MCN 2026

Following our previous sessions—One Collection to Rule Them All (MCN 2024) and Future-Proofing through Sustainability and Resilience (MCN 2025)—we return with the third chapter in our evolving story of digital transformation at The Huntington. Framed by this year’s themes of trust and longevity, our session explores not just how an organization grows its technology infrastructure and digital capacity, but also how enduring relationships make that growth possible. Centered on the recently launched My Huntington Portal, we’ll share the realities behind the work: aligning multiple vendors around an ambitious technical roadmap to integrate our CMS with our ticketing/membership, retail, and CRM systems; facing critical business decisions; cultivating stakeholder buy-in; and coordinating across diverse internal teams and priorities. We’ll examine how to ensure that what you build remains sustainable—not only for the organization, but for the people responsible for maintaining and evolving it.

In summer 2025, The Huntington began efforts to create an industry-leading integrated customer portal that would simplify visitor and member account management and power a personalized website experience – including tailored calendar listings and other targeted content based on the unique aspects of the visitor’s customer profile. Our goals were for the portal to drive additional earned revenue through targeted marketing and upsell opportunities, increase engagement and member satisfaction through a carefully designed user experience, and maximize operational efficiency through reliable data workflows. This would be a critical strategic cornerstone to our “One Huntington” ethos and revamped brand message – we need to appear as a unified entity to the public and be gracious hosts online, as we are in person, to build and maintain brand loyalty and satisfaction. 

In this session, The Huntington, Co-Curator, and Cogapp will show how the project moved from strategy into implementation without losing alignment across teams, systems, and priorities. Co-Curator will share how the portal was built inside Shopify Customer Accounts, using a reusable custom application layer shaped through this work and now being adapted for other cultural organizations. Cogapp will show how that member context extends into huntington.org through personalized calendar and content experiences, tighter paths into ticketing, and clearer upgrade opportunities. Rather than focusing only on the finished product, we’ll unpack the architecture decisions, handoffs, and governance patterns that made the work sustainable—and increasingly repeatable—for cultural organizations with different systems, teams, and constraints.

At the heart of our project, and our success, is trust: a client-vendor-collaborator partnership built over time and essential to making complex digital change possible.