Gene Carr's Patron Technology Blog

Moms, Children's Events, and Facebook

At our session during the Arts Reach conference last Friday in San Francisco, we got into a discussion about whether or not Facebook was a valuable place to communicate to moms about about arts programming for children. 

My response was based on an article I had read on eMarketer.com recently and I'm providing it here. The quote that jumped out is below, though the underline is mine. You can read the entire article and see the compelling graphs here. 

"eMarketer estimates 23 million US moms are on Facebook this year—a figure that counts women with children under 18 in the household who use the site at least once each month. That represents well over two-thirds of all online moms in the country."

This data suggests to me that if you're marketing any events for children, Facebook is, at a minimum, a place to pay attention to. 

Fifth Wall Fridays: Online Ticketing & Confirmation Friendliness

 

Twice a month I offer expansions on the themes and topics that Michelle Paul and I wrote about in our book, Breaking the Fifth Wall: Rethinking Arts Marketing for the 21st Century. If you like these, you can buy the book from us here, or on Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles' Nook. 

In Chapter 9, we suggest that the online ticketing experience is actually the beginning of the cultural event, and perhaps the most important interactive experience your patron will have with your organization. 

One aspect of ticketing that nobody talks about is the language used during the ticket-buying process and in the confirmation e-mail after the ticket has been purchased. Isn’t it true that if a customer were standing at your box office, you’d want the agent selling the ticket to be friendly and helpful? When I’m buying arts tickets, that idea doesn’t always seem to translate. In particular, when I receive the ticket confirmation e-mail, it’s almost always filled with unfriendly, negative, and legalistic language:

"No returns, no exchanges are permitted. You may not resell this ticket. You must have your  membership number ready when you call. "

We’ve all read things like this. For that matter, why does it seem the bigger the institution, the meaner the language?

I realize you have to communicate policies that may not be all that customer-friendly, but can’t we be a bit nicer? How about saying the same thing only in a more friendly tone? Something like:

“We’re sorry that we can’t allow you to refund tickets or exchange them. But if you can’t use your  ticket, we’ll gladly take it back and convert it into a tax-deductible donation which will help our  organization. If you have other questions, please call our box office -- it would greatly help us if  you  have your ticket stub available when you call.”

Take a look at your online ticketing confirmation e-mail with fresh eyes and see if you think it represents your organization in the very best way.

What Does the SOCIAL Revolution Really Mean?

Today I offer up the equivalent of a long-form re-tweet. The brilliant CEO and founder of Salesforce.com, our business partner, was quoted in this Op-Ed article in The New York Times yesterday. This excerpt closely aligns with much of what I'm thinking and writing about these days. You can read the entire article here.

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed — everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don’t have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges — from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before — as individuals.

A is for alignment. “There has never been a more important time to have all your ships sailing in the same direction,” said Benioff. “The power of social media is that it is easier than ever to both articulate, and reinforce, the vision and values that create and inspire alignment.” And L is for the leadership that does that. Leadership in a SOCIAL world has to be a mix of bottom-up and top-down. Leaders need to inspire, enable and empower everything coming up from below in a company or a social movement and then edit and sculpt it with a vision from above into a final product.

 

Free Webtool Friday - Real Time Audience Polling

We've come to a time when you can be pretty sure that most of your audience has some kind of smart-phone with them that will allow them to send a text message. This opens up all sorts of opportunities for getting real time freeback from them during your event. 

One interesting free (and with a paid option) tool to do this is Poll Everywhere, which was designed with purpose of gathering feedback from a business presentation audience in real time.  The product is clean and simple, and  I think you'll see very quickly how it could be used in the arts. 

Watch this video and get inspired to poll your audience! http://www.polleverywhere.com/#video

 

 

Three Simple Steps to Reboot Your Website

Today’s post is by Eric Saber, an Account Specialist here at Patron Technology. 

I spend a large portion of my day in front of a computer, staring at performing arts organizations' websites. Last week, in preparation for this post, I had the following exchange with one of my colleagues:

Do you know any good performing arts websites?
(10 seconds of silence)
Colleague: Um, good question.

I think the exchange speaks volumes.This is a call to action: if you work for a small to medium-sized performing arts organization, then in all likelihood your website needs some fixin'. 

The good news is there are three simple steps you can take right now to not only improve your patrons' online experience, but to immediately benefit your organization:

1. Stop procrastinating and redesign!

 
Here's something I hear at least once a week: "We're in the process of redoing our site." In my experience, this typically means that the organization realizes its website could use some work. However, it also means that the new site will probably launch sometime in 2015 ;)
 

Having a professional website in 2011 is a foregone conclusion, so why do so many organizations put it off? We've all be there; when something feels important we often rationalize our procrastination by saying it's too difficult, time-consuming, or expensive. Up until a few years ago, these things were true of web design, but that's no longer the case.

Your site is the digital face of your organization and just as you meticulously design print brochures to be very professional, you need to present yourself online in the same capacity. There are tons of ways to go about this, even on a shoestring budget. 99 designs and Elance are great resources to find affordable and talented designers and programmers to assist in creating an online identity. Weebly.com offers a professional, easy-to-use service for creating a new site. Even a premium Wordpress.com template can work in the interim. The important thing is to get started now.

 
2. Forget Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. First, make it EASY to buy tickets.

 
In Breaking the Fifth Wall, Gene Carr and Michelle Paul discuss in detail how important it is to make your patrons' overall ticket buying experience pleasant and smooth, start to finish. Of the performing arts sites I regularly visit, one of the most common offenses I find is that there is no clear link to purchase tickets for the current production, right now.

This is important. A link to purchase tickets (or at least information on how to buy them) should be very prominent on your site. Ideally, it should be directly below your logo in the main navigation and in concise, simple language (i.e., "Buy Tickets"). By now, your patrons expect it, they will thank you, and you will make more money!

 
3. Put the newsletter sign-up form "above the fold." 

 
"Above the fold" is a term that refers to the part of the newspaper that you can see when it’s laying on the newsstand. The most important stories are right up top, above the fold, on the front page. The same principle applies on the web.

You won’t get your patrons to join your e-mail list if your sign-up form is buried at the bottom of your website. This is a big deal, and even well-designed sites overlook this frequently.  

You have an awesome opportunity to grab an e-mail address. I all too often see social media buttons or huge logos above the crucial "sign-up" area. I promise that most of your patrons aren't going to bother scrolling down to find that button, so you need to move it somewhere in the top portion of your website.

Okay, so what do you do now? I hope you’ll think of this post as a quick checklist. If you can take one thing from this post, it is to improve your current site, and to start the process today. Your website is one of the most valuable marketing tools you have, digital or otherwise. You will have happier patrons if you make their online experience better, so don't let this opportunity go to waste!

 

Towards a Universal Theory: Report from Spain

When I received an invitation from Asimetrica in Madrid to present a keynote at its first “arts marketing annual conference,” I was thrilled to be part of what seemed to be the European version of our NAMP conference. It was held last week and was a two-day event that drew mostly Spanish arts executives and a group of speakers from the U.S./U.K. and Spain. In some ways it was less an international conference about arts marketing than a Spanish arts marketing conference with international arts marketing guest speakers. Nonetheless, it provided a rare opportunity to compare and contrast the challenges of arts marketing here and abroad. 

I came to the conference hoping to confirm a long-held assumption that the European model of arts funding was superior to ours. After all, the art forms we focus on (classical music, theater, dance and visual arts) were initially imported, and it seemed self-evident that arts interest must permeate these countries. That’s why governments there fund the arts almost 100%. How lucky these arts group are, I thought, not having to devote their time to raising money from their patrons. 

That might have been true in the past, but no longer. The economic crisis that has swept Western Europe seems to me more significant than ours, and the survival of many arts organizations is at stake. When the government is your single source of support, but the government is under siege and unemployment is at 20%, suddenly support for the arts is no longer a given. There were talks describing how governments were preparing to make (if not already making) massive cuts to the arts. The entire regional arts audience development infrastructure in the U.K. is being dismantled because of a huge budget cut.

In an era of severely scarce resources, politics require that funding for the arts is pitted against funding for social services. The dialogue in Europe is very much like the dialogue here: How do we make the case for the value of supporting the arts? Those passionate about it have to make the claim that the arts are worth it, and as important that some other government priority.

But in Europe there is hardly any history of donor development,  no “give or get” board structure with deep-pocketed board members to reach out to, and no infrastructure in place to motivate ticket buyers to pressure the goverment, much less systems or staff to make up for these losses under the gun. 

My experience in Spain confirmed for me that the lessons we’ve been preaching in our book The Fifth Wall and in selling our PatronManager CRM system  are feeling to me like universal truths for the future of arts marketing and the survival of the arts: 

Job number one is to build deep relationships with your audience, and make that as important as making art. Arts marketing isn’t about simply getting the word out and filling seats. It’s all about audience development: Knowing intimately who your audience members are, communicating with them as if you know them personally, and focusing on keeping and motivating the audience you do have as much as finding a new audience.

 

Fifth Wall Fridays: E-mail Subject Lines

 
In our chapter on e-mail marketing (titled "The Least Exciting but Most Effective Marketing Tool"), we take a moment to focus on e-mail subject lines. Frankly, this topic is so important that we could have written a full chapter on it.

If you’re tracking the success of your e-mails, you know that average open rates for the industry are around 20 percent, and if you're doing really well, click-through rates are around 3 percent. So if you have 2,000 people on your e-mail list, you can be sure that about 400 are opening that e-mail.

But here’s a fact that many forget: if your subscribers are checking their inbox at all, then 100% of them are seeing your subject line! Subject lines, then, are the most important real estate of the entire e-mail because of their reach.

Your subject line becomes the marketing message. So make sure your subject line communicates the crucial information you want your readers to know. Don't try to be cute, or get bogged down with a clever turn of phrase that only makes sense if someone actually clicks and opens the e-mail, because most won't.

If you can deliver your key marketing message to the 80 percent of people who are not opening your e-mail, you’ve just dramatically improved the effectiveness of your e-mail marketing.

Patron Technology TV: Interview with Linda Forlini - NY Philharmonic

This is the first of a series of periodic interviews I'm going to be doing with people I think are doing really interesting work in arts marketing and audience development. This is a conversation with Linda Forlini, the Director of Customer Service and Sales at the New York Philharmonic, a 26-year veteran in the box office and ticketing industry.  

Linda reveals how a CRM approach has brought an entirely new role for the box office at the New York Philharmonic.

 

Free Webtool Friday - Boomerang from Baydin.com

If you're like me, you have a system of tasks in a calendar somewhere with people to follow-up with. Here in our office we use Salesforce.com to track all of these tasks. But then there are things that fall between the cracks.  I can't tell you the number of times I send an email and think "hey, I never heard back from.... "

Here's a solution I read about a few weeks ago and I've been testing. It's not completely free -but nearly so. It's called Boomerang from www.baydin.com. (Note: don't Google the word Boomerang, or you'll get the wrong product).

It has two features which are really useful:  

1. Return to inbox:  When I send out an email (let's say I'm proposing a lunch with somone), I can schedule that email to be returned to the top of my inbox on a specific time or day (ie: in an hour, or a day or a week.) That solves the "whatever ever happened..." problem. 

2. Send later:  Let's say you know somoene is traveling on business and you want them to get your message the day they return. Boomerang's "send later" feature enables this.   

The system has been remarkably easy to use, and super helpful for my piece-of-mind. If you're a Gmail user, you can get 10 messages a month for free, and paid versions for more messages start at $4.95 a month. If you're still using Outlook, you can try it for free for 30 days, and buy it for $29.95.  

 

If a Patron Buys a Ticket but No One Collects Any Contact Info, Was She Really There?

Today’s post is by Lily Traub, Sales Manager here at Patron Technology. 

It’s like the old “if a tree falls in the forest” adage: If you sell a ticket without knowing who bought it, did she really attend?  Without any data on that ticket buyer, you lose the ability to report on who came to your performance and who came back again -- not to mention the ability to sell her more tickets or solicit a donation.

Recently, I went to a theater where all ticket sales are cash at the door -- I couldn’t buy a ticket in advance, even though I wanted to.  As a former box office employee, I know firsthand how difficult it is to take contact information at the door: You’ve got a line of people waiting, it’s 10 minutes to curtain, and you just need to get people into their seats as quickly as possible.

• Suggestion #1: Have a second person at the box office, asking for e-mail addresses.

I would have loved to see a staff member or volunteer right by the box office, asking people for their e-mail addresses after they’ve purchased their tickets but before they’ve entered the theater.  The next people in line would already be paying for their tickets, so the line wouldn’t be held up. 

• Suggestion #2: Offer online ticketing and charge a lower ticket price for advance purchases than at-the-door.

They should offer online ticketing! It’s infinitely easier to collect contact information when someone is buying a ticket online.  But more than that, I am dying to see arts organizations motivate their patrons to buy tickets in advance of the performance night.  Popular music concerts frequently have a higher ticket price at the door than when a ticket buyer pays in advance.  Thus, people are given an incentive to make their purchases ahead of time, and since they’re buying in advance, they’re also providing their contact information.  This solves two problems simultaneously, and non-profit arts organizations should consider utilizing a similar technique.

• Suggestion #3: Also pass around a clipboard or use signage to get e-mail/social media sign-ups in the lobby.

We were all waiting in the lobby for a good twenty minutes before they let us into the theater, and it was another missed opportunity.  Pass around a clipboard, inviting me to sign up for your e-mail list!  Have signs up suggesting that I follow you on Twitter or Facebook! (This is something, of course, that I could have done right then and there, thanks to my smart-phone.)  

I know that it’s extremely difficult to take the extra time to ask for contact information when you’re dealing with a line at the box office during crunch-time, but I encourage organizations to think creatively about other opportunities to collect that info.  The moment at which a patron hands over her money is far from the only interaction you’re having with her. 

• Suggestion #4: Add a check-box asking ticket buyers if they’ve been to your organization before.

This particular theater company is frequently performing new material, so it is primed for repeat attendees.  In my theoretical world, where a clipboard was passed around the lobby or a volunteer was stationed next to the box office, a simple “Is this your first time at our theater?” would take an extra three seconds and would greatly improve the organization’s ability to know who its patrons are.  It means you can solicit donations from your frequent attendees who have already demonstrated a commitment to your company, and know which ones are the first-timers you want to target to come back for a second visit.  

To summarize, make sure you have a way to contact your patrons, so you can encourage them to come again and/or make a contribution.  Even if you start with just one piece of information -- an e-mail address or a Twitter name -- that’s going to enable you to reach out to her, invite her to return, and tell her about other ways she can support your organization.  Otherwise, without any way of getting in touch, she remains just like the proverbial tree in the forest.