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volume five
issue one
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Welcome to our first E-Marketer of the Month for 2007 featuring Will Crockett, Director of Performing Arts Marketing at UNC Charlotte, who is reforming the Performing Arts Department's marketing program (with the help of e-marketing!) in conjunction with the opening of its brand new performance facility. Read on...
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Featured E-Marketer: Will Crockett
Director of Performing Arts Marketing at UNC Charlotte
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Will Crockett
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With a degree in Arts Administration from the University of Alabama's Department of Dance & Theatre, William Crockett started his arts marketing career with the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. In 2004, he became the Director of Performing Arts Marketing with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, just as the Departments of Dance & Theatre and Music were moving into a new state-of-the-art performance facility.
Despite being relatively young, the two departments have experienced
phenomenal growth in enrollment, performances, and the variety of arts
experiences offered, with over 60
days of performances each academic year. UNCC's "season" is comprised of two guest artist
series, four week-long music concert series, an opera, a lab theater
series, two dance productions, two theater productions, and the occasional
guest speaker.
After working in other institutions with a long history, William is pleased to be part of a new era at UNC Charlotte, marketing a wide variety of performing arts in a brand new setting. The departments' new facility has brought new challenges, but William has found that making some key changes is having a great impact - especially on the e-marketng front.
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Q & A with Will Crockett
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Campaign for UNCC November concert series
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As Director of Performing Arts Marketing, what are your major responsibilities? You've had a lot of set-up work to do since you arrived in 2004. Tell us about the changes you've made.
My charge is probably no different than that of many marketing folks - to attract and retain an audience. With performances presented at irregular intervals, the challenge is how to communicate a lot of stuff without breaking the bank.
When I got here, we had no e-mail lists, no mailing lists, no records of attendance, no electronic box office. So I've been building everything a little bit at a time. Since I'm a one-person operation, I've got to be careful how I manage my time. Starting from scratch was trickier than I thought. Before I could get into the bells and whistles of marketing activity, I felt that we had to offer an arts-going experience that was welcoming for our new patrons.
We started with the basics - being able to accept credit cards at the box office, posting clear directions on how to get here and where to park, launching a new one-stop Web site specifically for all the performing arts on campus, and building up our lists for mail and e-mail. Also, our student labor pool of ushers and box office staff were trained to be the friendliest, most knowledgeable individuals you'd ever encounter.
Once these things were in place, we really rolled up our sleeves. We've worked with our colleagues in Alumni Affairs, Development, and other academic departments to turn "friends of the university" into frequent patrons and frequent patrons into subscribers. We developed better consistency in our advertising and a wider distribution for our media relations.
E-marketing is the newest addition to your marketing strategy. Tell us why you decided to adopt e-mail and how you are integrating it into the 'bigger picture'.
Between writing releases, designing posters and ads, and just plain "keeping up," I don't have much time. PatronMail is great because I can design the campaigns during down times and let them go out when I'm swamped. It also allows us great experimentation. With every e-mail I send out, I learn a tremendous amount at a low cost. Is our e-mail list hot or cold? Do people like a postcard or a newsletter? Did I send it too early or too late? With each campaign, I learn things about our patrons, making the next campaign that much stronger.
Our performance schedule can be random and can include a huge variety of events. I signed on with PatronMail with the intent of doing the e-postcards. Now, I feel that the e-newsletter works better for us because it keeps people in the loop about everything that's going on, driving people to our Web site. It's a much more proactive approach to keeping our patrons informed than a sporadic postcard in their inbox.
Your first campaign was a great success. Can you tell us about the e-mail you sent and the results you saw. Why do you think the campaign was successful?
At the end of a semester, we always have a marathon of music concerts. It is usually about 7-8 different ensembles performing over 10-12 days. It can get a little crazy - a concert on Monday and Tuesday, no show Wednesday, back on Friday, no Saturday show...
For our late fall concert series (7 different concerts over 10 days), I sent out an e-postcard on Monday, November 27. It was "down-and-dirty" - just a picture, a list of the events, and the box office phone number. Normally, we average a house that is 50% full. However, our first 3 events sold out and all of the following events ran at over 70% full!
Until now, we haven't had a strong e-mail presence, but I strongly feel that e-mail allows us to really reach our patrons. Not everyone can catch the Sunday paper or see a postcard in all the other junk (snail) mail. But we all have e-mail accounts and we all check them 50 times a day. As far as putting our info in front of people's faces, there's not a better way to do it!
Tell us about your Bring-a-Buddy pass and how it's helping you build your list and audience numbers.
Because we're an academic institution, we have a lot of students in our audience who are required to see the show for one course or another. To make the experience more fun, we created the Bring-a-Buddy pass. I went to all the professors who required students to see our shows, and asked them to distribute to their classes a Bring-a-Buddy pass, which allows a student to purchase an additional student ticket for only $3. How did the students redeem the coupon at the box office? They had to give us their e-mail address!
This was completely win-win. Firstly, even though students were required to attend, they had an incentive to bring someone with them. Secondly, our surveys showed us that once students had actually been in the building, seen a show, and not lapsed into a coma from boredom, they actually enjoyed their experience. Thus, I accumulated a student e-mail list that was fairly hot - students who had been here, brought a friend, and were likely to come back.
Buddy Passes can make up about 25% of our student population at any given performance. Additionally, we're fairly certain those students come back to see more shows since our overall student audience has increased by about 30% over the past season and a half. The passes have been working so well for students that we'll probably extend the offer to other ticket buyers too.
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Winter E-mail Marketing Seminars Planned for this March
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We're hard at work finalizing our next e-mail marketing seminar tour with Gene Carr for this coming March. The dates aren't firm yet, but we wanted to give you advance notice of the cities we're planning to visit:
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Cincinnati
- Dallas
- Ft. Lauderdale/Miami
- San Francisco
- Las Vegas
- Tulsa
We'll keep you posted on exact dates and times in an upcoming newsletter.
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Improve your e-marketing with books by Eugene Carr, President of Patron Technology
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Wired for Culture: How E-mail is Revolutionizing Arts Marketing (Second Edition)
Learn how to get started with e-mail and do MORE marketing for LESS money and get BETTER results.
- Essential tips for great e-mail marketing
- Why an investment in e-mail marketing will provide a spectacular return
- What arts patrons do online, and why arts e-mail is so powerful
Web Sites for Culture: Essential Principles for Great Arts Web Sites
Provides a structured way of thinking about how to build and improve your arts Web site. You'll learn:
- The basics of site strategy, conception, and design
- What most arts sites are lacking
- What it takes to run your site once it's launched
- How to get properly listed on Yahoo! and Google
Sign-Up for Culture: The Arts Marketer's Guide to Building an Effective E-mail List
Learn how to grow your e-mail list!
- 20 top ideas to build your list quickly
- How arts patrons behave online and how to market to them
- What goes into an e-mail acquisition plan and how to create one
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$15 each from Patron Technology (click here to buy)
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If you have interesting and creative initiatives that you would like to have featured
or know of an arts marketer that you would like to recommend
for one of our upcoming editions, please contact info@patrontechnology.com.
Watch for the next edition of our E-Marketer of the Month
coming February 13, 2007.
Patron Technology
850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 801 | New York, NY 10019 | 212-271-4328
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