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THE GEORGIA BALLET

By Kaitlyn Pack, The Georgia Ballet

The National Arts Marketing Project Conference was a wonderful experience. I attended in November 2016 on a scholarship provided by the Audience Building Roundtable, an initiative of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. The conference is a unique opportunity for the arts community from across the US to come together and talk about marketing. At the conference, my two favorite workshops were: “Gray is the New Gold” and “Arts Marketing + Patron Journey”. 

“Gray is the New Gold” was of particular interest to me. The panel was about how our community likes to always seek the younger audiences that more difficult to reach and get investment from, while there are millions of seniors that are already love and appreciate the classical arts like ballet. So why are we, as arts organizations, discounting older generations? One of the panelists, Desmond Davis of Verb Ballet, shared his experience with a Summer Camp Program for seniors which has had amazing success for Verb Ballet. With the information gleaned from this workshop, The Georgia Ballet is place more marketing emphasis on group sales from Assisted Living Communities. We are aiming to fill more seats with these patrons in the upcoming season. 

The workshop on “Arts Marketing + Patron Journey” focused on how to identify our organization’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP). We identified what makes our organization different and how we can incorporate that into our marketing. Using this method, The Georgia Ballet built our marketing campaign for The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty on our affordability and the convenience of our location. We DID see a difference from our approach. We received many phone calls from new patrons who responded with excitement to our offer of affordable tickets and that convenient location for family entertainment.

To sum up my conference experience: don’t forget what makes your organization special! Use that in your marketing. And just because we want younger audiences, we can’t forget about the existing, older audience that is ready and waiting for us to make an offer to them.