Ideas

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.

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.

Let’s hop into our digital marketing time machines. The year is 2012, and the 92nd Street Y, in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, established #GivingTuesday. The power of social media was used to launch a movement of philanthropy in communities worldwide.

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.

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. 

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. 

At CI we are always thinking about how we can help arts organizations use digital tools to help you reach your sales and marketing goals.

Over the years we have helped hundreds of organizations build out digital infrastructures to better understand how users are interacting on arts websites. We have become very good at capturing granular user behavior online. When a user interacts with your website, they are providing you with rich data about their interests and intent. But this data has always been anonymous in Google Analytics and in advertising platforms like Facebook and Google Adwords.

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.

At Capacity Interactive, we work with nearly two hundred arts and cultural organizations and have the privilege of tackling challenges in the digital marketing realm with them every day.

Certain questions come up again and again across all organization shapes and sizes, and that inspired us to retool our benchmark. Some of the toughest questions for organizations involve where to put their money, how to staff their teams, and how to set priorities when there is always more to do.