The Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Regional Chamber is a 1,200-member organization dedicated to supporting local businesses, fostering economic growth, and strengthening community connections.

To further enrich the region’s arts and culture ecosystem, the Chamber envisioned a digital platform that would better connect artists, venues, businesses, residents, and visitors. The goal was to centralize discovery, encourage collaboration, and simplify engagement within the local creative community.

To bring this vision to life, the Chamber partnered with Symphonize to design and develop NEEDEE—a mobile application built to unite the region’s creative economy through intuitive, purpose-driven technology.

Our Solution: A Community-Driven Creative Discovery Platform

Symphonize engineered NEEDEE as a mobile-first platform designed to connect people, places, and opportunities within the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti creative ecosystem.

Artist Discovery and Engagement: Enabled users to browse visual artists and creatives, explore portfolios, and connect directly for commissions encouraging meaningful collaboration.

Venue and Locale Search: Developed a targeted search experience that helps creatives identify performance and exhibit spaces, complete with filtering options and contact details.

Event Discovery and Exploration: Designed a dynamic Events section allowing users to filter by type, date, and location—making it easy to find experiences that match their interests.

Profiles for Creatives and Businesses: Built structured profiles where artists can showcase work and communicate needs (such as studio space), while businesses can post opportunities or connect for commissioned projects.

Personalized Content Recommendations: Implemented recommendation logic that suggests events and creative works based on user interests and interaction patterns, enhancing engagement.

Integrated Maps and Navigation: Incorporated Google Maps integration to simplify locating events, venues, and creative spaces—encouraging exploration of the local arts scene.

Strengthening Community Connections

NEEDEE bridges gaps between artists, venues, businesses, and patrons—making collaboration easier and more accessible within the regional ecosystem.

Simplifying Cultural Discovery

Advanced filtering and personalized recommendations reduce friction in discovering events, creative works, and opportunities.

Built for Local Impact and Growth

The scalable mobile architecture supports expanding partnerships, new community initiatives, and growing user engagement across the region.

Impact: Empowering a Vibrant Creative Ecosystem

The launch of NEEDEE has strengthened connections across the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti creative community, earning praise for its intuitive interface and practical functionality. Users value the app’s ability to showcase local talent, streamline event discovery, and foster meaningful engagement.

By aligning digital innovation with community development, the Chamber has reinforced its commitment to cultural enrichment and local business support—positioning NEEDEE as a valuable platform for long-term creative growth.

Community-Centered Mobile Platform

Smart Discovery & Recommendations

Integrated Local Ecosystem

We deliver solutions to:

Patricia Campbell, Chief Operating Officer.
Christian Financial Credit Union

"The Symphonize team is amazing! Their ideas and designs for our website are truly exceptional, and they consistently follow through on delivery. With their flexible, collaborative approach, they are a pleasure to work with, and we just love the end result."

Sean Johnston, Senior Vice President - Operations and Technology.
Huntington National Bank

"The Symphonize team makes it so much easier! They can see through the complexity and the outliers to pull together an elegant solution that makes a complex product more intuitive. The team is always great to work with, challenging us when needed and helping us see beyond our requirements. We’ve been thrilled with the results so far and look forward to what the future will bring."

Ed Rose, CEO.
Paqqets

"Symphonize brings the expertise we need to make good decisions and stay calibrated. Our teams work together seamlessly. If you sat in on a working session, it would be hard to tell the Symphonize folks from my team. They have a seat at the table for every important decision."

David Jones, CIO.
Meridian Medical Management

"Symphonize is a one-stop shop that supports us at every stage: from whiteboarding to architecture to development to implementation. They know what the market is doing and reliably guide us to next generation technologies that will put us ahead of our competition."

Fady Zoweil, VP of Professional Services.
Thales Group

"The Symphonize Solution Architects and development team are excellent. We can assign tough tasks and know they will do them right without creating complexity or delays. I trust Symphonize to deliver on our commitment and achieve our customer’s goals because they've been doing it for 8 years now."

Terry Leahy, CEO.
Meridian Medical Management

"We have been successfully partnering with Symphonize for many years on a broad variety of technologies and product roadmaps. From Big Data analytics product development to rapid development and deployment of RPA, Symphonize has been our key strategic relationship. Their team functions seamlessly as an extension of our product management teams, which has enabled us to dramatically increase release velocity and quality simultaneously."