Ideas

For years the arts and cultural industry has been on edge. We keep waiting, and perhaps hoping, for packages that yield our largest quantity of repeat attendance to die. Why?

It’s quite a trick. How did email, the original digital marketing channel born in 1970, become not just reliable, but effective, trusted and dare I say, cool?  No doubt you’ve seen the data on email’s conversion rates. It’s still your best marketing spend by a mile. But there’s a bigger story to email than just conversion stats. Why has email been so resilient, why is it so effective and more importantly, is there still a tangible opportunity for the modern marketers with email?

Digital marketers of the world, if we all had the budget, time, and staffing resources that we wished we had, then we’d be unstoppable. But, working in a non-profit often means having to market on a shoestring. That’s why it’s important to be strategic and prioritize high-impact, low-effort campaigns.

The road to social content bliss is often met with some challenges along the way. Whether you’re creating content from scratch or only have a small pool of artist-approved assets, you don’t have to put the brakes on creativity. That’s right. There are solutions ahead.

Arts marketers from two different organizations and genres discuss their social content challenges and how they found solutions to keep their content fresh and engaging. 

Let’s say you have twelve delicious donuts in a box. You bring them into a classroom of first-grade kids, frothing with glee after recess. You put the donuts on a table. Cake donuts. Glazed donuts. Different flavors. They smell good. They’re even still a bit warm.

You say, “Who wants a donut?”

What happens? All thirty kids come rushing to the table and start grabbing donuts in a fierce dustup of flying sugar, elbow jabs and colorful uses of the word booger. 

Navigation, whether you’re talking ships or the web, refers to a method of determining one’s current position, distance traveled, and plotting the course to a destination. When it comes to your organization’s website, you want your users to be able to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. This is accomplished by putting an interface into place that clearly plots out the information and actions available and encourages them to move through your site with confidence.

The beginning of the fall arts & culture season is a great time to review all the platforms and features in your digital marketing toolkit. Most savvy marketers already know the basics of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Google Adwords. But there’s one product you may have overlooked: Google My Business.

Hi, CI! is our monthly series featuring the best team we know - the Capacity Interactive team! You will learn more about the people who help arts organizations market smarter. This month, we’re featuring one of our Senior Analysts who’s a passionate and versatile dancer,  discovered digital marketing through a Peace and Conflict Studies major, and helps arts organizations create social content that connects with fans on a personal level.

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 for your organization.

This month, we’re asking, “How do you manage multiple social content creators and contributors?”

Natasha Porizkova and Bill Spellman (AT&T Performing Arts Center), Laura Bowman and Jonathan Stiles (Pennsylvania Ballet), and Nessa Ferrell (Wolf Trap) discuss how they successfully work with multiple departments and stakeholders to create compelling social content, and their unique roads to get to this crucial point at their organizations.

With the ever-increasing dominance of smartphones, mobile-first design has become the priority of businesses across industries and around the world. Mobile-first design impacts websites, social media content, and emails.