Ideas

Ask the Industry features advice from arts marketers in their own words. We hope you that it will spark new ideas for your organization.

This month, we’re asking, “What’s your advice for an organization looking to start and maintain a blog?”

Calvin Dotsey (Houston Symphony), Jeff Fickes (Seattle Shakespeare Company), and Krystina Tran (Stanford Live) discuss everything from how to feasibly create blog content on a regular basis, to the different types of audiences they write for, and the tools they use to keep everything in line.

Now that all of the ballots from the 2018 midterms are finally (mostly) counted, the election season has come to an end (though the politicking never seems to stop).

Many arts marketers feel the aftermath of an election season, and spend time trying to recover from a downturn in ticket sales. At University Musical Society (UMS), we call this the “election year phenomenon,” and it’s something we’ve been tracking for well over 20 years.

The difference is that we’re using our data to do something about it.

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.

There is a new marketing model I can't stop thinking about. It's called the Flywheel. It's a new paradigm to model modern marketing that I learned about at the 2018 Inbound Conference from HubSpot’s CEO, Brian Halligan. His presentation outlining the Flywheel is long, but it’s worth watching.

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?

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. 

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.

I sometimes get asked for a list of books or podcasts that I recommend. In honor of National Book Lovers Day (that's a real thing), I’ve compiled a list. I’ve included links to the books on Amazon or, even better, buy them at your local bookstore.

I’m grateful to the authors and producers who put these together. They have taught me so much. Also, big thanks to the many people that have recommended these to me over the years!

The American Alliance of Museums asked a group of museum CEOs, “What do you need to know (more) to strengthen your institution’s audience-building results?” Two responses summed up the general reactions: 1) “Behavioral patterns, decision-making prompts,” and 2) “What perceived value would attract prospective attendees?”

Perceived value is critical to understanding why people decide to act or not to act. The tagline of the communications strategy firm Maslansky + Partners says it all: “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.” To break through to cultural consumers, we have to speak to their truth, not our truth.

We’ve all heard the cry of arts organizations in search of seemingly elusive new audiences. But at every organization for which I’ve worked­—organizations of all sizes and various disciplines—getting new audiences was never really the problem.

Despite what we tell ourselves about the need for new people, it’s getting those new buyers to come back that’s the challenge. In fact, the reigning statistic for orchestras in the U.S. is that 90% of first time attendees never return. That’s a lot of people not coming back, a lot of money on the table, and for other arts disciplines, the no-return rate is similar. The Orchestra X project (named after Google[X], the company’s experimental research arm) was launched to figure out why this is happening.