audiences already familiar with that logo quickly associate the new logo with the orchestra. But it also features the organization's name more prominently for viewers. I also opted to unify FASO's design assets and to have the org's name in Poppins, the same font used in the new website. Upon the logo's approval, I created variations of it for FASO's Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Text
One section that saw the most text edits was the site's History section. The glow-up team drafted initial copy outlining FASO's history. But upon my review, I found issues in the statement's depiction of Philippine music history. Here's a sentence from the copy with those issues highlighted here:
"With the migration came a high number of Filipino American musicians, whose lineage can be traced to the colonial history of the Philippines when Western music was implemented by Spain and then reinforced by the U.S."
While the masculine adjective "Filipino" is baked into FASO's name and most folks on the team prefer its use when referring to our community, it's generally best to avoid its usage whenever possible. It linguistically excludes folks who identify as Pilipina and Pilipinx. The statement's definition of Philippine music as one that can be traced only from the Philippines' colonial history completely erases the many musical traditions that were practiced throughout the islands long before Spain's arrival. In addition, the statement's use of implemented seems to erase the systemic violence enacted through colonization.
To address these issues, I wrote replacement sentences that contextualized music in the Philippines before Spain's arrival and avoided using the highlighted words above to prevent the exclusion of audience members. I also made sure to tie the Philippines' history to the present day. Here are those sentences from the new History section:
"Many musicians have migrated from the Philippines to the United States. Their musical lineage can be traced – from the multiplicity of musical traditions indigenous to the Philippines’ many islands, to the country’s colonial past that includes Spain’s imposition and the United States’ reinforcement of Western musical traditions, all the way to our globalized present."
After a few stylistic edits to keep things clear and in AP style, and writing new sections dedicated to FASO's Education & Outreach program, I sent it back to the team for their feedback. (No changes!)
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