Arts Intranet

Beth Malone

Audience is something we think about every moment. How are viewers engaging with our exhibitions? How are they responding to the organization’s methods of outreach? Are they even showing up in the first place?

From very early on, Dash has had a large outpouring of community support. My partner and I are both Atlanta natives and were lucky enough to leverage relationships we had with press, artists, and musicians in the city. As we continued to grow within our mission, we cultivated (and continue to cultivate) a solid, committed constituency. Efforts to engage an audience outside the traditional art-viewing public such as university students and faculty, small businesses, and city government, paid off. Quite literally, we were networking – meeting with leaders in these industries to explain our work and ask for their support via their own promotional tools like social media, web links, etc.

Janet Starke

An Arts Educator’s Report from NAMPC 2014

I had the privilege and honor to attend this past weekend’s NAMP (National Arts Marketing Project) Conference in Atlanta. I co-presented a session with AFTA’s Arts Education Program Coordinator, Jeff Poulin. This stemmed from a conversation we first began last winter, when we discussed the concept of the “shared space between arts marketing and education.” Mind you, even as we might picture the "center" of the highly-valued Venn Diagram, there are varied tracks within that center:

1) Marketing arts education for the advancement of the programs

2) Using education as a tool for marketing the organization

3) Using education as a vehicle for increased audience development and ticketing sales

The theme for this year's NAMP Conference is Lift Off! We will be exploring a variety of new techniques and technologies for audience building and obtaining more overall support of our organizations and the arts in general. Before we can Lift Off!, it is wise to look back over the year-to-date and see what has been occurring in order to create our checklist to get ready for Lift Off!

It’s a scientifically proven fact that some of the most interesting things that happen at a conference occur outside of the meeting rooms. 

They happen in the hallways.

They happen in the hotel rooms, if that’s how you roll.

And they happen at the bar.

Will Lester

Arts marketers are often in the business of predicting the unpredictable:  “If I do (insert tactic), will they come?”  The question applies to every piece: an expensive brochure, a low-cost email campaign, a Tweet or Facebook post—just about anything in the marketing arsenal.

Arts marketers aren’t psychic, but you can predict how your direct marketing campaigns will fare. Analyzing who took you up on your past offers tells you where your base of support for future campaigns lies.  Tracking response gives you predictive power for future campaigns:

• We got almost a 1% response… We can expect a similar response on future mailings to these types of patrons, then.

• We sold about $90,000… Historically, similar renewal campaigns have done the same. Let’s use this number in revenue projections.

• Our ROI was 3-1, but we made a lot of revenue…When we spend more on acquisition campaigns, we make more.

Understanding response to campaigns, like so many things in arts marketing, is dependent on using good methodology to track patron behavior. At TRG, we research the behavior of patrons within individual organizations’ databases, as well as aggregate data in 20 community networks across the country. Our research helps arts marketers harness the power of their local arts market by describing how patrons behave across organizations in their city or region. Using this individual and aggregate data, we’ve been able to find the best ways to track patron behavior and start finding meaning in those numbers, including some I talked about in a recent webinar.

The problem that inevitably arises with response tracking is that many methods don’t accurately capture response. Promotional codes can be mis-categorized or typed in wrong at the point of sale. For example, if there’s a discount offer associated with the promo code, you’ll often get “hidden responses” where people received your piece but don’t use your discount code; instead, they choose to pay full price for a different date, seating section, etc.

Raheem Dawodu

The time has come. You’ve done your research to find out your audiences, figured out how to create great content to meet their needs, and you’ve convinced your organization’s staff and leadership that it’s time to build a new website.

Now it’s time to involve your staff in the process - since they are the issue experts that should work with you to create or revise your website’s content. At Americans for the Arts, though everyone on staff has an interest in the success of the website, only some of the people on our 70-person staff are what we call “content creators” – the ones who write the content.