Ideas

Perhaps you were among the many thousands gathered around a YouTube livestream on March 22 for a one-night-only return of The Rosie O’Donnell Show. It was a live benefit for The Actors Fund and was billed as “Broadway’s Biggest Stars...At Home!” You’re reading this on our website so you’re likely an industry insider and familiar with the wonderful work of The Actors Fund. If not, go here – maybe make a donation – and then come back and read on.

Ah yes, the stock image. It’s a creative resource we have at our fingertips, yet rarely use. It’s officially time to stop fearing stock images and focus on the value they can bring. We’re in an age of high-caliber creative stock resources that will keep your ticket sales flowing when you’d otherwise be at a loss for content.

This past year, Dorset Theatre Festival, a small summer theatre in southern Vermont, diversified their portfolio and discovered what stock images can add to the performance of their season’s Facebook campaigns.

The Performing Arts Ticket Buyer Media Usage Study is back to provide you with the data you need as an arts marketer in 2020. We created this study as a resource for arts marketers in organizations of all shapes and sizes to navigate this rapidly changing media environment and the 2019 report breaks new ground as the follow up to the study we debuted in 2017.

Spring might be over a month away, but it’s the perfect time to start planning for a bountiful season of new, engaged patrons. We hope we reignited your passion for gathering new leads in our blog post about the success Emerson Colonial Theatre has had with their lead generation campaigns on Facebook.

In this follow-up post, we’re here to round out your repertoire of ways to gain permission to talk to patrons via email and then dive into how to make sure you set up great communication with those patrons from the get-go...and avoid losing their permission via the dreaded unsubscribe.

It’s a fresh, new year and with it comes the opportunity to think about new leads. When it comes to permission marketing, gaining an email address from a patron is the ultimate invitation—they’ve given you permission to have a regular conversation with them about the things they care about. It’s vital to nurture those patron relationships through tailored, vibrant communications. And it’s also important to continue to infuse your database with new leads to grow your patron base and weather the ebb and flow of database churn.

You probably have firsthand knowledge of the power of social media advertising tools to engage your audiences and sell tickets. Lately, we’ve been exploring cost-effective ways to harness these same digital tools to support the mission-centric programs that are important to all of the organizations we work with (and we’re guessing yours, too!)

Read on to learn how we did this with Anchorage Concert Association (Anchorage Concerts) and how you, too, can cultivate audiences and awareness for outreach activities and public performances through the Facebook tools you already may be using. With a solid targeting strategy as a foundation and engaging creative as your framework, you’ll see measurable results as your programs grow.

Central to the value of Facebook users and advertisers alike is its purpose of connecting people all over the world. Facebook has over two billion active users, and half speak a language that isn’t English. Additionally, a majority of Facebook Pages promote to multilingual audiences.

Carnegie Hall saw a crucial opportunity to reach multilingual audiences in New York City with their world-renowned programming. We worked with them to promote foreign language posts throughout various campaigns, which helped them bring new patrons into their universe, connect with communities in their languages, and as a bonus, drive strong return on investments (ROIs)!

Instagram’s strength as a photo and video sharing platform makes it a natural social media fit for visual art museums looking to engage audiences with their collections, exhibitions, and events. Our partnership with the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) has demonstrated how seamlessly Instagram can be integrated into a comprehensive and highly-tailored marketing approach with Facebook and other digital channels.

When you’re tasked with creating videos for a non-profit organization, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and start playing the comparison game.

"Opera companies have such beautiful sets to capture!"
"Orchestras have it so easy, they already have the music!"
"Dance companies have bigger budgets!"