About a month ago I was at a meeting of arts people hovering on the edge of a conversation discussing the creation of a consolidated database of arts attendees or some sort of limited sharing of lists.
My first thought wasn’t about jealously guarding my list from their greedy grasping hands. There are quite a few people with whom I wouldn’t feel threatened sharing my list.
My initial concern was that have I gone to great pains to assure my ticket buyers that we will not sell, trade, etc., their information. There is such a concern about spam, phone calls and identity theft, that audiences need a high degree of assurances about the use of their information before they provide it to you.
In fact, we often have people who have signed up on our mailing list sheet in the lobby at intermission upset that it is still out at the end of the performance. Considering there is no information that can’t be acquired from the phonebook, their fear is a little irrational. It is difficult to steal someone’s identity with their address and the added information that they attended a show at the theatre. People usually feel a little silly when I point out the reality of this.
Which is not to say that we don’t handle information with which a person could steal someone’s identity. We are very careful about getting proof of ID before handing out credit card receipts at will call. Even if people act a little irrationally about their personal information, it only goes to show how important protecting it is to your relationship with them.
But back to the mailing list issue.
When I am signing up on a website that collects information, there is often a opt in/out box where the company asks permission to share information with their partners in order to offer the widest range of options and the best customer service.
Now I don’t buy for a moment that I will benefit from whatever their partners have to offer. I wonder if a similar approach could be applied to ones patrons though– “As an arts lover we would like to offer you information on the widest range of activities in town. May we share your information with other arts organizations?” I guess as an arts person, I would have a less cynical view of that approach coming from a theatre than I do when my credit card company uses it. I don’t know how the average patron who already gets appeals from a theatre, the United Way and college alumni association around year end might see it.
I was wondering if anyone had dealt with the issue of sharing names in the last year or two. Did you ask your patrons if you could share the info or did you just do it? If you did ask, how did you go about doing it? Did people know in advance that you might share their information?
When you did share your list, did you place stipulations on its use? For example, one brochure mailing and then the list is destroyed so that the only way to capture the information is if the person buys a ticket. I once had a condo association give me a list with the provision that they send it directly to my mail house who had signed a promise to immediately destroy the disk.
If you did share the list with such restrictions, did your partner abide by the rules or did your planted address get appeals and mailing beyond what you had agreed to? (Common trick when sharing lists is to add the names and addresses of employees with a low public profile or friends/family members who have agreed to help you keep an eye on how the list is used.)
In Philadelphia it’s common to trade lists between affinity organizations with an agreement for one-time use. When I worked for The Academy of Vocal Arts, our policy was that we didn’t trade lists for fundraising purposes, and that email addresses and phone numbers were never traded. Philadelphia has the Cultural List Cooperative, a shared database that allows organizations to see where there is crossover between orgs, but it’s necessary to obtain permission to use the addresses. However, permission is not necessary to use the addresses of multi-users, those who have attended events at more than one organization. Another initiative in Philadelphia is still in progress, a patron database shared by members of the Theater Alliance. For this project, each org would be able to see up-to-the-minute ticket purchase info for everyone in the database, but not donor records. Each org would be able to mail to (but not telemarket or email) to anyone in the database. I’m not actively involved in either of these projects at this moment, so I may not be up-to-date on all the facts. But if you’d like to look at list-sharing, Philadelphia might be one place to start.