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Welcome to our July E-Marketer of the Month featuring Steven Hadley, of Audiences Northern Ireland, who is using e-mail in a multitude of ways to reach the organization's varied member-base.
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Featured E-Marketer: Steven Hadley
Audience Development Manager for Audiences Northern Ireland
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Audience Development Manager, Steven Hadley
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With a masters in Contemporary Media and Cultural Studies and graduate training in Business Development, Steven Hadley has pursued a varied career in arts marketing and development. His work experience includes making his way from Marketing Assistant to Marketing Manager at a small multi-artform center near Manchester before moving on to be the Marketing Manager for the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool.
In 2002, Steven set up his own freelance arts marketing consultancy which lead to a role with the Ravi Shankar European tour. In 2004, he moved to Belfast to take up the position of Audience Development Manager for Northern Ireland's new Audience Development Agency (Audiences Northern Ireland), where he now works to increase and diversify audiences for the arts in Northern Ireland via delivery of a suite of tactical and strategic services.
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Q & A with Steven Hadley
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Audiences NI is a pretty grand operation. Tell us how it works and who your members are?
We are a membership based Audience Development Agency and currently have thirty members - arts organizations across Northern Ireland. Each organization pays an annual membership fee based on their annual turnover, so we are able to establish an economy of scale for all of our members, who range from large-scale concert hall, opera house and orchestra to small-scale touring theatre companies and music promotion agencies.
We deliver socio-demographic reporting and analysis, business performance reporting, consultancy, training across all aspects of operation (FOH, Customer Service, Management, Strategy Development, E-Marketing) and also work across a wide range of tactical areas where our members need more immediate and practical interventions.
How does e-mail factor into the communications strategy of the agency in its dealings with members and stakeholders?
All agency communications with members are handled through our PatronMail account. We adopted the policy of issuing visually strong, text-light e-postcards to members to alert them to training dates, seminar sessions, upcoming activity etc. Each postcard links to the relevant section of our website, where the bulk of information on each topic is stored.
This process enables us to deliver eye-catching and immediate information into the inboxes of members, whilst also driving traffic to our Web site. The agency website is a centralized resource for members, and grows organically with new postings and downloads on a weekly basis; there is also a password-protected members-only area.
Alongside the e-postcards, we also issue a bi-monthly agency newsletter which is sent to our members and also to our segmented stakeholder and prospect lists. The newsletter is an update on our activity and also includes information on partners such as the Arts Marketing Association, Arts Council NI and any regional or national arts marketing developments.
Finally, we use e-mail for our arts listings Web site (artslistings.com) which has its own e-database of arts patrons who have registered to receive our monthly arts listings update highlighting upcoming shows, on sale dates and special offers for shows and events from our member organizations.
Tell us more about artslistings.com. How does it work and to whom does it cater?
The artslistings brand covers the Web site, bi-monthly print magazine and monthly e-newsletters - all of which are generated and distributed by our agency. The artslistings.com Web site allows arts organizations to post information onto the site themselves but everything is checked internally here also. Each element of the artslistings brand reinforces the other, with the print magazine driving traffic to the Web site and the Web site having a sign-up form for the e-mail list.
Our e-list has grown by just under 100% since last September from 1600 to 3100 and open rates for the monthly e-mails are very good and well above the sector averages detailed on PatronMail. This growth has been achieved in a period of review for the brand so we are very excited and optimistic about the future development potential. Equally we have a very low opt-out rate and members report good responses to individual shows: for example, the Ulster Orchestra have generated upwards of 10% of total house sales within 48 hrs from an individual campaign for their Popular Classics concerts.
You provide assistance to smaller arts groups by sending e-mails on their behalf. How has this helped them to get the word out and increase their own profile?
We currently host e-databases for a number of our members including a theatre, two touring companies, a classical music society and a film festival. We discovered that a number of smaller organizations, though keen to incorporate e-marketing into their mix, were struggling to cope with the purely administrative tasks of database management - adding in new sign-ups, handling bouncebacks and acting on delete requests. Also, many had no data capture mechanisms on their homepages and were unsure how best to proceed.
By enabling the inclusion of sign-up forms, for each of which a specific management category is assigned within PatronMail, and by being able to provide detailed campaign reporting we have enabled a high number of arts organizations to commence e-marketing activity in a short space of time. All they need to do is supply us with the artwork and we do the rest!
For example, Belfast Film Festival were able to increase their list by over 30% within the space of two months due to the combination of the agency assisting them with online booking and e-mail capture via a PatronMail sign-up form on their Web site. We have now just launched an online questionnaire for the festival targeting their PatronMail list and received a 20% response within 48 hrs.
In what ways do you aim to further build your e-marketing strategy in the coming months?
We are hoping to re-launch the artslistings brand in the coming months and update the database profile, allowing for segmentation along both artform and geographic lines. We are also planning to put some marketing spend into promoting the brand and increasing the size of the database with a view to being able to offer access to the list to our members on an ad hoc basis for promotion of their events to specific markets. Ultimately we need to take our e-marketing function on the journey from dissemination of information to Customer Relationship Management tool.
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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 August 8, 2006.
Patron Technology
850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 801
New York, NY 10019
212-271-4328
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