This Friday’s chat covers social media strategies for arts organizations, a topic, as you know, that is near and dear to my heart.

My experience with the Ask the Musicians Twitter chats has been that you never quite know in what direction it will be taken, so I’m curious to see where this chat will lead us. I think I’d like to see my role as a guest host to explore those interesting, unexpected areas and, as an analytics and data enthusiast, ask follow up questions that delve deeper into measurement other than “this campaign got us 100,000 page views.”

Join us on Friday! Chat starts at 2 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. CT on Twitter with the hashtag #ArtsMgtChat.

This concludes a brief overview of what went into a new website and new digital strategy for a performing arts organization. At the start of the season, the opera was in a precarious position. I had to work with a 35% overall marketing budget cut, so I knew I had to be more efficient with the marketing dollars I had to my disposal.

Because many parts of the digital strategy were outsourced, the opera had spent a little more than $40,000 on all things online in the previous season. This season, the number barely reached $15,000, yet we were able to significantly increase the effectiveness.

Aided by a new ticketing solution launched simultaneously, we increased online single ticket sales from 28% to 55% of total single ticket sales while delivering a greater ability to analyze patron behaviors, track conversions and account for advertising spending.

Going into the future, the next steps should include eliminating those points that skew data in Google Analytics. In the course of the season, I identified a handful of these issues and we need to find fixes so that the data is more accurate. You won’t want to make decisions on flawed or incomplete data. So even though certain banner ads didn’t seem to perform very well, I wouldn’t want to make radical decisions just yet.

Furthermore, we only started collecting e-commerce and conversion data for one production. As all arts marketers know, no opera or symphony concert or ballet sells in the same manner. What are the noticeable differences we can detect in the conversion data and what can we learn from these differences?

In addition to making the data stream more accurate by eliminating points that skew data, we should make sure we add certain elements in the strategy. We started testing this in Google AdWords already, and we can apply what we learn there in other areas. How does different marketing content perform in identical groups? Next steps must definitely include small scale A/B testing, in either email messages or landing pages, where one (random) half of the gets one message and the other (random) half gets another message.

But what becomes very clear is that if you have the human resources, and a knowledgeable staff, you can bring much of your digital strategy in-house. A company like Venture and tools like Google Analytics and Google Grants offer free or low-cost alternatives to expensive agencies.

Outsourcing can typically get you all the fish you want, at a cost. It’s much better, however, to teach yourself, or even have someone teach you, how to fish.

I am proud to have built a strong digital foundation and by collecting and analyzing data we will be able to fine-tune this foundation to become ever more efficient.

What we wanted to build then was something to complement, not replace the new website. There is no auto detect for mobile browsers on the main institutional site, to redirect mobile device users to a mobile site. In the future, if the mobile site proves more effective in delivering mobile sales, auto detect can be enabled.

The core concept for a complementary mobile site was easily accessible program notes and pertinent event information readily available for patrons on the go. This is how the idea for ALOontheGo.org was born. There are no extra costs and no considerable extra work involved; it’s a simple, straightforward WordPress installation with mobile specific content.

Traffic is directed specifically to mobile site where deemed appropriate: a Facebook post for production notes on the go; or promote accessibility and information at your fingertips in email marketing.

While mobile traffic accounts for 20% of total traffic, it only delivers less than 10% of the revenue. As mobile traffic will become more and more important, we need to bridge this gap in conversions. We will need to monitor how ALO on the Go converts to sales compared to the main institutional site. What can we learn?

Paciolan recently launched mobile specific box office sites. Auto detect for mobile browsers is enabled. So no matter how you arrive to the ticketing site, via ALO on the Go or the main site, if you arrive on a mobile device, you will see the mobile box office site. Will this mobile specific site improve conversion rates? As the site just launched, it is too early to tell at this point.

Over the past decade, the Internet has moved toward becoming a social medium with more participation (encouraging contributions), openness (no barriers to content and feedback), connectedness (networked relationships and sharing content), community (gathering around a common interest), and, of course, conversation (a two-way street).

The Cluetrain Manifesto, still pertinent after more than 10 years, tells us that “conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.” And that means being authentic.

And that sentiment has been the driving force in the social media efforts of the Austin Lyric Opera: messaging for engagement in status updates and tweets; no barriers to behind-the-scenes content; sharing content across channels; fostering an opera fan community; and not shying away from conversations and responding to customer service issues rapidly and personally.

In just one season, we increased the number of Facebook fans by more than 60%, but more importantly, we increased engagement and viral reach. Facebook is now the second largest referral source to the ALO website. By integrating YouTube into other marketing channels, such as event landing pages and email campaigns, we increased channel views by 60%.

Perhaps my proudest social media moment was turning a negative customer experience into a positive outcome by transparently responding and following up and following through with customer service. This patron now regularly “likes” and positively comments on the opera’s status updates.

First, I applied for Google Grants. It’s a simple process for nonprofits, but it took a couple of months to be approved. Google Grants allows nonprofits to set up Google AdWords campaigns at no cost. It’s all in-kind advertising. There are a few limiting factors, but the biggest is perhaps the maximum cost-per-click (CPC) of $1.00, which makes you miss out on some popular keywords. Monthly “ad spend” will be capped at $10,000, but that won’t be a problem for 99% of the nonprofits.

Pulling Google AdWords in-house through Google Grants obviously saved money. But the biggest benefit is that you can use it as your own testing playground for ad content, especially if you can tie it in with Google Analytics e-commerce tracking. It was certainly interesting to see some ad content delivering more traffic than other ad content. But delivering more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean the ads are more effective, as you can see in the slides below.

Retargeting was introduced to me via our ticketing solution Paciolan. They helped set up a campaign for Turandot where we targeted consumers based on their previous Internet actions, in situations where these actions did not result in a sale or conversion. Basically, you visit the ALO website but don’t buy a ticket? Next time you visit Time magazine online, or any other media outlet in the network, and you might get served a Turandot ad. Compared to banner ads on local media websites, retargeting seemed to do much better. Paciolan reported a ROAS of $16 (the slides below only report what can be learned from Google Analytics, hence the significantly lower ROAS).

Facebook Ads are an interesting story. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) is impressive for the campaign we ran. However, I didn’t see a positive return for advertising spending as reported in Google Analytics. This is somewhat understandable when you realize none of the ads drove traffic directly to the ALO website. Facebook ads seem to work best with a higher social reach (delivering the ad content to the social circles of your Page’s fans). Advertising is about frequency and reach and Facebook certainly delivers on that at a low cost. I certainly see value in that.

If we should believe Google Analytics, banner ads in local media seemed to perform far below the other channels. However, there are two reasons for not completely discarding them: 1) they are part of a print and online package negotiation; and 2) they do deliver a decent reach with prominent placement in media outlets that are frequented by the opera’s patrons (and Google Analytics will not have measured all the impact of that).

After launching the website, we started collecting Google Analytics data. Both from the institutional site as well as the third party ticketing solution hosted on another server. The problem was the traffic between the institutional site and the ticketing site; we could track conversions, but they were always sourced from the institutional site. We needed cross-domain tracking to really get into the roots of conversion traffic. This is somewhat complicated and tricky to set up, but Paciolan, the ticketing solution, was helpful and knowledgeable. The client services team set up the appropriate code on the ticketing site and delivered documentation for the institutional site.

E-commerce, cross-domain tracking was now enabled. Just in time for bulk of the single ticket sales would come in for the final performance of the season. What follows here is a look inside a specific one-time offer delivered via email marketing.

All links in the email were tagged with campaign parameters through Google’s URL Builder tool. This enables a marketer to see in one glance how an email performed. What was the conversion rate and how does it compare to another email? Is there a bigger story to tell? As you will see below, an email can do much more than simply deliver a certain number of discounted ticket sales.

 
Next steps include eliminating those points that skew data, such as bit.ly links on the institutional site that caused a distorted number of referrals from “austinlyricopera.org.” In addition, small scale A/B testing should be done in landing pages and/or email messages. And this also includes using the “campaign content” field in Google’s URL Builder to differentiate between several links in an email message that point to the same page (what button or link in the email was most effective driving conversion traffic? Use this to determine the best placement for these links and buttons!)

A new website
Tracking conversions
Online advertising
Social media
Mobile site
Final round up

A new website

Coming in, the opera was stuck with an all Flash-based website: it was complicated and time consuming to make even the smallest of updates; mobile devices could not load the site; and no data could be collected. The first priority was to change this. You simply cannot build a working digital strategy without the foundation of a solid institutional website that can drive ticket sales.

In redesigning the website, from architecture to graphic design, these were the four key development concepts:

Driving conversions

• All roads should lead to a conversion. The ticket buying process needs to be straightforward, simple and seamless; from campaign source to order confirmation.

Data collection

• How do patrons get to our website? What do they do when they arrive? We need to track the entirety of the sales funnel.

Highly customizable

• A responsive website that can handle breaking news, custom landing pages and continuously revolving sales and institutional messages.

Easily manageable

• Staff with little technology skills should be able to make basic website updates and embed multimedia elements.

I knew I wanted a website built on WordPress and having watched the development of Venture Industries by Drew McManus, I was surely impressed by the proprietary elements on top of the standard WordPress installation that Venture offers. Doing due diligence, I talked to and received several proposals from other web development agencies. One proposed Drupal despite my insistence on WordPress, and all proposed a budget in the $15,000-20,000 range. I knew I could do better. I went with Venture and I set a $10,000 budget.

Drew McManus’ Venture brought together the opera’s in-house strengths and Drew’s strengths in the performing arts and online user experiences. The work broke down like this:

In-House Resources (Client)

• Planning: entirely redesigned site architecture and navigation
• Content: content migration, creation and population; and integration with third party box office
• Design: custom graphic design template along with home page and interior page layouts.
• Development: basic custom CSS changes.

Custom Work (Venture)

• Adapt client’s graphic design into custom PHP templates.
• Designed custom admin interface.
• Designed custom search bar that appears in the top, right hand corner of every page.
• Removed slider overlay for unobstructed full width image while maintaining use of standard action button.

Work was completed in a 3 month time frame. That’s fast. The actual money spent came in far under budget, totaling $6,500, and broke down in two components: $1,500 for the custom work; $4,000 for the annual Venture license.

A quick note about the $4,000 annual license fee. This includes hosting, support, updates and a myriad of other benefits and services. In a way, Venture is like purchasing a Photoshop license for your organization. Having Photoshop doesn’t automatically guarantee you beautiful design; you have the best tool at your disposal, but you still need a graphic designer. Having Venture doesn’t automatically guarantee you a great website; you still need someone in-house.

However, the support and the best practice / brainstorming you get with Venture are superb. Other agencies would bill hourly. Furthermore, if your in-house resources are not as strong, you can outsource more of the work. I was impressed by the custom work we received for the money we spent. You can do as much or as little custom work as you’d like or as your budget allows.

The end result was a beautiful, highly effective new website that met all the criteria outlined in the four key development concepts: driving conversions; data collection; highly customizable; and easily manageable.

Aided by a new ticketing solution launched simultaneously, and a new digital strategy, we increased online single ticket sales from 28% to 55% of total single ticket sales while delivering a greater ability to analyze patron behaviors, track conversions and account for advertising spending.

I think it is time to reframe the discussion. The current discussion is based on some untruths. Let’s dispel them.

“The arts are in crisis.”

That was the premise, the starting point, of the meeting. Seeing some of the shifts in the Austin cultural environment, and indeed recent big (near) bankruptcies like the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York City Opera, things do seem bleak.

But Drew McManus recently wrote about a webcast on the supposed crisis among American orchestras in a post entitled “Relax, It’s Not A Crisis”

Within the first few minutes, the entire event seemed to be unfolding along the lines of predetermined outcomes. No one bothered to define “crisis” or juxtapose the Detroit fiasco and the bankruptcies alongside the equal numbers of healthy, extraordinary examples of groups doing well during the economic downturn (LA, San Francisco, Nashville, Chicago, etc.).

So are we really in crisis? Everyone and everything has been affected by the economic downturn, but what seems to be suggested is that the arts in particular are endangered. But much more than macro and micro economic factors, and certainly also cultural participation and consumption trends, doesn’t it ultimately come down to individual organizations and how they are run? Which leads to:

“You guys suck at business.”

These words were uttered by Kevin Benz, editor-in-chief of the soon to launch CultureMap Austin. While there might be some truth in that statement, the insinuation is that arts organizations need to be run like businesses.

Let me give you four compelling reasons why this is not the case: Enron, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and General Motors.

On the other hand, and importantly, the nonprofit moniker has too often been used as an excuse for a lack of accountability, efficiency and success. What it means then, to run an arts organization like a business, is to be held accountable. Patrons and donors have invested in your organization with the expectation of a return. Not in shares or profit, but in what you promised them in your mission statement. Everything is measurable, including how you fulfill your mission statement.

“We need a new model.”

Interestingly, at the Austin event the discussion immediately led to a comparison between nonprofit, for profit and limited liability low-profit corporations. Before I could object to this direction, Marshall Jones, executive director of the Wine & Food Foundation, already told the room that tax statuses are not business models.

Indeed, your organization’s tax status is just a legal construction. There is nothing broken with the nonprofit framework. What is broken is the way in which people operate in that framework. Think about it: a nonprofit status doesn’t dictate your marketing or development strategy; a nonprofit status doesn’t dictate what kind of staff you hire and in what positions; a nonprofit status doesn’t dictate what office furniture you need.

The success stories in aviation do not come from people who tried to change the laws of physics. It was the innovators and adventurers that took advantage of exactly those laws that changed the course toward our mission to fly.

You don’t need a model. You need a mission.

But if you’re hell-bent on a model, Clara Miller (via a presentation by Andrew Taylor) says it best: “There is only one business model: reliable revenue that exceeds expenses.”

The movie was a mild PG-13. Apparently, that means you should bring your 2 or 3-year-old and let him improvise sound effects and let him continuously and loudly ask questions. After about an hour and a half of it, nearing the end of the movie, a Simpsons-inspired squeaky voiced teen usher finally approached the mother. The mother in turn chewed his head off and “wasn’t going anywhere.” A security guard finally moved in to make sure the remaining ten minutes were somewhat enjoyable.

Contrast that with the attitude at the Alamo Drafthouse. They have a zero-tolerance policy since 1997. And trust me, they mean business. And they stick to it.

Tim League, the company’s founder, just posted this in response to a customer complaint voicemail:

When we adopted our strict no talking policy back in 1997 we knew we were going to alienate some of our patrons. That was the plan. If you can’t change your behavior and be quiet (or unilluminated) during a movie, then we don’t want you at our venue. Follow our rules, or get the hell out and don’t come back until you can.

But he didn’t leave it at that. He turned the actual voicemail into the latest “Don’t Talk or Text” PSA and posted it on YouTube. The video just went viral with nearly 500,000 views in just four short days (nsfw).

The policy is part of their brand. That is why people love going to the Alamo. Sure, there are countless stories of consumers posting creative videos exposing the indecent side of business (United Breaks Guitars being the most famous example). But how many companies would feel comfortable enough to expose indecent customers?

It’s gutsy. But it fits the brand. It’s what makes the Alamo the Alamo. Reactions have been overwhelmingly and extremely positive.

That made me wonder… are there any classical music organizations that would feel comfortable enough to do this?

And granted feelings about the arts are subjective, and not objective like a strict don’t-text policy, but would an orchestra ever consider putting up a voicemail complaint about a, let’s just say ‘modern,’ piece and unapologetically stand by their decision to perform it?

I doubt it.

And to be honest, I’m not even sure I would have the guts to do it. We spend a lot of time apologizing in the arts. But sometimes, sticking to what you believe in pays off. Just ask the Alamo.

Do you have any examples of artists or arts organizations taking a stance? What would you do?

This is exciting. I cannot wait to put everything I have written about in the last couple of years into action. Social media is going to play an important role. I have been meeting with a lot of people, all warmly welcoming me to Texas, including good Twitter folk like David Neff and Travis Bedard.

I’ve been through a production already (in my second week!) and was blown away by the quality on display at The Italian Girl in Algiers. And the Long Center is just an amazing facility of which Austin can be proud (they are, by the way, also looking for a marketing manager). I can’t wait for Flight in April and then kicking off season 25 after the summer!

And yes, I’ve already bought a new bike. When we move to our new place in April, I can start that bike commute I have been waiting for!

I will keep the blog posts coming. Especially now that I am right in the middle of it 24/7 again. And to prove I have not been sitting idle, this Friday, March 4, Lacey Huszcza and I are putting on the second Ask the Musicians event in our ongoing series. As chosen by 86 voters, this round will cover composers in #askacomposer.

I hope you’ll be able to join us in #askacomposer, and I hope you’ll keep following me throughout my new Austin adventure!