Arts Marketing for Dummies: Tactical Ops

In my first Arts Marketing for Dummies post, we started out at 30,000 feet, surveying the landscape of non-profit structure and motivations. This is the kind of thing that drives harried non-profit marketers crazy, because they are not tasked with reinventing their company’s business model. So let’s take a more tactical approach.

There’s just one core assumption that everything else here is built on: Non-profit communications (marketing, PR, development) are first and foremost communications with their audience. They’re part of a relationship that exists, or are part of building a relationship. (All too often, in a stressed non-profit, that relationship takes a turn toward hostage-taking at the end of the fiscal year: “Give Now or We’ll Shoot Next Season!)

But non-profits–partly because they believe their audience is older and out of it–have yet to take full advantage of the productivity advances provided by technology. Arts organizations often blame their programming for gray-haired audiences, but if you survey the larger population about any given exhibit or performance, you will find that most people have never heard of it. Because arts groups lack money for large mass-media campaigns, they tend to market to their existing audience more intensively.

That doesn’t mean the arts don’t use technology, it just means, usually, they use everything else, too. They call you on the phone, they mail you letters and newsletters and brochures and postcards, they email you, they tweet at you, and pester you to like them on Facebook. The non-profit gun of choice must be the shotgun.

Log in to almost any private company’s site, including the startiest start-up, and you’ll generally be offered communications choices, sometimes basic options and sometimes insanely granular. You can adjust these as you go along. Then, if you purchase something, an account history is created that you can see as well. Often, you’re presented with further options in managing your account.

Now visit a non-profit site. Can you even log in? Do you see anything that suggests a communications strategy based on your preferences? Can you send night-of-show alerts to your phone? How easy is it to interact with and manage your “account,” view your donation history this year?

Or do you see a content shotgun pointed in your direction? Read the blog. Watch this video. Follow us on Twitter. Sign up for the newsletter. RING RING. “Hi, we noticed you purchased tickets online five minutes ago. Would you like to buy two more, or make a donation?”

Is that a relationship, or just someone who is incredibly demanding of your attention? In my experience, when people in business aren’t sure what the best thing to do is, they may do many, many things not very well, in the hopes that something works.

Non-profits know from experience that direct mail supplies so much response, as does a telemarketing or telefundraising campaign, and then there’s online solicitation. So they all go into the hopper. If you bought a single ticket four years ago, you’re getting something in the mail.

I know that in business “self-help” you’re supposed to provide people with numbered lists, so here goes. I just have one but I will number it. Oh, and add boldface.

1) Reorganize yourself around online communications (aka “Tweet first”).

I won’t need to tell most of you that the game has changed. But to get the most out of the time and money available to your non-profit, you’ve got to begin with online communications, not use them as a supplement. (Drop the senior-citizen excuse: 80-year-olds have email.) This may seem easy enough but old habits die hard. Would you give an exclusive to a major newspaper…or your audience on Facebook? Would you write up a full press release, or tweet about it to the reporters following you on Twitter?

Media coverage of the arts is occasional these days, so I would estimate that some 80 percent of news releases don’t actually need to exist, if you judged strictly on coverage generated. They exist because that’s how you justify your PR salary. Who needs to know this information? Isn’t it easier to just tell them yourself, through channels you already possess?

I have to ask, because this always pains me, but how many non-profits actively solicit email addresses from various contact points? Not just that little box on your site, but volunteers walking around with clipboards at events. Email is the actual gold standard, but you’d never really know it from how people treat it. “People never see it,” carp old-school types who have not been inspecting recycling bins to see the…what? 90 percent?…of unread direct mail.

(If you get season tickets sent to you in the mail, note the envelope probably says so in large letters. That’s because people were seeing that it was a letter from “that arts group” and throwing their tickets away.)

I’m always a little stunned by organizations that refuse to spend the money on a self-returning postcard asking for email addresses from their audience. “Too expensive,” they say, as they prepare for the design, printing, mailhouse, and postage for a direct mail drop. But that postcard should probably go out every six months, to keep track of new emails. (How easy is it for your email subscribers to update their email address on their own?)

Established non-profits can be august personages. They have very nice stationery and they intend to use it. That has its major-donor place. But what about online micro-donors? They likely do not care about the weight of your bond.

Micro-donation is scalable. Weak ties are fine with micro-donation–it’s more a question of whether the funding project sounds exciting or necessary. Independent artists, through Kickstarter, are discovering the power of pocket money, while larger organizations are still sending out direct mail donation requests that start at $25, but usually have $75 circled, as a suggestion.

It’s 2011, and I still walk into press rooms to be handed large folders full of printed material. People hand me CDs. In the best case, this is redundant, because it’s already online. In the worst case, I get to do data entry or wonder where in the evening I misplaced that CD, which didn’t fit in my pocket. Even if you don’t have a full website to store press materials at, you can still sign up for a Dropbox account.

Online comes first. Online comes before the brochure. Don’t you dare print that first and then chop it up for online use. Stop “repurposing.” Your audience is online. Your brochure should be a shriveled appendage by this point, sent only to strange outposts far beyond the reaches of civilization. This is where you will start to find efficiencies, as you start to drop a few of those superfluous balls you’ve been juggling.

Far from doing everything, all at once, the goal here is to do online primarily, and do it very well. The handwritten thank-you note still has its place, but it’s hard to think of any regular communications to your audience at large that shouldn’t be conducted online.

As for the wider audience, stop automatically going back to the printed well. Online advertising and sponsorship will cost a fraction of what it would cost in print. You have, for once, the chance to experiment and test with various sites and messaging formats. That’s where your time is going to best spent: discovering what works online. (Trust me, if you don’t discover what works online, you have a dark future ahead of you.)

As a postscript on this point, a short story: I’m not sure how long The Gathering Note existed, here in Seattle. Since June 2007? Founder Zach Carstensen is moving on from running it as a multi-author blog. For the bulk of its life, despite it being a major source of online classical music reviews locally, it went unadvertised upon. Keep in mind that there was no reason to visit the blog unless you were interested in classical music, so it was a targeted readership. I’m sure you could have offered TGN $25 and gotten an ad placement. But no one did. You know why? Because arts groups do not yet think “online.”

Here at the SunBreak we’ve been writing about and reviewing local arts for two years. We average over 10,000 unique visitors a month (or 20,000, depending on the stats package), presumably people who are either interested in local arts or unable to shake the habit of clicking on our links even though the arts are anathema to them. In two years, we’ve been queried about arts advertising and sponsorship twice. People haven’t even asked. I find that amazing.

I know, you’re busy working on a great new brochure. You have a conference to attend on how to attract younger audience members.

No, I kid. But I don’t. The audience you want is online. Stop messing around with the other stuff. You’ll get a lot more done.