The Spotlight : Marketing

Call for Upcoming Conference Feedback

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:17:00 GMT

One of the sessions at November's Blackbaud conference will be Effective Pricing and Discounting Strategies for Arts & Cultural Organizations. With that in mind, we wanted to gather as much feedback as possible to tailor the session to your needs. If you can, please check out the quick, five-question survey below. Please email your responses to the session coordinator jackie.huffman at blackbaud dot com. The more responses we get, the better the session will be. Thanks!

When do you offer discount pricing to the general public (non-members)? Choose all that apply.
1. The day of the event
2. The week of the event
3. The month of the event
4. All of the above
Do you use any of these promotion strategies? Choose all that apply.
1. Coupon with a promotion code
2. Buy one get one free offers
3. Combo offers that include multiple events
4. Packages with different types of events/items (e.g. dinner discount and event tickets or a CD and the performance tickets)
5. Other? Please specify.
Have you used any revenue management techniques? Choose all that apply.
1. Airline style pricing in which the closer to the event the higher the prices
2. Charging premium prices for specific events
3. Last minute discounting
4. Other? Please specify.
What are the biggest challenges your organization faces in regards to pricing and promotion? What are you doing to deal with them?
Would you be willing to share your experiences? If so, please provide contact information and one of our presenters will contact you.

Add A Facebook Fan Box To Your Site

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:27:00 GMT

My colleague Chad recently wrote about 6 Dogooding Webby Things Your Nonprofit Should Check Out, and I wanted to show how quick and easy it is to implement one of those webby things, the Facebook Fan Box. It's not a fit for every organization, but if you have a strong Facebook presence and want to promote it on your website, don't let the idea of building this custom piece intimidate you. And the steps work for everyone, whether your site uses PEO or a different application.

Step One: Visit your Facebook page. Go to your organization's Facebook page and click the link on the left that says Add Fan Box to your site.

Step Two: Get the code. You will be taken to a second page where you can check whether you want to include both your stream and fans, or just one of the two. You will get the auto-generated code along with a preview, like this:

Step Three: Add the code to your site. Edit the "connections" entry in the code if you want to display more than 10 fans at a time, and the "width" bit if you want it to be wider than 300 pixels. If you use Patron Edge Online as your content management system, save this code to Notepad as a .htm file and add it to PEO as a screen part. If you use a different CMS, the process should be pretty similar. Of course there are advanced options and extra styling you can get into, but these three painless steps get you from zero to Fan Box in five minutes.

Is your site using the Fan Box feature or custom Facebook applications? How do they fit into your marketing strategy or promote your mission? Leave a message for other readers in the comments.

The Value of a Ticket

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:57:00 GMT

This is a guest post by Michael Culler. Michael is the Managing Consultant for Blackbaud's Arts and Cultural consulting practice.

Given the current economy, overall decline in attendance and the competitive landscape for patrons and supporters of arts organizations, every organization must consider diversification in brand awareness, funding and underwriting – even around what is printed on tickets or done with a ripped ticket.

From corporate messaging on tickets where the sponsor gains passive access to potential consumers, to cross-marketing with “like-minded” organizations, the relationship with the patron or supporter has an opportunity to deepen. By building an intrinsic value into the ticket, you benefit as patrons take more than a “one and done” attitude towards their relationship with you.

With corporate sponsorship via a physical ticket, it's a win for both parties; the corporation gains access to a new customer base through brand awareness, and still has an opportunity to demonstrate its softer, more philanthropic side. You benefit by lowering the overall cost of the show, but more importantly you have an opportunity to maintain a level of affordability for the patron or guest by keeping ticket costs lower.

One way to build intrinsic value into a ticket is to offer the patron a discount on a future transaction, such as a subscription or a single ticket sale. Additionally the ticket number could be used as a promotional code to be used online, or as part of a larger raffle at the end of show run or season.

The relationship via the ticket could extend to certain conveniences or future benefits outside of your organization. It could serve as a discount for parking at the next show, for dinner at a local restaurant or as part of a larger discount cross-marketing plan between you and another organization.

Cultural organizations should consider building a culture with their patrons that makes it bad form to throw out a ticket.

Even More Potential

Nicholai Burton — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:24:00 GMT

I got some feedback on the Potential Revenue Report I put up last month and have made some improvements. Some folks told me that promoters who are used to working with Ticketsmasher (ack!) always ask for reports on free seats totaled by price level. One client told me she manually counts every unsold seat on the sales map for every price level in an event, does the math and then sends the information to the promoter in a spreadsheet. With that in mind and to make your lives easier, there are now two reports. The first breaks down by area within the event and the second breaks down by price level.

To install:

Download this set of files: Potential Revenue Report.zip
Add the stored procedure to your PE database
Add the report into Patron Edge per Knowledgebase solution BB142029

If you're using the report, leave a comment and let me know how it's working and if you have any feedback about it.

As with any stuff I give out on The Spotlight, this isn't a core piece of the product; it's custom so that means it is unsupported. My analysts cannot help with the report or take questions on it. If you have any problems with it, please leave a comment, hit the forums, or send me an email.

Four strategies to thrive in a down economy

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:42:00 GMT

Things are tough all over, and though my wife and I haven't felt much effect yet I'm hearing it everywhere. And finally it's more than just the usual media/political FUD, as I was listening to Morning Edition on my way to the Baud this week and heard the recession is official. Frugal is chic again and we need to learn to get by with less. With less discretionary income, remember that it's a really special thing when a patron decides to pass on other items and come your shows, exhibits and special events. Here is some advice for ways to thrive, because just surviving isn't enough.

Know thy audience

The best way to keep and grow your audience is to give them a memorable experience. To do so, you need to always be listening and capturing what they want, and then acting on it. Make sure that you've got a strong feedback loop in place so that patrons have an opportunity to tell you how they've heard about you and what they're interested in, and your internal folks have the ability to report on that feedback and use it to influence decisions about your programming. Great places to capture feedback are:

At the time of sale for walk-up and phone.
Email and snail mail.
On your website.
At the exit, in the gift shop, or other locations. This can be comment cards and a box, or a standalone kiosk linked to some kind of document or feedback capture system. Using a Google Docs form is an easy, free way to achieve this.

Know thyself

You have a lot of smart people at your organization, and folks with a passion for what you're doing. You have people who give money and volunteer time to further your mission. Make sure these people have a chance to share their thoughts and ideas with you. The feedback of your front-line people is just as valuable as that of your board. They see patterns, shifts, bottlenecks and pain points in a way that doesn't show up on reports. They also see firsthand what gets your patrons excited. Capture this feedback and use their ideas.

Move quickly

If you're in a situation where you have a meeting before the meeting to form a committee to oversee the task force that organizes even more meetings, it's the perfect time to break that cycle. What is the real goal of all these committees? If you're not sure, kill the committee and let those people work on things where they bring more value. If every decision needs to be vetted by five committees and two managers, you can't move quickly to take advantage of new opportunities or to streamline things that may improve customer service and audience size. Sometimes this can point to a leadership vaccuum, so make sure there is a strong, confident leader (confident does not equal stubborn) to guide you.

Respect the web

Your website is not an online version of your brochure. It is the starting point for people to get to know you better and to interact with you, on their time. You need to constantly keep the website up-to-date, not just with your programming schedule but with special events, news, pictures, maybe even a little bit of video. Put up interactive quizzes, downloadable theatre notes, mp3 samples, links to your social media pages. Give the kids a scavenger hunt to print and bring to the museum, and if they email it back with all the right answers give them a special award to put on their imbee pages. I'm not saying to clutter your site with useless tchotchkes, but give your audience a reason to stay on the site for more than a few seconds and to keep coming back on a regular basis. What you provide is an experience, and the web is the best way to give people a taste of it.

There are tons of great ideas to increase interaction and better respond to audience tastes. What is your organization doing to thrive in the current economic climate?

How Do You Welcome New Clients?

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:22:00 GMT

photo by Crossing Sparks

When patrons become associated with your organization, either by purchasing tickets or signing up to receive information, do they receive any kind of introductory materials? How do you go about getting lists of new people who have expressed this interest? One great, fully-automated way is to use the Welcome Letter feature within Patron Edge. Not many organizations are aware of what this is or how it works, but it can really save time in getting a list of new folks. When a CRM record is created, there is a field called Welcome Letter in the client details section; in order to include this record in a welcome mailing, be sure this field is set to Yes.

After records have been created, go into Administration, Client Management, Welcome Letter. This will throw up some options to help narrow down the list of clients to include in the mailing, like when the record was created or a ZIP code range. Run it a couple of times on small sets of clients to get an idea of how it works, and make sure to uncheck the Save to CSV File option until you know the list has who you want. When the file is generated, the Welcome Letter flag on client records is updated so that they do not receive a letter multiple times. When the list looks good, check that box to Save to CSV and click Generate. Now you have a file with the same information that is listed in the report; you can take this into your favorite mail merge application and create letters or labels to send a welcome package. Following is one scenario showing how cool this feature can be:

A client comes to your organization for the first time to see a show or an exhibit. He had a great time and signs up for your mailing list. At the end of the day, you generate welcome letters and run the CSV file through your preferred mail merge program. If you don't use MS Office, I highly recommend doing your mail merge through the free, open-source OpenOffice.org suite (you may want to wait a couple days to download it though; version 3.0 just came out this week and their site is being hammered from the huge demand). One version of the letter is for those who have email addresses and the second one is for those who do not; the second letter is nuanced slightly differently to encourage the client to give you his email address. Along with the welcome letter, your packet includes a brochure about your history and mission and a schedule of upcoming events. Now here's the nice bit; you throw in two teaser coupons for a nominal discount that the client can give to a friend. Some clients will use the coupons for themselves, but for the most part those who had a good time and signed up to receive information from you are the same kind of folks who will talk you up to their friends. You've just gotten free advertising from a credible source, and even better is that you can now track the coupon's effectiveness as a marketing tool!

Add this into your welcoming process for new folks. Come up with something awesome and creative, and most importantly be sure to share your experience in the comments. The Spotlight currently has about 200 regular readers and I know there are some good ideas out there!

Tomorrow is Museum Day!

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:01:00 GMT

I hope all of you museums out there are participating in the national Museum Day tomorrow, September 27th! Museum day is a great way to get those people who were interested in your organization but not willing to pay admission on the chance that the experience would be disappointing. Get them in, give them lots of information, and maybe even offer a one-day discount for purchasing a membership. For my readers out there from theatres and operas, go visit Smithsonian Magazine's Museum Day site to find out what museums near you are participating. I'm trying to decide between The Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon and Drayton Hall plantation. Have you participated in this event in past years? How has it affected visitors and membership? Leave a quick note in the comments.

Blogging the AZA Conference, Part II

Nicholai Burton — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:12:00 GMT

Continuing on with some more stuff I picked up at the conference, there was a big push on social media and keeping a well-maintained web presence. See below for the highlights and some ideas on how you can improve the web experience for your visitors, members and donors.

The session: Using Web 2.0 for Education, Advocacy, and Outreach

The concept: The social web is here. If you ignore it you are doing your organization and your mission a big disservice. Having a presence on the social web does not mean creating an account on every social networking site, but choosing carefully which ones to participate in, based on where your market is.

The details:

For those who still aren't familiar, the main concept of the term Web 2.0 is that the web is no longer a one-way information portal. It now serves and connects people in new ways every day, with things like blogs, forums, wikis, podcasting, video sharing, social networking and other tools.

You cannot afford to ignore your web presence. If you haven't built your own web presence on at least one of the major social networking sites, someone else has probably already done it for you and may be accidentally (or deliberately) spreading incorrect information. If you haven't created an account on Facebook or MySpace, take a quick look because it's likely that a fan of your organization is running a page under your name. During this session there were real-life examples of where this had happened. Luckily in every case, the person running the page was very happy to give it over to the actual organization. Know where you are and what things say about you.

Your brand does not belong to you anymore. Since the web has become so social, the reputation economy rules. You can live and die by reviews and comments about your organization. That's why it is so important to put out lots of your own content and work with individuals who are your fans. One zoo did a Flickr search for photos taken by visitors and found lots of images, some of them pretty high quality. They then went one better, sponsoring a Flickr photo contest with a prize (with rights to use the images on their site and in publications, of course), and this brought in hundreds of photos from individuals. People on the web are creating an impression of you that is out of your hands. Do what you can to mold that impression, and harness the creativity of the folks online who love what you do.

Be choosy about where you spend your time online. Instead of ignoring web presence, some people create the opposite problem by putting themselves on every social network they can find. Learn which sites your market is using and put a lot of time and effort into developing your presence on those sites. Don't create a presence on 10 different social networks, because chances are that you won't be able to keep up with all of them and those who do find you will only see outdated, half-finished content. My personal opinion is to skip MySpace altogether, it only provides any value as a place for bands to put music and concert schedules. Go with Facebook, and keep your eye on a newer social network called BrightKite, which is a location-based network. I think this one is going to get huge in the next 1-2 years.

Many people prefer self-service when possible. This one is pretty simple and was thrown out as an afterthought, but it shouldn't go unsaid. Your visitors and members want to be able to add and remove themselves from mailing lists, change their address and edit other personal details.

Now get out there, join a social network, improve your website and leave a comment about your experience!

Blogging the AZA conference, part I

Nicholai Burton — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 14:28:00 GMT

Sorry for not getting any posts out last week. I was at the conference for the Association of Zoos and Aquariums in Milwaukee and was taking everything in. There were a lot of specific kinds of issues I didn't realize that zoos face, but many of the problems and business practices do have a broader reach. In this series, I'm going to discuss relevant bits of information I picked up at various sessions and talk about how you can apply it to your organization to help achieve your mission.

The session: Membersip Marketing: Integrating Marketing Principles into your Membership Program

The concept: The speakers discussed having strong reporting and knowing where your market is, and taking advantage of the web to increase your reach and enrich your members' lives. This session was pretty good overall, and while a lot of the things discussed are common sense there were some cool perspectives on membership marketing and really good stuff on member retention.

The details:

Get new members to visit you as frequently as possible during that first year. An actively engaged member is much more likely to stay a member for a long time compared to a member who has only visited you once or twice in a year and doesn't know your mission. Have an inexpensive event or mixer for first-year members to get to know each other. If you're a zoo, it can be as simple as a behind-the-scenes animal feeding with a zookeeper. If you're an art museum it could be a brief lecture by a local art historian about your latest exhibition. Get creative, but get those people in!

If members get messages that aren't relevant, they will tune you out. With information overload in the form of mail, email, TV, radio and the web, you have to stay relevant in order to keep a person's filter from coming down on you. Once a member has decided that you aren't pertinent to his life, chances of renewing that membership are very low. If you send out electronic or print newsletters, there should be two versions; one that goes to visitors on your mailing list, and another one tailored specifically to members. Give the members something special, like an interview with a zookeeper/curator/creative director or extra detail about specific news items. Members aren't just visitors, they support your mission and want to know what is going on. The member-focused version should always include a web address to renew memberships on your site.

Tailor your marketing efforts to different target groups. Make sure you know who your market is made up of, and then determine the best way to reach those groups that are important to you. Do some data analysis to find out what ZIP codes are attending most frequently; send different marketing/renewal materials based on new vs. mult-year members or based on frequency of visits. One zoo wanted to to reach a large, Spanish-speaking market for membership, and did a lot of research rather than just sending out a direct mailing. The zoo determined that these folks have tightly-knit families and value family time greatly. They also frequently work overtime or more than one job, and want to relax on days off. This zoo's marketing materials described how there was "so much to see you can't finish in one day" and this was a major turn off. The organization wrote new materials that focused on the family aspect, the ability to bring a picnic, etc, written in native Spanish (not just translating the English copy). It was a hit and the zoo saw a major increase in membership by that market.

Measure marketing results. Marketing involves quite a bit of testing to see what works. Every organization creates and sends marketing materials, but many fail to measure the effectiveness of those campaigns. Simply capture the marketing information at the time of sale by having a quick "how did you hear about us", both at the point of sale and online. It doesn't require any customization and you can get the data back out using canned reports like the Marketing Campaign Report. It only adds a couple of seconds to a sale but makes a big difference in finding out whether or not you are spending your marketing dollars wisely.

Go take some of these ideas and run with them, and I'll be back again soon with more information from this and other great sessions.

Create maps of your patrons using free online tools

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:20:00 GMT

Check out the guest post I wrote today on The User's Edge blog. I explain how to use the RE Export module and a free service called Map a List to create a Google Maps mashup. These tools are not RE-specific though; you can run Marketing Mailing queries and generate a spreadsheet of address info, enabling you to get a visual of where your season ticket holders or major sponsors live.

What do you think? Do you find it useful to be able to visualize trends about your patrons on a map?

Choose Your Own Order Details

Nicholai Burton — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:49:00 GMT

Patron Edge contains a pretty nice feature that allows you to enter additional order information based on the price type chosen. While you will need to write your own reports for the captured data, you have a lot of flexibility with what it can do. Here are a few ideas for using special order details on price types:

If your organization participates in a reciprocal membership program, create a Member price type. Then use a drop-down to select from the available reciprocal membership programs you accept and a text field to capture the membership ID. Now you can get an accurate count of how often these people come in on a weekly or monthly basis.
If you give comp tickets to employees and staff, use a Staff price type. You can use a drop-down to record the department and have an idea of which group is coming most frequently. You could approach it a little differently and create a Comp price type, where the drop-down contains entries like Staff, Volunteer, Press, VIP, etc.
For classes, capture registration details, emergency contact information and status of a parental release form.
Some grants are given to arts and cultural organizations to bring in a wider range of ages or ethnicities. You can capture these fields in order to present before-and-after information to a grant provider to determine the effectiveness of the grant.
If your constituency is mostly local or in-state, you can create a field for County to see the geographic distribution of your patrons or visitors. This will help determine where your advertising dollars would be best spent.

Here is how to set up special order details based on price type:

Go to Administration, System Setup, Order Type Definitions and create a new order type
In the Code field, enter a value greater than 100
Enter a description, set Ticket Level Sale to Yes, and choose the appropriate options for the remaining fields. Click OK.
Go to Pricing, Price Types and edit the desired price type
In the Order Type Definition field, select the order type created above
Go to Administration, System Setup, Order Type Details and create new details as needed for the new order type. If you have never added order details before, see Knowledgebase solution BB213578 for a walkthrough.

For reporting, all of this information is stored in the TicketExtraInfo table of the database. Each entry here links to the Tickets table, so you can get to any other tables you need from there. If you are not familiar with writing Crystal reports, Blackbaud provides this service (of course, cash-filled envelopes sent to my home address also work!).

How does your organization make use of order type fields? Leave a note in the comments.

Selling out is a beautiful thing

Nicholai Burton — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 22:22:00 GMT

The PEO Labs series brings you information or advice on items that are geared towards users who can take high-level concepts or sample code and run with them. Please note that many of the things discussed are not supported. That doesn't mean that an item is a warranty-voider; it just means that the Support Analysts can't walk you through it or troubleshoot it if it breaks.

In Patron Edge Online 3.3.3, we started work on a feature that will allow you to continue to display sold out events on your website rather than having them get removed. This is a great feature in a couple of ways. First, the marketing folks will love it because patrons who visit your site can see how popular your events are and won't wait until last minute to make a purchase. A press release that says your last ballet performance sold out on the first day of sale is a great boost to your reputation. From a customer service perspective, it's also a win because people who visit your website can see that the event they want is already sold out instead of calling the box office to see if it has gone on sale or if there are still tickets available.

The reason this is a PEO Labs post is because the feature requires the help of a DBA to implement so it isn't something that a support analyst will take you through. But with a tech person and 15 minutes of free time and you can get this up and running. Here's how:

Set up Patron Edge

Go to Administration, User Setup, User Groups
Edit the Internet user group and set Update Events Active Data Table to Yes. If you don't see this option, just use the Design toolbar to turn on the field.

Create the SQL job

In Enterprise Manager or SQL Management Studio, create a SQL job to run against the PE database with the following command: exec CalcEventsActiveDataView. This is the part where you want the tech person involved. Set it to run on a schedule as frequent as your PE/PEO sync runs. By default a partial sync runs every hour, but you may want to set this more or less frequently; your mileage may vary on how long a sync takes.

Add the sales point to Patron Edge Online

Go to Administration, System Setup, Sales Points
Create a new entry that uses the number of the Internet sales point. The description can be anything you want; I would set it to the same description as you have in PE for clarity's sake.

Configure Site Settings

Here is where all of the business logic comes in. Your tech person can do the configuration, but the box office manager and marketing manager need to make some business decisions.

Set Display sold out events to 1 (leave at 0 to remove the event from the site altogether when it is sold out).
Set Display sold out shows to 1 (leave at 0 to remove the show altogether when all of its events are sold out).
Set an expression for Sold-out behavior, using one of these examples:

Option	Value	Explanation
<empty string>		Events will never be defined as "Sold Out"
Numeric value	5	Event is Sold Out once number of empty seats = 5
Percentage	10%	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10%
Min(Value, Percentage)	Min(5,10%)	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10% number of empty seats = 5, whichever is lower
Max(Value, Percentage)	Max(5,10%)	Event is Sold Out once percentage of empty seats = 10% number of empty seats = 5, whichever is higher

And with that, I bid you good weekend. Now take this stuff, run with it, and come back to leave comments about how it's working for you.

Filling in the blanks in reports

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:06:00 GMT

Imagine this scenario: You have started using the ZIP Code Analysis report pretty regularly to decide where to spend your advertising dollars, but you know that some people slip through without having the marketing or ZIP Code information entered by a user and your data could be more accurate. In Patron Edge, you can use the Audit Order Details feature to go back in after the fact and update the records that are missing info.

This is an okay tool on a one-off basis, but the real advantage of it is the ability to globally change things. For example, you have a huge line out the door for the July 4th Extravaganza and you need to get people through the line as quickly as possible. You decide to turn off the requirement to capture a marketing source to trim a couple of seconds per sale. At the end of the day, you know that your recent radio spot was the reason everyone came out to visit but you need to get this into the system for reporting. To add in the information, do this:

Go to Administration, Client Management, Audit Order Details
Use the filters to get the date range and sale types you need
Right-click and choose Select All
Click Edit and change the Marketing Source to reflect the spot you aired on WTKT
Now run your marketing reports as needed and you'll have the most accurate information, without having to export to a spreadsheet and then play with the numbers

Have you found any other good uses for the Audit Order Details feature? Share your experiences in the comments.

Send an SMS blast to patrons using free online tools

Nicholai Burton — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:51:00 GMT

You've used Patron Edge for a while, gotten the hang of Marketing Mailing, and are pretty good at generating lists for brochures and email blasts. But have you considered the possibility of using the system to send out an SMS blast to the mobile phones of your subscribers? In the past, if you wanted to send email to a mobile phone, you had to figure out how to format the email address properly in order to hit the phone, and of course every carrier uses a different format. There's a free service out called Flipout (by California-based company Teleflip) that lets you send an email - like 8432166200@teleflip.com - and it is sent to the phone as an SMS.

To use:

Sign up for the Flipout service
Create your list via Marketing Mailing and save it as a CSV file. Make sure that you're using the Restrictions feature of Patron Edge and only sending messages to patrons who have opted in. Receiving unsolicited text messages is one of my pet peeves, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Open the file in Calc or Excel and strip out any characters like parentheses or hyphens. This is easy to do with a quick Find and Replace
Append the text '@teleflip.com' to the end of the phone numbers. This can be done by adding a new column that contains only this text and then using a simple Concatenate formula. See this link for an example if you do not know how to concatenate fields
Use your favorite email merge application to send out the message.

You have to get a little creative with the CSV file, but once you've done it a time or two it becomes second nature. Are you currently sending text messages of any kind to your patrons? What are the reactions or what techniques are most effective? Leave a message in the comments.