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The 9 Types of People in Your Organization

Today’s blog post is written by Rebekah Pearson, Digital Learning Specialist, PatronManager.

When my family gets together, it never fails that we find ourselves sitting in the living room around 5:00 PM asking the age-old question: What should we have for dinner?

I don’t know how your family solves this dilemma, but in my family, it’s not just a simple question. Putting aside the personal food preferences and restrictions of individuals in the group; under the stress of this seemingly trivial task, the distinct personalities of each person in the room comes out.

I’ve also seen this mirrored in the workplace. Perhaps you’ve had the same experience when working with colleagues on a project — like brainstorming fundraising ideas for a new season, changing your group sales strategy, deciding on a lineup of shows, or improving the process for thanking your major donors.

Having different personalities on a team can be extremely beneficial. It contributes to better decision-making, a more balanced workplace, and increased efficiency. Everyone tends to view the world through the lens of their own experience, which means others can see what you can’t, and vice versa. But this can also come with challenges when people with various perspectives try to communicate effectively. Especially when you likely have a number of different personality types in your organization.

Over the years, many different personality tests and psychological questionnaires have been put out into the world to help people discover their “personality type.” Once identified, a person’s results can be used to help improve relationships and communication with others. Some familiar approaches include Myers-Briggs or DISC. While these assessments, and many others, hold a lot of value, your team may benefit from diving into a centuries-old personality strategy that has recently taken popular hold: The Enneagram.Read the Article

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Open Studio: Design Thinking at PatronManager

Today’s blog post is written by Emma Smith, Creative Technologist, PatronManager.

This is the first in a series of three posts about the product design process here at PatronManager. We hope this gives you some insight into our process for designing new features as well as some ideas about creative thinking and collaboration.

My role as Creative Technologist here at PatronManager is to help find ways to more fully weave design into our product development practice. This could be anything from revamping existing features to prototyping new ones. As part of this effort, I recently started hosting a series of internal design workshops called “Open Studio.” These workshops are meant to be a gathering akin to the Design Thinking sessions held by Stanford’s dSchool, or (a really short version of) Google’s Design Sprint.

Open Studio works like this: anyone from within PatronManager is allowed (and encouraged) to attend! The calendar invitation that I send out company-wide literally says: “Hey, I’ll be designing something. Come join me!” In the sessions I’ve held so far we’ve had representatives from all over the company across multiple departments and experience levels; from senior managers to marketers to developers to customer support to sales, you name it.

We all gather in a room, close our laptops, tuck away our phones, and put a “problem” we need to solve in the center of the room. Last week, for example, the question I posed for the group was: How can we let patrons pick their own seats when they buy a subscription? And how can we do it in a way that accommodates all the various notions of “subscription” that an arts organization may have? How can we make this patron experience really fantastic?Read the Article

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Two Conferences, One Big Theme

Today’s blog post is written by Kevin Patterson, Senior Account Executive, PatronManager.

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend two conferences: the 2019 Art House Convergence Annual Conference, and the INTIX (International Ticketing Association) Annual Conference and Exhibition. While Art House Convergence focuses primarily on film, and INTIX on the broader ticketing industry, there are always crossover issues that resonate between the two.

This year, I found both conferences were more centered around the idea of “connecting with audiences” than I have ever seen in past years. Previous iterations of these same conferences were often focused on the idea of just making the transaction process as frictionless as possible. Now more cultural leaders and their teams are interested in making deeper connections with the patrons who walk through their doors.

I found that two questions came up repeatedly during conference sessions and networking discussions:

  1. How can we move beyond the transactional and engage with audiences to improve their overall experience and increase retention?
  2. What role is technology playing to connect us with our audiences?

Read the Article

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Introducing Our New Public Ticketing Site

Here at PatronManager, we’ve set out on a mission to help arts, culture, and live entertainment organizations build stronger (and more profitable) relationships with their patrons. And in this day and age, we understand that a huge part of that relationship happens online. An organization’s website is the place patrons go to learn about event offerings, and more importantly where they go to purchase tickets and make donations. We get it. Your patrons’ experience on your website can make or break your relationship with them, which can make or break your organization.

With this in mind, we’re thrilled to announce our new Public Ticketing Site (PTS) as part of our February 2019 release. With this upgrade, you’ll be able to manage the look and feel of your patron-facing ticketing site all from a brand new “do it yourself” admin portal. Lovingly dubbed “baby Squarespace” by our team, you can now create a beautifully designed modern ticketing experience whether you are a designer or not. The online ticketing experience has never looked better on the patrons’ end or been easier to manage on the administrative end. Read the Article

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Scams, Fraud, Phishing and How to Be Safe

Today’s blog post is written by Samantha Colbert, Senior Client Support Specialist.

One day while I was working from my home office in Texas, my personal cell phone rang. It wasn’t a number that I recognized, but the caller ID said: “United States.” I answered it.

“Hello, is Samantha Colbert there.”

“This is she.”

“Hello, Samantha my name is,” for the sake of the story let’s call them Marvin, “Marvin, and I’m contacting you today from the Microsoft Company because we have a report here that your windows computer has been hacked.”

I instantly knew something was off. Through mandatory internet security trainings here at PatronManager, stories I have read on the internet, and old jokes about Nigerian Princes, I had a feeling I was speaking to someone who wanted my personal information… a scammer. Marvin proceeded to try to prove that he was legitimate by telling me my email address. Besides that, clearly, he already had my phone number, but I just assumed this personal information was likely sold to his company from somewhere else.

After about 10 minutes of letting him lead me on, I decided that it had been long enough and said “It’s been really nice chatting with you. I’m glad I could keep you on the phone this long so that you couldn’t spend this time trying to scam someone else, but I really need to get back to work…” at which point he hung up on me.Read the Article

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Marketing Goal for 2019: Be More Human

Today’s blog post is written by Paul Miller, VP Sales – Non-Profit Ticketing, PatronManager. 

Last week I listened to a podcast, which is neatly summarized in this article. In it, social media strategist Mark Schaefer talks about his new book, Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins. I’m just starting the book, but here’s the biggest takeaway from the article: marketing isn’t controlled by marketing anymore.

In 2009, we had already been through decades of a shift away from traditional media and marketing tactics. Even at that time, 66% of all marketing was happening through customer-to-customer interactions beyond the control of the company, like social media and user reviews and such. Today, only 13% of customers are entering the sales funnel through marketing materials generated by corporate marketing departments. As the article says, “Trust in brands and advertising has declined for 10 years in a row. It’s at an all-time low. Now consumers trust each other—their friends, neighbors, and even influencers.”

So if your traditional approach to marketing, and the corresponding dollars spent, are only driving 13% of your audience, what can you do to reach the other 87%? And more specifically, what does this mean for arts organizations for whom marketing dollars are extremely hard to come by? Read the Article

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