Who is your organization's primary target audience?
What is your organization doing to reach or deepen the relationship with them?
Keywords
Who is your organization's primary target audience?
What is your organization doing to reach or deepen the relationship with them?
Keywords
Who is your organization's primary target audience?
What is your organization doing to reach or deepen the relationship with them?
Keywords
Who is your organization's primary target audience?
What is your organization doing to reach or deepen the relationship with them?
Keywords
Who is your organization's primary target audience?
What is your organization doing to reach or deepen the relationship with them?
Keywords
What is your organization doing to reach or deepen the relationship with them?
Keywords
What is your organization doing to reach or deepen the relationship with them?
Keywords:
By Susan Aspinwall, High Museum of Art
The High Museum of Art attended the November 2016 National Arts Marketing Project (NAMP) Conference on a scholarship provided by the Audience Building Roundtable of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation. The scholarship grants were a joint project of The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and the Georgia Repertory Theatre.
By Shelli Siebert, Executive Director, Conyers Rockdale Council for the Arts
It has been an exciting year for Conyers Rockdale Council for the Arts! Since we received an audience building grant from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation in October 2016, our audience has grown by leaps and bounds. As a smaller arts organization, receiving this grant was the catalyst for us to upgrade our communications, helping us to grow our audience.
August 25, 2017 - click on the following links to download:
By Danielle P. Varner, Springer Opera House
Organizations near the Springer Opera House were investing in high-tech marketing strategies by the minute. However, the historic Springer Opera House building was becoming archaic. We had beautiful, ornate rooms and a breathtaking stage. What we didn’t have was a way to let people walking and driving by know that. Our downtown district is bursting with more tourists, residents, and students every day. We had to find a way to draw them in as they were passing by.
By Scott Hazleton and Rebecca Danis, Atlanta Opera
One of the best things I’ve learned from The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation’s Audience Building Roundtable is to stop trying to do everything. Have I been personally successful at implementing this lesson? Nope. Not even close. But, we have applied it to our social media strategy at The Atlanta Opera and seen wonderful results.
By Amy Miller, Executive Director, Atlanta Celebrates Photography
During 2016, the Audience Building Roundtable offered member organizations a four-part workshop series about audience building practices. TRG Arts, a national consulting firm focused on the arts and culture sector, led the workshop series.
After the first workshop, we had a realization. We are a visual arts organization that produces mostly free and open events at various partner venues (including outdoors) so data collection through ticketing is not something we have ever done. Most of what the workshop presenters spoke to the Audience Building Roundtable about would not apply to us.
July 20, 2017 - Atlanta Opera’s Social Media Takeover
Atlanta Opera Social Media Takeover Video:
Atlanta Contemporary presents audience increase results video:
July 20, 2017 - Red Clay Media Relations Presentation
July 20, 2017 - Atlanta Contemporary Quadfecta Presentation
July 20, 2017 - Theatrical Outfit Digital Marketing Presentation
We’ve talked a lot about data in the Audience Building Roundtable and how important it is for an organization’s data to be as accurate, complete, and mine-able as possible. We’ve also talked a lot about audience. Who is your current audience? Who is your potential audience, and how do you engage them?
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.
This year at Core, we have spent quite a bit of our audience building effort on our brand development. In this huge endeavor, we have managed to change our logo, add graphics to our building, change our colors, our fonts, our website and much of our language. We have also added new positions to our staff and have more company members than we have had in the past 4 years.
Through all of this effort that Core Dance has taken to re-brand and re-fresh, communicating our changes is the most challenging part. Our social media pages have new photos but our page still looks the same and the followers are still growing at a very slow pace, the same with our e-blast clicks and open rates.
I begin to search the website for the National Arts Marketing Project, the title of the 2016 conference caught me immediately! “Fueling the Change” It was exactly what I needed, with an emphasis on social media marketing.
As I moved through the different sessions at the NAMPC, one of the universal messages I took away is that, this marketing world changes with each minute of the day and it’s moving as fast as our technology. We have to keep up. It is 2017 and we are marketing like it’s 2011. Just think of your cell phone now and the Blackberry you had 6 years ago, and what about the technological advances of your 2012 Toyota Corolla to your 2017 Corolla, it probably has wifi now, backup cameras and push button start, to name a few. It all became clear to me that the effort I was making to communicate wasn’t as fresh as our new branding.
Re-branding took a year of planning and research. That is the groundwork that needed to be done and the same needed to be done for our communications. Since the department is staffed by one person, and we are in the middle of the season, I knew this would be challenging. So I started with social media because it's at the majority of society's fingertips. I began by implementing a few tips I received from the social media breakout session.
I tried the light-hearted, funny post, because people like to laugh and enjoy social media for leisure. We receive minimal engagement from this post. It didn’t speak to Core Dance's audience.
I tried the 80/20 rule—80% of your content should be entertaining or about community—not be a hard sell—and 20% should be about Core Dance and our events. They were hit or miss, depending on how well I could relate to our audience.
I realized that I wasn’t engaging our audience because I didn’t really know them. I needed to go back to the drawing board, put a plan together, research and put the same energy into communicating that we did with our branding.
I am at the beginning of the planning work. I began by working with our current tools to figure out where we are in our audience engagement. I looked through Facebook Insights and found that our most engaging posts are those that are directly related to the community, with no ulterior motive. This was also true of our e-blast data.
This data was useful in learning what excites our current audience. Then it was time to set goals. How much do we want to grow, how quickly and what do we want our audience to know about us or how do we want them to see us? These are all questions I need to answer before I can set goals for our audience engagement. I will be taking these questions to the whole organization on an organization-wide planning day, so we can work in the way that our values dictate: in collaboration. At this session I will conduct an internal focus group about where we are currently, and together we will strategize on goals we should set for audience engagement through social media.
Once the internal focus group is completed, the external focus group will be held. This is where the challenge lies. How do we get audiences that we have yet to engage to participate in a focus group and what groups do we use? The answer is “the lowest hanging fruit:” the group that goes to dance performances, just not ours; the group of art lovers or creators—the group that has come close to engaging and for some reason just didn’t get around to doing it. We need to do research, find out who that group is and approach them at their level. Once I get the information I need from our current and prospective audience members, the plan is to create content based on speaking to the audience we want to market to. I will continue to test different ways to communicate throughout the summer months until we have a solid plan in place for the next fiscal year. Our plan will include a content social media calendar and scheduled posts.
This data was useful in learning what excites our current audience. Then it was time to set goals. How much do we want to grow, how quickly and what do we want our audience to know about us or how do we want them to see us? These are all questions I need to answer before I can set goals for our audience engagement. I will be taking these questions to the whole organization on an organization-wide planning day, so we can work in the way that our values dictate: in collaboration. At this session I will conduct an internal focus group about where we are currently, and together we will strategize on goals we should set for audience engagement through social media.
My advice to my fellow Audience Building Roundtable members is to set aside dedicated time to develop your social media: let it be your mission and be sure that it is strategic. It isn’t just a simple marketing tool, it isn’t something that we can leave to a volunteer or intern to plan and implement. Don’t just post on social media, but engage, share and comment on others if you want that engagement in return. Start off with mastering Facebook, because it's the most utilized platform and managing more than one won't be as effective, quality over quantity. Lastly, try, if you can, to hire someone specifically for social media. It is a job all its own.
We look forward to growth in audience and engagement through our new information, new tools, and knowledge that we gather