Ideas

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.

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, “What keeps you inspired as an arts marketer? 

PennyMaria Jackson (Apollo Theater), Sara Villagio (Carnegie Hall), and Sara Waugh (Marin Theatre Company) discuss their favorite apps, websites, and blogs to keep up with marketing trends, what they do to recharge outside of work, and how they keep their team (and themselves) motivated, even during the busiest times.  

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. 

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.

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 are some unique ways to highlight the benefits of becoming a subscriber or member?" 

Kerry Ingram (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), Karina Kacala (Opera Philadelphia), Jackie Ortiz (Pasadena Playhouse), and Vanessa Ramirez-Sparrow (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) answer everything from creating unique content for different audiences to keeping subscription and membership campaigns fresh each year. 

At the end of 2017, we published the Performing Arts Ticket Buyer Media Usage Study, a collaboration with WolfBrown where we surveyed nearly 27,000 people who purchased a performing arts ticket within the prior two years at one of the 58 organizations that partnered with us on this study. We wanted to take a bird's eye view of what types of media arts buyers were consuming most often, and where they are getting their information about cultural events.