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Causes of Churn Common Across All Business Types

March 25, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

There was an article on Fast Company this week that discusses customer churn. For the most part the piece is written from the perspective of being a company that has sold another business a product/service that they choose not to renew. Some of that part of the article can be view in parallel with subscription renewal, but there is a fair portion of their advice which applies to single ticket sales as well.

The article notes that the decision not to renew is often made six months prior vs. in the last 30 days or so before the renewal discussions are scheduled.One of the issue identified in the article is the onboarding not matching the promise of the sale pitch. Clearly that can be an issue for customers of arts and cultural organizations when they find their experience isn’t what they expected based on the promotional messaging.

Satisfaction surveys are problematic in that they only measure satisfaction at a specific point in time rather then over an entire span and they don’t record the subtle signs that a decision to disengage has been made. The author of the Fast Company piece, Ron Carlson, suggests being proactive and interactive with the process of collecting feedback from customers, both current and past.

Instead of relying on static surveys, consider having real conversations with both current and past customers to uncover what’s actually happening. What you’re likely to hear in these conversations will shock you.

Customers Don’t Feel Heard: “We raised concerns, but nothing changed.”
The Real Pain Points Were Missed: “We didn’t leave because of price—we left because we weren’t seeing value.”
Your Biggest Risks Are Invisible: “We made the renewal decision months ago.”

Instead of simply sitting around waiting for a renewal conversation, take active steps to retain your clients:

Listen To Lost Customers: Post-churn interviews reveal patterns you won’t see in dashboards.

Map The Customer Journey: Identify weak points before they become churn risks.

Have Regular Check-ins: Not just to “touch base,” but to understand evolving needs.

Ask Why Customers Stay: Understanding what’s working helps reinforce those behaviors.

Source

Issues like not feeling heard and decision to leave being based on value rather than price are factors I have discussed across a number of posts in the past. Likewise, identifying weak points which might include external issues like parking, dining and safety as well as the ticket purchase and staff/volunteer interactions are also topics I have raised.

I think it is also important to pay attention to that last point -analyzing what is working is just as important as identifying problems. It is easy to view anything people aren’t complaining about neutrally. But it is just as important to catalogue what people say they value as assets and invest in reinforcing what is great about those aspects of the experience.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership, Marketing/PR

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Strippers Organizing, But Not Unionizing In Minneapolis

March 24, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Earlier this month I saw a news piece about strippers in Minneapolis organizing to form a guild in that city. Stories about people organizing to take collective action and engage in bargaining in industry segments you might expect often catch my eye. I have written about the unionization efforts at a strip club in Los Angeles that saw people join the Actors Equity union.

What is interesting in this case is that while the dancers in LA were fighting against being improperly categorized as independent contractors, the members of the Minneapolis Stripper Guild, which has more than 200 members and counting, values the independent contractor status. In their view, it is the dancers customers are loyal to and not the clubs. They value being able to choose where and when they work.

Among the Stripper Guild’s top issues:

-Increasing advocacy among dancers, who are all independent contractors working largely for national strip club chains.
-Educating dancers about their rights under Minneapolis’ Adult Entertainment Ordinance, passed in 2019.
-Exploring ways to collectively purchase health insurance.

[…]

The guild deviates from the traditional union structure because strippers value their independent contractor status and don’t want to become employees of clubs, Snow said. The freedom that comes with being a contractor allows dancers — many of whom are managing various disabilities — choose their workload.

“We think it’s super important for stripping to stay accessible, because it’s one of the safest forms of sex work,” said Snow. “Anyone who is excluded from being able to work at the clubs, that means they’re just working in more marginalized, less safe spaces.”

Source

Securing collective health insurance is a big issue for the members. Because they are operating as independent contractors they can’t get employer provided coverage. Wearing high heels all night and performing athletic movements physically stresses their bodies leading many to seek massage and chiropractic care which they need to pay out of pocket.

Advocacy, Business Models, Working In The Arts

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Seeing Opportunities To Diversify Revenue

March 18, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

I was recently drawn to the story of Rock School for Dance Education in Philadelphia opening a retail dancewear store out of their location. They spent $150,000 renovating a space that used to contain two offices into a street level store space. The director of the school noted most dancewear stores stock up to $150,000 in pointe shoes alone and they haven’t reached that level of stock quite yet.

Business Insider had an interesting video in December about the London based pointe shoe maker that supplies the NYC Ballet and the staff at the ballet that maintains the stock.

Rock School made the decision to open the store based on success they have had selling to their own internal constituencies and the fact that a number of longstanding dancewear stores had closed. Those stores had not only supplied the dance community, but also the intricately costumed participants of Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade.

They saw an opportunity to diversify their revenue stream in what they anticipate to be increasingly challenging financial times.

“There’s this perfect storm of already having a successful boutique, seeing the need in Philadelphia, and the potential for a new revenue stream to enable us to do our good work,” he said.

[…]

As a nonprofit, the goal is not to make money, but to cover expenses including maintenance of the buildings. It can be a struggle, says Stark.

“We are anticipating that struggle could get more challenging with what we’re seeing in some of the proposed changes on a federal level,” he said. “We want to be ahead of that, and we don’t want to wait until there’s a problem. We want to proactively step forward and have a solution so that we can keep doing our good work.”

[…]

“Really we’re trying to monetize our asset to support our mission and to support the scholarship and the outreach programming that we do,” he said.

Source

Art(ist) Education, Arts Facilities, Business Models, Finance, Leadership

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Go Get My Guitar

March 17, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

There is a lot of conversation among arts organizations these days about the need to create connection and show the value of arts organizations to the community. I worked with an artist this weekend who really exemplified this aesthetic.

We presented the Masters of Hawaiian Music which is typically George Kahumoku and a rotating roster of 2-3 other notable musicians from Hawaii. In this case it was Herb Ohta, Jr. and Sonny Lim. Kahumoku has been hosting the Maui Slack Key show for over 20 years and has been a musician for far longer than that. He was trained as a visual artist, but is also a farmer, cook, writer in addition to being a sculptor and printmaker. Definitely a renaissance man.

When I initially contracted the show, the local museum was planning having a quilt exhibition around the same time that was going to have 2 out of 20-30 quilts from Hawaii. Over the course of the year that evolved to 100% Hawaiian quilts. I arranged for Uncle George Kahumoku to speak about quilt making the night before the performance and then join the members of a local organization for a potluck and mini-cultural exchange.

The local organization said there would be 15-20 from their group at the talk and potluck and the museum didn’t know how many would attend from their mailing list.

We got to the museum and there were already 40-50 people gathered in the gallery. Uncle George turned around and told me to go back to his hotel room to get his guitar. He really enjoyed the experience because he had never seen so many Hawaiian quilts in one place. He would watch his grandmother and her friends make quilts for every newborn, but he had never seen one placed on a bed and used because they were treated as heirlooms.

He joked when he inherited his father’s quilt, his dad let him look at it and then closed the chest up a few minutes later and told him to never open it again. He didn’t mention if he gave his son the same instructions when he passed it on.

Later at the potluck, upon learning some students of hula came an hour to hear the museum talk, he made everyone move the tables and told them to dance while he played familiar songs on his guitar.

The next night, before the show he was out in the lobby greeting audience members and handing out slips to fill out to “win stuff.” The slips were obviously a way for him to collect address so he could contact people in different parts of the country to attend his shows when he was in the area. But he was also very much making himself available to the audience to chat with him rather than delegating this job to subordinates. (Okay, so he pressed me into helping him so maybe there was a little subordination going on.)

He was back out in the lobby at intermission with Ohta and Lim chatting with the audience. (I had to nudge them back on stage.) Then they were back immediately after the show until everyone left.

It is difficult to communicate the vibe and dynamic via text. His agent may have explained it best when she mentioned his instinct leans toward creating connections and socialization. She mentioned he was likely in his happy place at the museum talk and potluck more than even at the concert.

As much as he was trying to gather people’s contact information, his goal wasn’t to optimize that process. He started drawing names to give things away as soon as I introduced him rather than waiting until the end of the show and taking the opportunity to gather more names at intermission.

Also at some point he managed to collect the names of every staff member and volunteer in the building and acknowledged them all before the performance started. The morning after the public show, I got a long text from Uncle George telling me how much being able to see the quilts meant to him and how he would write about the experience in his memoirs. Again he praised our staff.

I knew by then that he was an exemplar of the level of sincerity and investment that arts organizations need to manifest in their interactions with their community.

Art(ist) Education, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership, Working In The Arts

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