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Arts Marketing: Telling Your Organization’s Story

By Ben Ferber, Operations Manager

Are you telling your organization’s story everywhere you can? I have some data that might inspire you to take a second look at where you’re funneling your marketing efforts online!

The Background

Every year at PatronManager, we conduct something we call the “Arts Patron Survey,” a nationwide survey in which we work with 20-30 of our clients to send a detailed questionnaire out to all of their patrons. Over the 15 years of the survey’s existence, we’ve partnered with over 300 organizations to contact over 1.5 million arts patrons, and we’ve received over 125,000 responses.

As you might expect, it’s a great source of information! Michelle and Gene used it to write our book Breaking the Fifth Wall, and we regularly present information from the survey at events. Over the last few years, one of the most important things we’ve learned from conducting this survey is: arts patrons of all ages are online, and that’s the primary place they interact with your organization before they come in person.  Read the Article

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Bringing Sponsor Activations to the Arts & Culture Sector

By Gene Carr, Founder & Paul Miller, VP Sales – Non-Profit Ticketing

In our last post, we introduced the concept of the “sponsor activation,” which is becoming more commonplace in commercial venues, but less so in the arts. In this post, we’ll give you more detail on how to think about a sponsor activation at your organization — and how it differs from a traditional sponsorship.  

The key element of an activation is that it offers benefits to all participants — the patron, the sponsor, and the arts organization. Read the Article

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5 Tips for Arts Organizations to Weather Any Economy

By Jacob Trussell, Marketing Coordinator

Depending on who you ask, the U.S. may be looking at a recession come 2020, which obviously could have some adverse effects on your arts organization. But we’re not here to get all “doom and gloom” on you! As I’ve always been told, it’s much better to plan for the worst and hope for the best than to have no plan at all. So even if we aren’t hit with a major economic upheaval in the next year, it’s still a great idea to start putting procedures in place that’ll help ensure financial security if your institutional giving is ever negatively impacted by the ups and downs of our economy. Read the Article

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Further Musings on AirPod Nation

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In my last post, I talked about “transhumanism” and a time when most people will have access to AirPod-type devices — either in their ears for hours on end or within easy reach. Industry insiders who follow technology trends predict this will happen sooner rather than later. With that in mind, I did some brainstorming on how this could benefit arts organizations and their patrons, looking at several different art forms. Read the Article

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You’ve Got a Friend in Me: Friendliness at the Box Office

Today’s blog post is written by Kate Levine, Client Support Specialist, PatronManager.

At the end of my senior year in high school, I was awarded the superlative of “friendliest” by my peers in the senior class. At the time, I was really surprised that my classmates voted for me to have this specific title, not because I wasn’t friendly, but because I was a fairly quiet teenager! Nevertheless, I was honored to be thought of in this way and graduated feeling hopeful that I would carry this trait with me throughout my life. 

As I started my career in box office management, and now in customer support with PatronManager, I have found friendliness to be a vital asset for my work! With a few years under my belt being on the front lines in various customer service roles, I can safely say that simply being a nice person is a huge part of what has made me successful. But beyond basic human decency, why is this idea of being friendly such a big deal in our industry? To quote a blog post I recently stumbled upon: Read the Article

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