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Gen Zers — Get Em’ While They’re Hot!

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By Jonathan Kay, Marketing Intern

In recent years there has been a lot of focus and conversation around bringing more Millennials into arts organizations – but what about Gen Zers? As a 23-year-old born in 1996, I find myself on the cusp of two generational groups: Millennials and the increasingly prevalent Generation Z (or Gen Z for short). Gen Z includes people born between 1996 and 2015 while Millennials were born between 1980 and 1995. This up and coming generation is  spending money, engaging with brands, and consuming arts and entertainment in different ways than Millennials. By engaging this audience now, arts and non-profit marketers like you can get in on the ground floor and put yourself in a position to retain their loyalty for years to come.Read the Article

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Embracing Cell Phones at Your Arts Organization

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By Aaron Schwartzbord, Director of Marketing

Performing arts organizations are slowly coming around to allowing, dare I say encouraging, audiences to take photos inside their venues prior to events. But there are still many organizations resistant to the idea, holding on to stodgy policies and shaming patrons for trying to get a picture! I was recently at a show where I heard an usher tell an audience member that photos weren’t allowed inside the theatre, but that they could take a selfie in the lobby—the patron was just taking a picture of their program cover. My response, “What’s the fun in taking a picture in your boring lobby?!” Read the Article

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Trial by Fyre

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Today’s blog post is written by Jordan Simmons, Senior Account Executive, PatronManager.

By now, I think most people who are inclined to watch one (or both) of the competing documentaries on the doomed Fyre Festival on Netflix and Hulu have done so, but spoiler alert: Things do not end well for the festival planners, attendees, contract workers, or Fyre employees — really, anyone involved in the whole thing from top to bottom.

The Fyre Festival, for anyone still mercifully in the dark, was an ill-conceived music festival originally planned to take place on a private island — formerly owned by Pablo Escobar — in the Bahamas. Organizers leveraged social media and “influencers” to create huge buzz for the event, which was skillfully marketed as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to turn your actual life into a supermodel’s Instagram feed — to hang out on the beach with celebrities and listen to cool music while imbibing and feasting before bunking down for the night in a private beachfront villa. Private planes would ferry you to and from Miami, and although you would pay a lot for the experience, you would get to live the life of an oligarch, if only for a long weekend.

I probably don’t have to tell you that this all went comically, catastrophically, criminally wrong, and that all the attendees found when they arrived was a half-finished concrete spit of land on a decidedly occupied island. The “villas” were actually FEMA tents with rain-soaked mattresses, and the gourmet catering was a couple of cheese slices on top of wheat bread. There was plenty of booze to be had, which unsurprisingly did not help ameliorate the “Lord of the Flies” atmosphere one attendee described once night fell.

There’s an element of eye-rolling schadenfreude, of course — it’s hard to feel too sorry for people who can afford to drop a minimum of several thousand dollars to attend a music festival in the Bahamas — but I would encourage anyone involved in selling tickets to check out at least one of the documentaries, as there are many lessons to be learned from the debacle.Read the Article

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The New Reality of the Experience Economy

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The phrase “experience economy” keeps creeping into daily life. In case you’re not familiar with it, let’s start with Wikipedia’s entry:

The term “Experience Economy” was first used in a 1998 article by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore describing the experience economy as the next economy following the agrarian economy, the industrial economy, and the most recent service economy. The concept had been previously researched by many authors.

Pine and Gilmore argue that businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers, and that memory itself becomes the product: the “experience.”

And, most interestingly, their book is titled “The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage.”

You’re probably thinking, “What the heck? We’re already in the experience economy business!” Yes, what arts organizations do is indeed produce experiences. But though that may be technically true, the rules of the game are changing rapidly and in a way that will propel all organizations to change what they do.Read the Article

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The Next Chapter of the Internet and the Arts

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My annual December blog post aims to help us understand what mattered most in the world of technology over the past year. And, I take a look ahead to where technology is going — and how this will affect the arts.  

This year feels different from the past few years. In my more recent previous year-end posts, the changes felt incremental. This year it seems as if we’ve arrived at the end of a big and important chapter in the history of the internet, and we’re just now turning the page and taking a glance at what’s to come.

The chapter-ending signals are many. To start with, we’re essentially finished with the adoption phase of the internet. For the past decade, we’ve been tracking the arts audience’s usage of the internet to get a clearer understanding of what portion of our audience is online — and how many of these patrons we could effectively build digital relationships with.

That story is basically told. Everyone is online, and pretty much everyone has a smartphone. And by everyone, I mean 85-95 percent of your audience. Even older patrons are online, and they are behaving just like everyone else. While they may not be on Snapchat, they do have fast internet, so they are checking their email and buying products and services online, and their expectations of speed and service are just as high as anyone else’s.

This year’s story also includes a big black cloud of data breaches. Read the Article

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Courting Sexagenarians

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I’ve been interviewing executive directors about their vision for the future, and inevitably our conversation turns to their efforts to court the millennial audience. They consistently report that engaging younger audiences the first time is less of a challenge than getting them to come back. That’s a subject for an entirely different post.

But, you know who comes back over and over? Older audiences — particularly those over 65. I was reminded of this by an excellent article in ArtsProfessional titled “A Snapshot of Older Audiences,” which looks at data for more than 800 arts groups across the United Kingdom. The article states:

The over-65s are demonstrably the most organisation-loyal and frequent arts engagers. 58% visit the same venue multiple times a year — much higher than for under-65s.

Here is your audience that is already committed to the arts, and for whom going to an arts event is now (and has been) an important part of their lives for a long time. They are your subscribers, ticket buyers, and donors. You don’t need to change the arts form or the manner (or location) of presenting what you do to satisfy them. And our PatronManager research demonstrates that their online behavior tends to mimic that of younger audiences — thus you don’t have to bifurcate your marketing efforts to engage them in a different way.  

Since this is such a valuable cohort, what are the ways you can nurture and build participation? The article points to one avenue pretty clearly: Read the Article

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