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Volume Two
Issue Five
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This year marks the centennial year for New York City's Jewish Museum. Along with the celebration come challenges and this month's featured arts marketer provides us with insight into her role in the festivities. Read on to find out what Grace Rapkin, Director of Marketing for The Jewish Museum, has to say about marketing the centennial.
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Featured Arts Marketer: Grace Rapkin
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After an MBA and two years experience in the corporate world, Grace Rapkin began working in marketing for the 92nd Street Y. Following that she spent six years as a consultant working on projects for Carnegie Hall, United Way, Planned Parenthood and the New York Botanical Garden, to name a few. In 1994, Grace became The Jewish Museum's first Director of Marketing and ten years later she is gearing up for a celebration that comes only once a century.
In the Q & A that follows, Grace discusses her work at the Jewish Museum and the challenges and rewards of celebrating the institution's centennial anniversary.
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Q & A with Grace Rapkin
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DESCRIBE YOUR POSITION AT THE MUSEUM AND YOUR OVERALL STRATEGY FOR MARKETING
I came to The Jewish Museum in 1994, just after the Museum reopened following a major expansion. The expanded building included double the exhibition space, a magnificent new permanent exhibition and new visitor amenities. My mandate was to increase and diversify attendance by marketing the Museum as one of the premier New York City cultural destinations for people of all backgrounds.
Through extensive marketing research and analysis, we have identified and prioritized key target audiences that are most likely to visit the Museum, and then return with friends, family and/or join as members. We have also established a strong positioning that both communicates what the Museum is about, and works to differentiate us from other museums and cultural offerings around the city. We have updated our graphic identity, tailored our message points and increased our marketing budgets in order to heighten visibility and interest among those audiences. The Jewish Museum, branded as an art museum presenting Jewish culture for all people, was successfully launched in time for 2004, our centennial year.
WHAT MAKES MARKETING THE JEWISH MUSEUM PARTICULARLY INTERESTING AND CHALLENGING?
There is never a dull moment at The Jewish Museum. We are constantly working to promote an incredibly variable and wonderfully interesting schedule of temporary exhibitions and adult and family programs. Subjects include contemporary art, Impressionist paintings, archaeology and cartoons, just to name a very few. We present exhibitions that range from the works of Marc Chagall to contemporary artists using Nazi imagery in their work -- the expected and the unexpected. Our challenge is to get people interested in topics or artists they may not be familiar with and challenge any existing preconceptions they may have about what the Museum has to offer.
THIS IS A SPECIAL YEAR FOR THE MUSEUM. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT THE CENTENNIAL AND HOW YOU HAVE APPROACHED IT FROM A MARKETING PERSPECTIVE?
We have been working for more than two years in preparation for the celebrations. In addition to all of the special programming, parties and public open house events, we have been using this "moment" to communicate the Museum's branding more visibly and boldly with our audiences. E-mail has played an important role in this effort. E-mail functioned successfully as the most cost-effective way to send out invitations to the public for our centennial events. We partnered with many organizations, who in turn invited their audiences to these events via e-mail, thus driving traffic to the Museum and our web site. Throughout all of these efforts we have been collecting names to add to our e-mail lists, so that we can invite people back again.
AND IN GENERAL? HOW HAVE YOU BEEN USING E-MAIL AS A MARKETING TOOL? WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS FOR FURTHER INTEGRATING IT IN THE FUTURE?
Through PatronMail, we send monthly e-mail newsletters to our entire e-mail address list. In this way, we can update everyone about what is happening at the Museum that month. In addition, we have increased our e-mail capacity, so that we are able to send targeted messages via e-postcards, mid-month, about items of special interest to selected lists. We might e-mail about an upcoming family program, a sale in the shops, or send a reminder about an exhibition that will be closing soon. We try to balance sending reminders with not sending too much to any particular recipient, thus building what we hope is a mutually satisfying relationship with our audiences.
Our goal is to implement more programs to grow our lists. Currently, we collect e-mail addresses, with checklists of specific interests, in the Museum's lobby. Visitors can designate what specific programming information they are interested in, and we add them to that particular e-mail list. We plan to add a pop-up feature to our web site soon, with a little incentive that we hope will encourage more web visitors to sign up. So please visit our site at: www.thejewishmuseum.org!
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Visit the Jewish Museum's Web Site
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Learn more about PatronMail - Try Our 15 Minute Demonstration
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If you're thinking about joining the over 200 arts clients that use PatronMail -- give us 15 minutes and we'll allow you to "test-drive" a PatonMail account. During the demonstration, we'll talk about how the regulations of the anti-spam law are built into PatronMail.
The demonstration can be scheduled at your convenience.
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Click here to request a demo
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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.
Please watch for the next edition of our Arts Marketer of the Month, coming June 9, 2004.
Note: The CAN-SPAM act mandates that all commercial e-mail contains a physical mailing address, and ours is: 850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 704, New York, NY 10019
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