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Issue of Art Connections, with links to ARTblog
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Tell us about the American Repertory Theatre?
Since 1980, the A.R.T. has presented 160 productions (over half of which were premieres of new plays, translations, and adaptations) in 81 cities in 22 states, and worldwide in 16 countries on four continents. The company has garnered many of the nation's most distinguished awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a Tony Award, and a Jujamcyn Award.
The A.R.T. presents a varied repertoire of new plays, progressive productions of classical texts, and collaborations between artists from many disciplines. It also is a training ground for young artists. The theatre's artistic staff teaches undergraduate classes in acting, directing, dramatic literature, design, and playwriting at Harvard, and in 1987 the A.R.T. founded the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. In conjunction with the Moscow Art Theatre School, the Institute provides world-class training for graduate-level actors and dramaturges.
You have a big target for your e-list growth. How are you planning to meet it and what success have you had so far?
Currently we have 9,000 e-mail addresses and we aim to reach 15,000 by the end of July 2007. To achieve this, we've focused - like many other organizations - on traditional ways of gathering e-mail addresses like ticketing transactions and snail mail newsletter solicitations. We also give away tickets to lighter selling performances, strategically targeting valuable constituencies. For instance, for our most recent production, Britannicus, we contacted local realtors offering them and their recent customers free tickets. To take the strain of reserving these tickets off our box office, all RSVP's are done through an online form, which captures relevant information in an Excel database.
After the performance, we thank the patrons for attending and send them the most recent edition of A.R.T. Connections (our e-mail newsletter). We also offer a voucher for a free drink next time they attend the A.R.T. if they forward the e-mail to five or more people. What's most significant is that our opt-out rate for this audience is nearly zero. Since we began, we've had an opt-out rate of 0.58% and a forward rate of 4.66%. Our last e-mail was forwarded 23 times. Since the end of August our list has grown 51%!
For us, an e-mail address connected to a patron who has attended a performance is more valuable than someone who has no experience with us at all. So our goal isn't to build our e-list with just any addresses, but to develop lasting relationships with valuable customers. To achieve this, it's often just a matter of tweaking current operations and not missing an opportunity.
Tell us about ARTblog and the feedback and results it receives.
Last August, shortly after I joined the A.R.T., members of our company left to perform Three Sisters at the Edinburgh International Festival. At the same time, rehearsals began in Amsterdam (with Gideon Lester, our Associate Artistic Director) for our production of Wings of Desire - a collaboration with Toneelgroep Amsterdam.
I saw this as a tremendous opportunity to document an international collaboration and suggested establishing our own blog. To launch the ARTblog Gideon posted his thoughts on adapting Wings and joining other members of the company in Edinburgh. In early November, an actor in Wings, Bernard White, posted entries about his experiences rehearsing and performing in Amsterdam and continued during the Cambridge run. We received very touching comments and "thank-yous" from readers who had shared the travel stories.
The benefit of ARTblog was also illustrated after Gideon Lester posted his thoughts about a production of Hell House he had just seen in New York. The same weekend there was a segment on National Public Radio about the production and soon after we received a lot of traffic to ARTblog from people searching "Hell House" in major search engines. For the month before Gideon's post about Hell House we were averaging about 14 pageviews a day. The month after his post, that increased to 64 pageviews/day and throughout the run of Wings of Desire, we averaged 124 pageviews/day.
Can you describe College Night and the role that e-mail has played in developing the program?
We started College Night at the end of the 05/06 season in partnership with the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC). Students from area colleges are invited to attend an A.R.T. performance for free. There is a post-performance discussion with the artists as well as a reception where the artists often mingle with the students. The evening provides a great opportunity for interaction between arts students and artists. With seven College Nights to date, we have welcomed 1,200 students from over 30 different colleges.
Our College Night invitations are distributed exclusively via e-mail. Sharing a building with the HRDC has created a strong working relationship and their board members send our invitation to their mailing list. We also have contacts in the theatre and arts departments at colleges and universities in the Greater Boston area who forward it to anybody taking courses in their department. One of the best things about e-mail is the ease with which it can be forwarded, but with this network we can't easily quantify how many people receive the e-mail invitation. We do know we've started getting RSVPs from students at Cornell and Northwestern. And we've had as many as 300 students attend a performance - with publicity coming from a single e-mail campaign.
After each College Night we send a "Thank You" e-mail with more information about our student pass and discounted ticketing programs. These e-mails have an average click-through rate of 8.67%. For the 06/07 Season 100% of our Season Passes have been sold since the first College Night!
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