Since 1982, the non-profit, volunteer Bloomington Chorale has been providing accessible, affordable and high-quality choral music for audiences throughout the community. The Bloomington Chorale offers an inclusive and vibrant choral community enabling singers of all ages and abilities the chance to be transformed by the beauty and power of choral singing and performing.
Our Mission
The mission of the Bloomington Chorale is to provide an inclusive choral community enabling singers of all ages and all abilities the chance to be transformed by the beauty and power of choral singing and performing; we provide audiences affordable, accessible and high quality choral music performances in the south metro area.
Performances by the Bloomington Chorale are a benefit to the community. Audience members are able to enjoy quality musical performances of great choral works without the expense and difficulty of driving into downtown. Parking is free and plentiful and ticket prices are kept intentionally low so that more community members will be able to afford the concert experience. In Spring 2009, a special full performance of Haydn’s Creation was offered to retirees and to the unemployed at a reduced cost or no cost at all.
The Bloomington Chorale accepts all singers wishing to participate as a member of the Chorale. Whereas many choruses restrict their membership to a limited number of voices and only to those who pass an audition process, all willing singers are accepted in the Bloomington Chorale. All are welcomed into a musical community where they gain friendships, learn music and vocal technique as well as experience the beauty and power of choral singing.
Why We Need a New Website
Our website is a dinosaur. Each page takes a long time to load because of the pixel size of the pictures and frankly, it is not user friendly. We need our website to be pleasing to the eye and functional for a number of users: the public, audience members, singers wishing to join, current members and volunteer committee members. We need our website to be easily updated so that a volunteer without special expertise can keep the content fresh. Our website should be a source of information for potential singers, should be a tool that the public can go to in order to learn about performances and ideally, to purchase tickets for performances. Donors should be able to make a donation directly onto the website. We are part of GiveMN.org and they will provide a "give now" button that will link to online donation capabilities, but we don't have the knowledge to even put that into our ancient website. With a more up to date website members could access documents, calendars and links to online rehearsal aids. Committee members could coordinate their work and share documents. Because we are all volunteers, it is important to be efficient.
The Bloomington Chorale is a community of singers. We need our website to help us advance the cause of making beautiful choral music. This includes having a functional, usable website that will help all of our users find what they need. Help us, computer nerds! We need you!
How Our New Site Will Help Make the World Greener
By using shared documents and keeping a shared calendar for members, we can greatly reduce the number of paper copies of basic information that we regularly print out.
By accepting online donations, we can reduce the number of mailed, paper appeals we send.
When the judges choose which non-profits will be selected to participate in this year's Challenge they will take into account testimonials from beneficiaries, donors, volunteers, board members and other
The Bloomington Chorale reaches out to both singers and audience members who cannot go to them, whether for economic, mobility or other reasons. People who hear us for the first time are always amazed at the quality of music, assuming if there are no auditions we can't be very good - HAH! We are very good, hard working, dedicated and all volunteer.
More and more, people are looking to the web in order to find groups like ours and we need to be as easy to find and user friendly as possible. Unfortunately, none of us are computer geeks, as you can readily tell by checking out our website. The other thing I worry about is the security of our current website. As the "web master" - okay, you can quit laughing now - of the site I am receiving more and more spam that appears to be coming from our website when I know it really isn't. I'm begging for help!
Connie Klaers, President
We find that, as our music becomes more challenging, we draw more people to our performances.
Singers are participating and all are working hard and enjoying every minute. We in the Bloomington Chorale join without benefit of an audition and have found that we get high caliber people who have a deep interest in singing which makes our audience more appreciative. Personally, I look forward to the rehearsals and the learning experience associated with them, and the ability to help create beautiful music.
In all that we do, the Chorale adds to the Artistic Community of Bloomington and it's surrounds and we feel a valued part of the local community.
Scott Guss - Participant
The Bloomington Chorale continues to evolve, offering challenging opportunities to present high quality choral works normally not even attempted by non-auditioned groups. Having recently performed Bach's Mass in B-Minor was truly a milestone for the group, if you can do a good job with that one the possibilities are endless. An updated, quality website would add immensely to the professional image of this quality group of performers, and increase access and information to the community at large.
Galen Pearson - Participant and board member
The Bloomington Chorale provides community as well as serving the community. Because we are a non-audition group, the expectation might be that the performance quality is substandard. That is simply not true. Singers of all experience levels are welcomed into the Chorale and are encouraged to learn and improve through a supportive and friendly environment. I joined the group two years ago, with an experience level of little to none, and feel that I have learned a multitude of choral skills. In addition I’ve found a second family among the members of the Bloomington Chorale.
And the end product? Connie is right. We are good. Our members continue to rise to the challenges put before them, and result is beautiful.
Sara Fry- Vice President
When I was looking into choirs online, the Bloomington Chorale was one of my top choices, but one day I tried to return to their site and it had "gone 404!" I thought the group had disbanded, and as it was down for sometime, I almost gave up. Once back up, it was still lacking many features I'd seen in other choirs' sites: photos, sound samples, bios, even nice colors and fonts...a group with a well-deserved good reputation really needs a website that doesn't look like it was designed in 1997 and not touched since! If it's not up to par with our fellow local choirs' sites, it may negatively impact how we're viewed by potential members, audiences and donors. I also think it's a good idea to have member-features easily accessible online rather than in printed handouts.
Please help our website better reflect what quality of our group!
Elizabeth Ishmael - participant
The Bloomington Chorale offers its members and audiences an outstanding musical experience. Choral singers looking for a friendly, welcoming community can find it with the Bloomington Chorale. As an all-volunteer group, our singers are dedicated, enthusiastic and serious about the music we perform and we are always looking for more singers.
As more and more people use the internet to find quality entertainment and community activities, there is no doubt that our having an accessible, well-designed and maintained website would increase our membership and audience.
Michele Abita - Participant and Board Secretary
We should look as good on the internet as we sound in concert!!! The Bloomington Chorale is a very ambitious and dedicated group of singers. We deserve to display a well-designed and well-maintained web site.
Barb Olson - participant and former Board member
The Bloomington Chorale has much to offer the community, whether you are a participant or and audience member. As a member of the Chorale, you are given the opportunity to perform a wide variety of music, under the guidance of an excellent director, accompanied by wonderful musicians. The search for new members is on-going, as our goal is to provide more people the opportunity to enjoy this experience.
Audience members enjoy concerts that are very entertaining, with music ranging from Broadway tunes, American folk songs and spirituals, along with pieces by classical composers such as Handel, Bach, and Brahms. Blending the chorale music with orchestration in the Schneider Theater at the Bloomington Center for the Arts just adds to the concert experience.
So, the question becomes, what can we do to continue to grow the organization and the audience? One key is to update our website and make it more attractive. We need it to be user friendly for the webmasters so making changes is easier. Information needs to be kept current, whether it's ticket information or cancellation of a rehearsal due to weather. People won't repeat visit a website if it never changes, after a couple visits, they stop coming. Ideally, we would be able to post pictures and video clips. People could see what we are all about and sample the music to hear what we do. That is huge. We need the ability to perform basic functions such as purchasing tickets on-line, make donations on-line, and setting up links to our Facebook page, GiveMN.org, etc. and being able to edit them ourselves. Another feature I'd like to see added is a place to sign up with your e-mail for a notices/newsletter option. Redesigning our website would give the Bloomington Chorale a great start to the new decade.
Mark Borchardt, participant
Bloomington Chorale provides audiences with high quality vocal experiences at affordable prices. As an audience member, it would be very helpful to be able to preview programs and news about this organization via the Web. As an all-volunteer run organization, I understand how difficult it is for them to maintain this important tool for communicating with their constituents, whether participants or audience members. Since no group can exist without an audience, having an up-to-date and viable web site would certainly help them keep in touch with its audience.
Susan Anderson, Audience Member
The Bloomington Chorale's concerts are a total pleasure to attend, but it's hard to pull other people in to either joining the chorale itself or the audience because the current website doesn't reflect the professionalism this group exhibits in their performances. Clearly, some volunteer *is* keeping the site up to date and clearly someone's hard work and time is being used... but in these days of Flash and Java and all those other things I barely understand, the "I know a little HTML" approach isn't enough for an organization like this.
Please pick them! They're a great group and could use a make-over!
