Gene Carr's Patron Technology Blog

Generational Shift Indeed

When the Kennedy family endorsed Barack Obama yesterday, the rhetoric was all about generational change. And that change is no better demonstrated than in Obama's deft use of the Web.

Consider this:

I watched some of the "State of the Union" address last night, and fell asleep. Apparently the Democrats did the normal thing and broadcast a rebuttal on television right afterwards.

When I checked my e-mail at about 1:00 AM (don't ask) Obama had already sent me an e-mail with *his own* rebuttal.

They guy apparently rushed upstairs to his Senate office and recorded this:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/sotu 

For the first time, a presidential candidate is in "my" living room speaking to me about something that happened only a few hours ago. It's direct, and though scripted, seems personal. And please note out how well the Web page is laid out. The simple and direct calls to action are a model for us all.

We are indeed witnessing a generational change -- and this one is in how campaigns are won and waged. We're seeing how the immediacy of e-mail and online video can cut the press right out of the equation. I'm just imagining how a president Obama would use the Web in this way. Can you imagine a weekly video-blog from the White House?  It could happen - and it should happen.

Bad Times for the Economy = Good Times for E-marketing

Sadly, economics is a game of expectations. And, today, most everyone I talk to expects there to be a recession. That's why an article in DM News called "Fundraising Outlook for '08 Mediocre" caught my attention.   

Last week I wrote about how e-mail marketing can be the key to success in economic hard times. Today I don't have to rely on my own thinking about the importance of stepping up your e-mail marketing times like these -- I have help:

Nonprofits should, instead, look at recessionary years as a time to cultivate donors for the future, according to Senny Boone, VP and executive director at the Nonprofit Federation. “In times of need, that's when nonprofits can step up and really showcase their value and efforts,” she says, adding that targeted fundraising efforts should continue to perform well.

So if your organization is bracing for a slowdown in our economy and the after-effects it will have on your own fundraising abilities, now would be a good time to get serious about developing your e-marketing and communications program. We'll be offering a few webinars to our clients on this subject in the coming months.

Presidential Politics and the Fall of "Old Media."

As both an Internet entrepreneur and an avid political junkie, I'm just loving the presidential campaign this time around. I've been carefully watching what each of the candidates is doing online, and naturally paying a lot of attention to their e-mail strategies.

However, the subtext of last week's NBC debate in Nevada wasn't as much about the candidates as it was about the chasm that lies between the traditional media (i.e., television) world and the new media (i.e., Internet) world in which we are all now living. 

If you didn't see the debate, imagine the following scenario. You have the three candidates (in a last minute power-play, NBC managed to prevent Kucinich from participating) sitting at a large table across from two anchors, Brian Williams and Tim Russert. Then, about 15 feet away in some kind of theatrical Siberia sat NBC's "Today Show" co-anchor Natalie Morales. What was she doing over there? Well, she was “taking e-mail questions from the public.” However, the e-mails had already been sent in -- there was nothing live about it. The computer was a prop.   

Let's examine this a bit further. NBC chooses Morales to represent the voting public, but then sticks her back in a corner where the candidates can't even see her without craning their necks. Isn't NBC by its actions implicitly saying that its smart white guys belong "at the table" with the candidates, but questions from the voting public belong off to the side? Apparently our questions aren't legitimate enough to be front and center.

And the chasm between the public and the candidates didn't end there. The first 20 minutes of this two-hour “debate” were all about the journalists. Going into it, everyone knew that Clinton and Obama had kissed and made up to try to get away from the gender and race scuffle they had been engaged in for the last few days. So naturally, Brian Williams had to begin with questions about that. Okay, that's fair, we expected it. But then it just didn't stop. Russert chimed in. Question after question pounded away about what the candidates said three weeks ago, six months ago, and in books published a year ago. For the entire first section of the debate the candidates fought to get air time to address the issues that any American would possibly find relevant. But the journalists were intent on making it all about them. They had created the story, they had fomented the story, and now they needed to keep the story alive so that they could look good for having reported it in the first place.

Yet every day there is more and more evidence that as we the American public embrace the openness of the Internet, we demonstrate that we don't want anyone in the middle anymore.   

This was brilliantly exemplified by The YouTube debates in November, in which average Americans videotaped and sent in their own questions which were broadcast at the debate, and the candidates had to respond to them directly. These questions were honest, refreshingly direct, and always relevant. The YouTube debates signaled the beginning of a new era in which the domination by the national media (and its penchant for celebrating itself rather than focusing on the things that people care about) will come to an end. Why? Because by the next presidential election we all will be watching TV on flat-screens connected to the Internet, and we'll control what we watch that much more completely.

This debate showed how our television networks still don't get it. They believe that they are still living in a world in which they rule. Yet, as the Internet develops, the public’s demonstrated eagerness for authentic information will force an environment in which we are much more directly in contact with the candidates who have a story to tell. One can easily imagine a web-based nightly live "Obama-cast" from the campaign bus. Right now, we're in the very beginning of the digital age, but our media structures are still stepchildren of the 1950s. As John Edwards says, “we can do better than this." And we will. 

Bright Spots for E-marketing Amid Worries

Today's New York Times confirms what a lot of us have been expecting to hear for a long time. The economy is going south and consumers are starting to feel the pinch. With gas at $3.00 a gallon and the price of oil at $100 a barrel, it was only a matter of time before the economy would take center stage in people's lives. Not only is that happening, it's about to transform the election, which is also coincidentally on the Times front page.

It feels to me a lot like when we started Patron Technology in 2001. The economy was terrible. And the more it was terrible, the more e-marketing made sense. I think that's why e-mail marketing in particular is about to see tremendous growth. In fact, last week eMarketer reported a study that suggests that e-mail marketing spending will roughly double between now and 2012. The article also points out that that number is somewhat understated, because the absolute costs of e-mail are negligible compared with most other marketing tactics.

The other article that caught my eye was the annual ritual of describing how the online medium fared during the holiday season. As it turns out, no records were broken. With about a 19% increase, online spending was ahead of last year, but it wasn't a record-breaker increase. That said, all *other* kinds of consumer retailing suffered losses. Retail spending at stores and over the phone suffered declines, not increases. So again, online marketing and retailing is a star.

It may be that we're in for another recession and non-profits will feel the belt tighten at donation time and in ticket sales. If that's so, I'll return to the mantra of 2001. If marketing resources are going to be scarce, the best thing to do is measure your ROI for each marketing activity very carefully. Doing the "same old, same old" isn't an option. And I'm pretty sure when you analyze how your online efforts are faring, you'll see a lot of what's been going on nationally reflected in your own results.

A Clever Kind of Family Concert

One of our clients e-mailed about a new kind of family orchestra concert, and it surprised me that I hadn't heard of anything like this before. Up until now, family concerts meant adults sitting with their kids listening to a concert designed for kids.

Now the Arts Viva Symphony Orchestra in Chicago has a new spin on that, called "Music for Life." Here's what they say about it:

You bring your children (or grandchildren) to our concerts and, after the orchestra has played the first piece, Maestro Heatherington will invite the children to go with the professional music educators from the Music Institute of Chicago to classrooms in the building. There they will be engaged in musical and educational activities related to the piece they have just heard. They hear the orchestra and then have fun learning and experiencing classical music in an age-appropriate setting with highly skilled teachers while you continue to enjoy the concert

This seems clever to me. Parents get to hear a professional concert, the kids get a small exposure to the real thing, and then are taken separately for an experience that suits them. In the end, everyone benefits, and as the orchestra points out, "there are no baby-sitters."  Here's their Web site where you can read more: http://arsviva.org/musicforlife/index.html

I realize this ain't clever online marketing, but it's definitely clever.

2007 Wrap-up

Now that we're settling in here for 2008, I'd like to do a review of the last year in e-marketing and take a look forward at the year to come.

What was most interesting to observe in 2007 was the maturation of e-marketing. By now, some things are just accepted as necessities in the arts marketing world - having a good Web site and sending regular e-mail is becoming such a "given" at most arts & cultural organizations that it's no longer seen as "new" or cutting-edge.

The latest trends, such as online video, podcasting, text-messaging, and social networks, while technologically not new, have certainly taken center stage in most arts marketers’ minds. As I've been saying in my seminars and on my blog for a while, this is a very exciting time for arts & non-profits, since as these technologies mature and become more and more affordable, we’ll have better tools to reach and motivate our patrons than ever before.

In the e-mail world we focus on, what I see is that the organizations that are having the most success are the ones professionalizing their strategy and approach to e-marketing. The truth is that once you've gotten the hang of sending an e-mail, it's no longer a question of technology. The things that make a difference are the things we cover in our training sessions and webinars and seminars:

• E-mail editorial: What to send, to whom and how frequently - and most importantly, how to always be relevant.
• E-mail segmentation: Sending more and more targeted messages to your list through smart segmentation and not just doing a "blast.”
• List building: Smartly and aggressively building your list to reach your donors and patrons consistently.

The thing is, these aspects of e-mail marketing are harder than merely composing an e-mail! They do take thinking, planning, and some investment of time and resources. It's becoming more and more obvious when I get an e-mail from an organization as to whether it's been really well thought out, or thrown together at the last minute. Much the same thing can be said about arts web sites.

The thing we all need to keep in mind is that arts patrons are being bombarded with more and more high-quality communications online and are exposed to the very best Web sites every day. And thus consumers won’t be as forgiving as they once were.

As a result, more and more of our company's time and energy is being placed into helping share industry best practices, case studies, benchmark statistics, and tips & techniques that we gather from our clients. I think this is one of the things that makes Patron Technology different than other corporate e-mail providers, and we’re poised to do more and more of it in 2008 to help the industry improve.