Ideas

Boot Camp Livestream Roundup

May 1, 2020

This is your Boot Camp Livestream roundup. If you tuned in and you’re looking for a recap for yourself or to share with others, this is it. Maybe you missed the livestream and you’re eager to read the headlines about what you missed. Got you covered. And, if you missed the livestream and you're trying to figure out what to go back and watch, let this serve as a guide to help you choose what to dig into first!

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Using Analytics to Build a Website for the Future

July 29, 2019

The Goodman Theatre has a long history of innovation on-stage. It’s the recipient of the Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and is known at home and abroad as a theater as much for artists as it is for the community. The team at The Goodman puts their patrons at the heart of everything they do, including their digital initiatives, proving that they are innovators off-stage as well. 

This was most evident in The Goodman’s recent website redesign, where, with funding from the Wallace Foundation, they were able to turn to user data at key moments in the process to inform the direction and prioritization of new templates on their site.

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Moving Beyond Mobile First in Modern Websites

June 24, 2019

A few weeks ago, I was digging through the Google Analytics (GA) account of one of our projects. While this may not sound exciting, I love gleaning information that I can use to improve our projects and empower us to do a better job. What I actually encountered was something that will change our approach to web development at its core. I discovered a bit of data that will have a direct impact on the way our team does its job.

Over the past few years, the GA data on all websites we’ve built has justified investing in responsively designed sites. With non-desktop traffic hovering in the 50% range, we could clearly make the argument that desktop and mobile need to have equal investments in time and effort. But what happens when mobile traffic reaches 70%?

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ITP: What We Do and Don’t Know

June 6, 2019

Almost 97 years passed between the first telephone call in 1876 and the first mobile phone call in 1973. In 1991, the World Wide Web became publicly available, and just 13 years later, a couple of kids launched Facebook from their dorm room. Three years after that, in 2007, Apple released the first iPhone and fundamentally altered how we engage with the web and with each other.

The Internet has brought us cat memes and viral ASMR videos, and our mobile devices have made it possible to watch them during meetings. It has brought us more relevant ads and better ways to measure their effectiveness, but it has also brought us data scandals and privacy concerns.

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Your CI to Eye Podcast Episode Guide

March 21, 2019

CI to Eye is a podcast for arts leaders who want to reach their full potential. Each episode is created to help you become better at your job so you can help the arts move forward.

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Uncovering User Intent with Google Analytics and On-Site Surveys

January 18, 2019

If you’re a marketer, you’re probably familiar with Google Analytics, one of the most powerful free tools out there for monitoring your website. Google Analytics (GA) allows us to measure the activity of our site visitors in real time, at a super granular level and can inform everything from landing page design to site structure. It’s one of the essential tools to have in our marketing tool belts. We love it and have talked about it at length here, here, and here.

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Meet the New and Improved Benchmark Study

November 19, 2018

The Arts Industry Digital Marketing Benchmark Study is available for download and this sixth edition holds a ton of new data to help you market smarter. We rethought our approach to make sure we’re giving you the metrics and key performance indicators that can fuel conversation about growth and help you make informed decisions. It’s double the length of previous versions, since the data’s cut in a couple new ways. Here’s a guide to help you get the most out of it.

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Ask the Industry: Advice for Managing a Website Redesign

May 31, 2018

Ask the Industry features advice from arts marketers in their own words. We hope you can learn from them and it will spark new ideas at your organization.

This month, we’re asking, “What advice would you give to a fellow arts marketer before embarking on a website redesign project?" 

Jonathan Carpenter and Jack Wright (Celebrity Series of Boston), Nora Brady (Los Angeles Philharmonic), and Rosemary Devine and Tori Harvey (People's Light) highlight their most recent website redesigns, and answer everything from choosing a project manager, to their biggest successes and most valuable learnings. 

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GDPR and Google Analytics: Why You Need to Update Your GA Settings

May 17, 2018

Over the past couple of weeks, you may have received an email from Google with the subject line: Important updates about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The email looked something like this, and may have seemed confusing. Why is Google emailing me about EU policy changes if our organization is not located there?

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Some Helpful GDPR Resources

May 16, 2018

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is confusing to marketers. Of course it is! GDPR is a legal issue and we are not lawyers. At CI we want to be helpful so what we can provide is what our lawyer sent to us and other resources we have found useful in facing GDPR for our business. This is the first post we’re publicly releasing with another specifically about Google Analytics to follow. CI clients will be hearing more from us individually.

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Boot Camp 2023 On Demand

In a time of perpetual change, Boot Camp 2023 will help you build a holistic foundation to become a stronger arts marketer, leader, and champion for our industry—all from the comfort of your desk.

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CI to Eye Podcast

From arts leadership to organizational culture, digital marketing deep dives and cutting edge innovation, CI to Eye is your one-stop shop to help you market smarter.

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Social Content Calendar for Arts Marketers

Create content that’s thumb-stopping, relevant, and thoughtful to connect with audiences—all winter long!

Take Me There


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The Performing Arts Ticket Buyer Media Usage Study

Based on a survey of over 17,000 ticket buyers, this report sheds light on the shifting media consumption and buyer behavior of your core audience, with marketing insights to help you turn data into strategy.

Download the Study