CSUF's new Performing Arts Center

To begin, Elizabeth, tell us about CSUF's College of the Arts

Cal State Fullerton, located in Orange County, is a school of just over 35,000 students. The College of the Arts boasts approximately 2,700 students working toward professional and creative excellence in the visual arts, music, dance and theatre.

In addition to over 75 annual performances by student ensembles in the Department of Music, 17 productions by the Department of Theatre and Dance, and numerous student exhibits in 3 small campus galleries, we have also welcomed more than 30 professional musicians to perform on campus and have held about 10 professional exhibits both on campus and at our Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana - an arts satellite facility.

As the PR / Marketing Director for an educational facility and a performance center, how do you manage your overall communication strategy. How integrated are the two facets of the College?

At CSUF, the educational mission comes first and foremost. However, presenting professional guest artists also provides a direct link and opportunity for our students, through a variety of interactions from master classes and lectures to performance -all of which support the students' growth in their artistic pursuits.  

As a result, we promote the events to both our on- and off-campus publics through e-mail and online marketing, posters (on-campus) and press and media spots (off-campus). Generating income to offset the cost of our guests' appearances is important to continue this program and to expand the opportunities for the students.

How does e-mail fit into your overall marketing mix?

E-mail has become invaluable and has been a strong component of our promotional arsenal for our younger audiences especially. We initiated PatronMail in April, 2005 and since then our web ticket sales have more than doubled! Early traffic on our site was about 1000 hits per week and that's grown to an average of 2500 hits / week.

I think we have only begun to scratch the surface of the opportunities e-mail offers. Our plan now is to better segment our e-mails so we can target audiences more precisely and increase the awareness and responses from all our different publics.

You have recently opened an exciting addition to the College. Tell us about your new Performing Arts Center.

The performing arts programs, since the opening of the university nearly 50 years ago, have been sharing 2 major performing spaces. This all changed January 13, 2006 (after nearly 20 years of planning) when we celebrated the opening of the new $48.5 million Performing Arts Center - which connects to the current facility and will be used in conjunction with it.

The new 109,000-square foot center has an 800-seat concert hall, 250-seat thrust theatre, 150-seat black box theatre along with a good amount of support rooms including rehearsal, laboratory, studio and technical spaces.

In addition to student ensemble concerts and theatrical productions, the new center is also hosting a wide-variety of guest artists this spring...from Deborah Voigt and Orange County's Pacific Symphony Orchestra to a guitar duo from Bulgaria and the Empire Brass.

How did e-mail play a role in the announcement and publicity of the new Center? What results did you see?

Numerous publicity campaigns helped us to open the new center this January, but without the use of e-mail we would have never gotten the word out to all our supporters and friends about all the exciting facets of the opening. 

In addition to bringing attention to and linking our patrons with tickets for the opening and season tickets, we used e-mail to share exciting news like KCET's (southern California's largest public television station) special on the new center. We also created special e-mail blasts to let all our patrons know about the glorious newspaper reviews from gala-opening performances.

Excitingly, since our opening - and with the help of so much positive press coverage - our web page hits have again skyrocketed... increasing by nearly 120%. We've also seen a growth of our e-mail list from 3,000 to 4,000 e-mail addresses.

Now we just have to keep this momentum going!