By Angela Harris, Executive Artistic Director, Dance Canvas

I attended the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in November 2017 on a scholarship provided by The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s Audience Building Roundtable initiative. I have attended the NAMP conference several times in the past, and it has always been one of my favorite opportunities to gauge arts marketing trends from across the country. Now, having been a part of the Audience Building Roundtable for over 2 years, I felt that this year’s conference did more to reinforce ideas than it did to inspire new ones. But I gained some major takeaways that I applied directly toward our 2018 Performance Series marketing plan.

1 – Storytelling is a way to engage…With listening at the core

A theme of this year’s NAMP Conference was storytelling. I participated in the Storytelling pre-conference, where Joe Lambert, founder and executive director of Story Center, led us through personal storytelling exercises to help us learn how to structure and tell a story.

The 5-hour session allowed us to spend time writing our personal stories and to share our stories with others. This activity was designed to inform us on tactics to use as we create stories for our organizations that can evoke similar emotions.

Here are my takeaways (*And what we implemented for the 2018 Performances):

• Put a face to the artistic decision making
  • We created a 10th Anniversary promo video to share the story of Dance Canvas through our staff and students. Click here to view
• Find new ways to talk to people, so that it doesn't feel like advertising
  • We put a lot of attention into our blog posts and social media spotlights this winter/spring. We had each choreographer share their experiences with us and with their cast during the creation of their pieces.
  • We created a photo reel of our 10 years of presented works: Click here to view
• Designed to maximize attendance...vs. designed to maximize revenue
  • We brought college students in to our dress rehearsals so that they could talk one-on-one with our choreographers and dancers. We wanted them to see the pieces and share their experiences with their friends. College students like free things, but also will work hard for something they are passionate about!
• Don't be afraid to test and create marketing content targeted to different communities
• Have choreographers give descriptions of their pieces
  • We added video stories of each choreographer before their pieces during the show. Leading up to the show, we encouraged the choreographers to tell their stories via social media, and then we would share.

2 – Marketing the Unknown – Testimonials, Testimonials, Testimonials

“How do you encourage your audience to take the risk on lesser-known, lesser-accessible, or otherwise “challenging” fare?”

This is a huge challenge with Dance Canvas, because we have a different show each year, with different choreographers and all the works are world premieres from unknown choreographers. So, what do we do? This session didn’t give me as many ideas, as much as it made me realize that larger organizations face the same problems and are still trying to figure it out as well!

Here were my takeaways:

• Have fans give reviews
  • We had people come to dress rehearsals and had them give on camera 1-minute reviews of the work, which we posted online. This way audiences weren’t just hearing from us, they were hearing from our audiences as well.
  • We encouraged people who attended on the Friday night show to go online and post reviews of the show, to encourage others to attend. Curtain speech “Pull out your phone and tell a friend to come see the show tomorrow night at 8pm” We had 11 people tag us in their posts telling people about the show and that tickets were still available. One person wrote a blog review of the show: Click here to view

3 – A/B Testing – Why didn’t I do this before?

“A/B testing is a methodology of comparing two slightly different variations of an outreach to see which one performs better.”

This session was so clear and self-explanatory. It baffles me why I didn’t try this in the past. We can send out as many ads as we want, but if the ads aren’t resonating with the people reading them, then the ads aren’t serving their purpose! During this session, we created two versions of an ad, and discussed why the differences would resonate with audiences, in our opinion.

I would love to add A/B testing to our marketing going forward. The planning of it takes a little more time than I had for the marketing period leading up to this show.

4 – Why are we still trying to figure out diversity? Seems pretty simple to me…

Luba Tolkachyov, Co-founder, and Rodrigo Alanis, Global Strategist, from Gravity were the Keynote speakers. Gravity is the award-winning advertising agency recognized by Advertising Age and INC 5000 as the fastest growing cultural agency in the U.S. Luba and Rodrigo were brought to NAMP to “present a big-picture perspective on how marketers can better understand and connect with consumers of different personalities and cultures, and why this is more important than ever in our digital, always-on world…(as well as provide) market insights, tactics, and best practices for implementing diversity into your own marketing campaigns”

For me, this Diversity discussion is becoming redundant!  We live in a multi-cultural community, and world!  If we are not considering diversity in reaching audiences (and in programming for that matter) then we are missing the mark!

Here are three slides which sum it up:

Now, let me clarify…Outreach and programs that serve underprivileged communities are very important! (And…P.S.: underprivileged doesn’t = brown/black!) It is necessary to provide these programs to underprivileged communities as part of each season.

But, when we talk audiences at our paid performances, especially in Atlanta, we have an extremely large non-white population with buying-power. By not considering these audiences with what we put onstage as well as how we market, we are missing out on a large demographic of interested non-attendees.

5 – I have learned a lot with the Audience Building Roundtable…I think I’m on the right track

My time at NAMP this year definitely reassured me that I am on the right track! I am at a place where I am not afraid to try new things…and possibly fail. As an ED of a small non-profit, I know that I have a bit of a luxury in that. I know that it is about figuring out the goals and devising a strong marketing plan. The sessions at NAMP were mostly sessions that we have covered through the Audience Building Roundtable, and as I was talking to people from across the country, many were intrigued that we have a program such as the Audience Building Roundtable for our professional development. And I am so thankful!

We haven’t completely finished our close-out of the 2018 Performance Series, but we increased our audiences by approx. 125 people over the previous year. But, more importantly, I know that our reach has grown and the general awareness of our organization has grown over the past 6 months, due to our increased efforts to ‘Tell our Story’!