Better Roundabout Theatre
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, SCSS
YEAR
2022
EXTERNAL URL
My first engagement with Roundabout Theatre Company — a standalone microsite for their five-year equity, diversity, and inclusion initiative. A pillar-based design system with dynamic accent colors, structured data architecture around core values, and a content management layer built for multi-season transparency reporting. The relationship that began here led to the full roundabouttheatre.org platform rebuild in 2026.
Led the build at Situation Interactive, Roundabout’s digital agency of record.
Background
New York’s largest nonprofit theatre company needed a public-facing platform for institutional accountability.
In September 2021, Roundabout Theatre Company — operator of five New York City venues including the American Airlines Theatre and Studio 54 — published a five-year strategic plan addressing equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism across every level of the organization. The plan was conceived by a 29-member internal Transformation Team following a company-wide assessment that began in October 2019, and it organized commitments into four pillars: On Our Stages, In Our Offices, In Our Community, and With Our Board. Roundabout needed a dedicated digital platform — separate from the main roundabouttheatre.org site — to present these commitments publicly, report progress season by season, and demonstrate institutional accountability to audiences, donors, and the broader theatre community.
This wasn’t a marketing exercise — it was a transparency initiative backed by a $2M+ annual budget, and the site needed to reflect that seriousness in both its design and its data architecture.
Implementation
A pillar-based design system with dynamic accent colors and structured data around core values.
The site was built on WordPress as a standalone microsite with its own design identity — distinct from Roundabout’s main site but visually connected to the parent brand. The design system centered on four pillars, each assigned its own accent color that propagated through headings, dividers, interactive elements, and progress indicators across that pillar’s pages. This wasn’t a simple color swap — each pillar carried a unique visual weight that reinforced the organizational structure of the initiative itself. The data architecture underneath was equally deliberate: each pillar contained structured goal categories (Diversity, Learning, Accountability, Equitable Policies), and within each category, individual commitments tracked progress across seasons with narrative updates and measurable outcomes. The content model was built so Roundabout’s communications team could publish seasonal progress reports — adding new data points, updating commitment statuses, and surfacing year-over-year comparisons — entirely through the CMS.
The complexity was in the relationships — pillars to goals, goals to commitments, commitments to seasonal progress — all managed through structured fields and rendered through templates that adapted layout and color based on context.
Results
A living transparency platform, updated across three seasons and counting.
The site launched and has been actively maintained through three seasons of progress reporting — 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24 — with Roundabout’s internal team publishing updates independently each cycle. The structured content model proved its value as the initiative evolved: new commitments were added, existing ones were reclassified, and progress data accumulated without requiring structural changes to the site. The platform supported Roundabout’s public accountability during a period of significant organizational action — from increasing BIPOC-owned vendor contracts to 65%, to expanding community partnerships with the New York Public Library, to launching the Theatrical Workforce Development Program with IATSE. The site earned recognition alongside Roundabout’s broader EDI efforts, which were named to Crain’s New York Business Diversity & Inclusion list in 2022.
This microsite proved the value of structured data architecture for institutional reporting — and the client relationship it cemented led directly to the full Roundabout Theatre platform rebuild that would become the most architecturally significant project of my agency career.
