Last month, I sat in on an awesome Lunch with NEMA session with John Beck, Deputy Director of ArtsBoston.
ArtsBoston is AMAZING. From their website:
ArtsBoston is a champion for Greater Boston’s arts and cultural institutions and a collaborative partner for public, private, and nonprofit leaders who seek to engage more deeply with the region’s arts and cultural sector. We gather, analyze, and disseminate data that provides a window into the significance of arts and cultural organizations to the region. We also help those organizations build their audiences and work more productively and effectively.
John gave us an overview of the amazing work his team is doing through the ArtsBoston Audience Initiative, a resource for actionable data about arts audiences in the region. Additionally, John shared The Arts Factor, an ArtsBoston initiative that uses data to demonstrate the positive impact of the arts on the Greater Boston area. Together, the Audience Initiative and The Arts Factor are powerful tools to help break down barriers to participation in the arts across the sector.
Essentially, the Audience Initiative is a community-wide database of arts participation. Subscribing organizations give ArtsBoston demographic information about their visitors (ticket buyers, members, donors, subscribers) exported from their CRM systems. ArtsBoston merges the data, cleans it up, and returns an enterprise-level view of patrons by overlaying institution-specific data with demographic information from Acxiom, a consumer information aggregator. The result is a picture of participation in the arts in Boston writ large: with over 56 participating organizations, ArtsBoston is looking at over 1.5 million unique households.
John highlighted four ways institutions can use data from the Audience Initiative to expand their base:
- Understand existing audiences: Organizations can search arts patrons by zip code, show geographic gaps in participation, and both diversify their audience outreach and identify best prospects. There are tools to benchmark current visitor demographics against aggregated data and the census, to look at both overall and show-by-show audience composition. The most surprising finding John shared is that 76% of people in the database attend only one organization. That’s insane! As John pointed out, these single-institution-goers represent the best potential audience for any arts organization in the area, since they are already “in the door” (so to speak). Also, retention rates are very, very low (4 out of 5 ticket buyers don’t return!). John suggested that, instead of overprospecting and continuously hunting down new audiences, arts institutions would get a better return on investment by investing in retention. It comes down to this: an institution’s definition of loyalty versus a patron’s definition can vary widely. (One visit per month? Per year? Per exhibition? Multiple visits? Visits to programs and exhibitions?) We need to figure out what we want participation in our institutions to really look like, and then plan audience building and visitor retention accordingly.
- Engage existing audiences: By seeing a holistic view of patrons across all participating arts participations, organizations can identify potential members, create personal messages, and target first-time buyers. John used the Central Square Theater here as an example of an institution that takes a strategic approach to turn first-time visitors into subscription patrons.
Here is a summary of the marketing strategy used by Nicholas Peterson & his team: They identify first-time buyers at the point of sale, and immediately invite them back after the show via direct mail and email. In the return invite, they acknowledge the patron’s participation (thank you, we know you’re new…) and incentivize a return visit with appropriate, time-sensitive offers. Evaluate, adjust, repeat. Subscriptions are up by 50% and there has been a 63% increase in multi-ticket buyers…so something must be working.
- Find new audiences: The ArtsBoston database is a great place for prospect-finding, list trading, and cross-promotion. With cross-over analysis, institutions can look at their own visitors to identify how many they share with other area organizations. With tools to track and analyze audiences after each event and between types of programs, this is can be a powerful way to evaluate outreach and diversity initiatives.
At the end of the webinar, John turned to audience data collection techniques (you can’t invite them back if you don’t have their contact information!) Here are some SUPER USEFUL tips from John:
- There needs to be an organizational commitment to data collection. Start at the top. Show that you act on data and use them in meaningful ways.
- Re-imagine role of admissions and/or the box office. It is THEIR JOB to collect information from patrons. Take advantage of that small barrier to collect information at the moment someone comes in.
- Incentivize the behavior you want (they give you information!) with strategic, well-structured rewards (discounts for sharing information, easy and FREE online registration).
I had never thought about this before, but John is so right: Why would you charge someone a service fee for booking online?! We should be offering discounts to people who book ahead! There are more opportunities to capture visitor data with online booking. It’s guaranteed admission, whether the patrons actually visit or not. It’s waaaaay easier to plan events when you have some sort of attendance estimate. Why would we disincentive online registration by throwing up barriers to access?
These data-driven insights — and more! — can be found in the PDF of John’s presentation, available here!
mindful museums 