Stimulating culture across borders with a new digital platform - Perform Europe

Perform Europe, an EU-funded initiative in the cultural sector, aimed to enable cross-border collaboration between performers and presenters but lacked a scalable digital platform. ACA Group developed a user-friendly online platform using Firebase to support collaboration, data access, and content management across 40 countries. This cloud-based solution improves accessibility, reduces operational costs, and enables efficient coordination within the European performing arts ecosystem.

Challenge

Perform Europe needed to build a cross-border platform to connect performers and presenters while ensuring accessibility, subsidy applications, and cost-effectiveness in a short timeframe.

Solution

We developed a user-friendly platform on Firebase with real-time data, a custom sign-up process, and easy-to-use content management, empowering Perform Europe to independently manage content.

Approach

The project followed an agile development model with 3-week sprints, leveraging Firebase for its flexibility and cost-efficiency while customizing front-end components to meet Perform Europe’s unique design and UX requirements.

Result

Perform Europe now has a fully functional platform that enables performers and presenters to connect, apply for subsidies, and manage content independently, fostering cross-border culture within the EU.

To reach its goal of cross-border distribution of culture, Perform Europe aims to bring performers (artists and groups) and presenters (stages and venues) together physically as well as digitally. After all, there are many artists out there looking for the perfect venue to perform their arts. Vice versa, there are also many venues that are constantly in search of international performances.

To help these different parties find each other and plan performances, Perform Europe wanted to build an online platform. Using this platform, performers and presenters can join to apply for subsidies for their art. This way, the platform helps stimulate culture within the EU. Moreover, thanks to the accompanying website, users can easily see whether a performance can be enjoyed by people with a disability or how ecological a particular venue is.

The platform itself needed to be built in a short amount of time in a cost-effective way. Additionally, it needed to include a custom sign up process with a specific flow with clearly defined user groups and access.

Perform Europe had already carefully planned the project from the very start. In order to be able to respect that set go-live deadline, we needed to closely monitor the scope and iterations of the platform. We therefore started by looking at a detailed view of what we were going to build exactly together with Perform Europe. We then split up this scope into manageable sprints of 3 weeks. This way, everybody had a good understanding of what the end product would look like, and how we’d get there.

Built on the shoulders of a giant

We built the Perform Europe platform with Firebase, a powerful part of Google’s Cloud Platform stack. Thanks to its enormous flexbility and extensive possibilities, Firebase takes care of many things at once: hosting the front-end of Perform Europe, storing documents from users, sending notifications, user management, secure login and so much more.

The choice to use Firebase was an easy one, since it offers a lot of functionality out-of-the-box, such as a real-time database, authentication, fine-grained control and remote configuration.

Additionally, Firebase’s generous use quota keeps the cost of hosting the entire Perform Europe platform extremely low.

Our approach began with a detailed analysis of Perform Europe’s requirements, followed by an agile development process using 3-week sprints. We prioritized a strong collaboration with Perform Europe to ensure the platform met their unique needs. To achieve flexibility, we chose Firebase as the backbone of the platform, leveraging its real-time database, user management, and cost-effective hosting capabilities. We then customized the front-end to align with the platform’s unique artistic design, building custom components and enhancing the user experience through UX best practices, ensuring ease of use for all users. Additionally, we built a custom content management system that allows Perform Europe’s team to edit and update the platform independently.

One of the partners within the Perform Europe consortium developed the minimalistic design of the public website and platform. Since the unique, artistic design strongly deviates from the standard look and feel of standard components, we couldn’t use our usual front-end frameworks.

To solve this problem, we custom-built a lot of these components. This meant we were able to build exactly what Perform Europe wanted, and also use our UX expertise to further enhance the user experience of the platform. This includes helping users filling in forms correctly with labels, notifications, buttons for specific actions and more.

Independent content editing

Perform Europe also wanted a degree of independency when it came to the public website. After all, it would be inefficient to always have to rely on us every time they wanted to edit a page or add content. We re-used a lot of Firebase parts to quickly and reliably build a custom solution that lets Perform Europe editors edit web pages in a user-friendly way straight via the front-end.

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