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 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. 

Over the past couple of weeks, you may have received an email from Google with the subject line: Important updates about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The email looked something like this, and may have seemed confusing. Why is Google emailing me about EU policy changes if our organization is not located there?

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.

When we analyze Google Analytics (GA) client data at Capacity Interactive, two themes relating to the homepage commonly recur. Chances are, if you were to look at your own data, you’d see something very similar:

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.

Your organization’s website isn’t built solely for the marketing department; it’s built for your entire organization. Each department has their own vested interest in your website, yet as a marketer, I’m sure you’ve answered questions like, “How many pageviews is the Education section of our website receiving” or “What do the demographics of our donors look like?”

The Challenge

When investing massive capital and human resources into a website redesign or update, how do you make the right design and content decisions to ensure a knockout site that meets stakeholders’ needs? We hope it comes as a huge relief to hear you can’t possibly make perfect and complete decisions at one preordained moment in time.

Thriving digitally today means your site (and your management of it) must be flexible and agile, evolving to meet the changing needs of users over time. So, how do you do this when your time and resources are finite?

Hi, CI! is our monthly series featuring the best team we know - the Capacity Interactive team! You will learn more about the people who help arts organizations market smarter. This month, we're featuring our Associate Director of Analytics, who is a web analytics geek, a flutist, and a knitting pro.

There are a lot of buzzwords in the digital design sphere. In this post, we’ll take a look at one of the more ubiquitous ones these days: User Experience and User Interface. I’ll fill you in on what these terms mean and why they’re important to your organization’s digital strategy.

Nobody likes to be misunderstood. This isn’t the beginning of an emo song - but rather a guide to help you understand some important, but often misunderstood metrics in Google Analytics (GA). Last time, we focused on bounce rate. Today, we will focus on pages per session and average session duration.