Ideas

When you market a large volume of programs and initiatives, it can be tempting to run as many campaigns as possible—the more ads, the better, right?—but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee an equally significant payoff. When it comes to digital advertising, sometimes less is more. 

Intentionality is key, especially for multifaceted arts organizations with small (but mighty) marketing teams. We worked with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to streamline their campaign structure, mitigate audience overlap, and reduce their team’s workload, all while maximizing overall impact.

Last week, Meta bolstered its social media domination with the launch of its newest app, Threads. Threads grew its user base to over 100 million accounts in just five days since its launch. (Twitter is currently sitting at around 350 million users.) For comparison: it took TikTok nine months to achieve that same milestone. Threads is officially the fastest-growing online platform in history.

It's summertime, and you know what that means: arts marketers have visions of Sugar Plum Fairies dancing in their heads. That’s right: now is the time to plan—and, in many cases, start—your holiday programming campaigns. 

By the end of the calendar and fiscal years, fundraisers are crunching numbers to determine when they’ll close the gap between dollars raised and what’s left to reach their goals. These are critical moments in any season—but that doesn’t mean they need to be a scramble.

I’ve been in your shoes, fellow fundraisers. I spent three years working in annual giving at Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and now help CI’s clients market smarter. Here are a few strategies that can make those big donation pushes easier.

When you think about digital marketing campaigns, return on investment (ROI) likely comes to mind. But what happens when you’re running an attendance or membership campaign, and purchases largely don’t take place online? Museums and similar types of cultural institutions often find themselves in this predicament. 

At CI, we’re obsessed with measurement, and that includes even those scenarios that seem unmeasurable. Enter: proxy metrics. A proxy metric is something you can measure that represents or approximates the value of your intended metric when data is limited. Let’s look at how we use proxy metrics to measure campaign performance for the museums we work with.

Hi, CI! is a series featuring the best team we know—the Capacity Interactive team! Today, meet Stacie Louis-Jacques: a CI Digital Marketing Analyst, singer, actress, and saxophonist whose love for the arts continues to grow every day.

Picture it: An audience member searches for tickets to your organization’s concert or production but can't find your official site page easily on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

This, unfortunately, is common for non-profit organizations. So, what can you do to ensure your organization outranks the competition? Implement a holistic search engine optimization (SEO) strategy!

Just ask McCallum Theatre, a non-profit performing arts organization in Palm Desert, CA, who faced a similar challenge despite leveraging social media and Google advertising efforts to promote their upcoming season programming. We identified the missing piece of their marketing puzzle: a robust search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

I’m thrilled to be sharing some big news — Capacity Interactive has transferred 100% ownership of the company to an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). 

CI was founded on a commitment to our employees and a commitment to the arts industry. Becoming employee-owned through an ESOP preserves those commitments for the future.

As privacy changes keep rolling in, it’s never been more clear that first-party data is the future of digital marketing—but how do you harness that power in a digital marketing campaign?

When San Francisco Opera (SF Opera) was ready to announce its 2023–2024 season, we developed a multi-pronged strategy that used first-party data as its foundation to drive subscription acquisition and renewals.