ArtOpps: A National Platform for the Creative Sector

The Challenge

Opportunities in the arts are inherently scattered. A single artist might be a fit for a juried competition on CaFÉ, a festival booth on ZAPP, and a grant on GO Smart, but each of those systems was built as its own application platform, with its own interface, its own data, and its own way of describing an opportunity.

For artists, this meant real friction. Finding the right opportunity required checking multiple sites, tracking deadlines manually, and having no reliable way to compare options side by side or be alerted when something new and relevant appeared.

For Creative West, it meant that the full value of its combined catalog was difficult to surface. The data existed, but there was no cohesive discovery layer sitting on top of it.

The fragmentation extended to identity as well. Hundreds of thousands of existing users were spread across the existing Creative West systems, and many held multiple, disconnected profiles: a separate account on each provider platform, with no single identity tying them together. Before the Platform could offer a personalized, signed-in experience, those users needed a unified account. Migrating them was a challenge in its own right. It had to preserve every existing profile and connection, and it had to be seamless for a community of users spanning a wide range of digital literacy.

Key challenges included:

• Aggregating near-real-time opportunity data from three independent provider systems, each with its own API, data model, and fee structures
• Normalizing inconsistent data such as opportunity types, locations, deadlines, and fees into a single coherent experience
• Helping users quickly find relevant opportunities across a large and constantly changing dataset
• Supporting a wide range of applicants, from individual artists to festival vendors and organizations
• Delivering personalized, timely discovery through feeds, saved searches, and email digests
• Migrating hundreds of thousands of existing user accounts into a single sign-on identity while unifying users who held multiple provider profiles
• Making that transition seamless for users across a wide range of digital literacy
• Bringing every flow to mobile, where artists often browse opportunities on the go

Creative West needed an experience that could unify these systems into something greater than the sum of its parts, without losing the depth of data that made each platform valuable.

The Approach

Bilberrry worked closely with Creative West stakeholders to understand how artists actually search for and evaluate opportunities, and how the three provider systems could be brought together into one model.

Early work focused on mapping the shared structure across CaFÉ, ZAPP, and GO Smart, identifying the common fields that could be standardized and the provider-specific details that needed to be preserved. This foundation informed both the data architecture and the design of the discovery experience, API integrations, and data injection.

To understand the data and design a migration path, Bilberrry worked hand-in-hand with Creative West’s internal tech team and their long-time external tech partners who built and maintain the existing CaFÉ, ZAPP, and GO Smart systems. Because the migration touched a large, non-technical audience, the plan prioritized a smooth, low-friction transition that would be easy on users and the Creative West customer support team. 

The design and development effort focused on several key principles:

• Unify three separate provider systems into a single, consistent discovery experience
• Establish a single, durable user identity that connects a person’s provider profiles together
• Make a large, changing dataset approachable through clear search, filtering, and feeds
• Support both quick lookups and personalized, ongoing discovery
• Prioritize relevance, surfacing the opportunities most likely to matter to each user
• Design for scale, allowing the platform to absorb thousands of new records as providers publish them
• Deliver a fully responsive experience, with particular attention to mobile users

This established the foundation for a modern, scalable platform embedded within Creative West’s broader artist ecosystem.

The Solution

Bilberrry designed and built the Opportunities platform as a new web application that aggregates opportunities from all three provider systems and layers powerful discovery tools on top, with a unified account authentication experience.

Search and Discovery

At its core, the platform lets artists search across every opportunity in one place. A keyword search spans opportunity titles, providers, and descriptions, with fuzzy matching that surfaces relevant results even for imperfect queries. A comprehensive set of filters, including opportunity type, location, deadline, event date, application fees, media requirements, source, applicant type, and eligibility, lets users narrow a broad catalog down to exactly what fits, then sort by relevance, deadline, fee, start date, or popularity.

Tailored Feeds

Rather than presenting a single undifferentiated list, the platform organizes opportunities into curated feeds that match how artists think. Users can browse New Opportunities, Upcoming Deadlines, opportunities Near Me based on their location, and Popular listings, alongside quick-access filters for common searches like grants, festivals, competitions, and low-fee opportunities. Each feed updates dynamically as new data flows in from the providers.

Personalization and Following

Once signed in, artists can personalize their feed by selecting the regions and opportunity types they care about, so the platform prioritizes what’s relevant to them. They can follow individual opportunities to save them in one place, save custom searches to revisit later, and manage all of it from a single profile.

Timely Notifications

The platform keeps artists connected to opportunities without requiring them to check back constantly. A weekly digest surfaces new opportunities matching a user’s interests and saved searches, and deadline reminders alert users to upcoming due dates on the opportunities they follow, helping ensure a promising call doesn’t slip by unnoticed.

Unified Identity and Single Sign-On

Underpinning the entire experience is a new user authentication application and single sign-on system, built by Bilberrry on Clerk. It gives Creative West a single, durable identity for each user, the source of truth that connects a person to their profiles across CaFÉ, ZAPP, and GO Smart. Once signed in, artists move seamlessly between discovering an opportunity, and applying for it on the original provider, pre-authenticated and without friction.

Working closely with Creative West’s internal technology team and the external partners who manage the three provider platforms, Bilberrry migrated hundreds of thousands of existing user accounts from existing systems into the new SSO, unifying users who previously may have held multiple, disconnected profiles into a single account with all of their connections intact. Because those users span a wide range of digital literacy, the migration was designed to be as seamless as possible, preserving existing logins and profile links so that people could continue accessing their applications without disruption. This unified identity layer is what makes the platform’s personalized feeds, saved searches, and following (bookmarking) features possible, and it gives Creative West a foundation for a connected user experience across their entire ecosystem.

Technology

The platform was built as a modern, scalable web application designed to ingest and index large volumes of continuously changing data:

• React / Next.js frontend
• Node.js with NestJS backend
• GraphQL API
• OpenSearch (ElasticSearch) for fast, flexible search and filtering
• PostgreSQL database
• AWS infrastructure, provisioned as code
• Clerk for single sign-on
• SendGrid for email digests and notifications

The Impact

Opportunities by Creative West transforms a fragmented set of provider platforms into a single, discoverable home for creative opportunities.

Artists can now search across CaFÉ, ZAPP, and GO Smart at once, filter exactly for what they’re looking for, follow the opportunities that matter to them, and be notified when something new and relevant appears, all from one place, on any device.  And with hundreds of thousands of users migrated into a single sign-on identity, applying for opportunities within Creative West’s ecosystem will be that much better!  And by unifying these systems into a cohesive, user-centered experience, Bilberrry helped Creative West deliver on its mission of connecting artists with the opportunities that move their creative work and their livelihoods forward.