Audience Relations

Customer, Know Thyself

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I will admit that one problem of which I have often been aware is that it is difficult to make everyone at my theatre aware of the myriad forms of relationships different people have with us. Since there are some people who have been working for the theatre for 35 years, I am actually often less aware of a person’s history with the organization than some of the employees.

Chad Bauman tackles this very situation in an entry on his Arts Marketing blog. He relates a situation we have all probably been in: A person approaches our organization with a transaction they want to make. However, because their relationship with the organization doesn’t fit into the straightforward rules we have set down, they are not extended the courtesy accorded those less closely involved with the organization. Fortunately, someone who knows the value of the customer’s relationship with the organization is on hand and provides direction.

Bauman goes on to talk about the improvements they have made with their practices so that the communications and development departments are contributing to maintaining long term relationships with their constituency and community.

But in the course of his entry, I think he also ends up answering the question posed by the title of his entry – “Who are your best customers (and why many don’t know)?” He talks about how they replaced their old ticketing software for something with more integration and then hired someone else to write an algorithm that would alert their staff when they were speaking to someone with a high value relationship with the organization.

The best software certainly doesn’t mean anything if the practices of the organization don’t support the goal of cultivating and maintaining relationships with customers. However, I think the impediment to most organizations will be the need to pay to have someone write a custom program for them.

On the scale at which the Arena Stage operates, it makes good financial sense to have this done. The return on investment they have seen already with an increase in subscriptions and a decrease in churn probably justifies it. But will that be the case with most organizations?

That being said, I feel like I am woefully behind the curve trying to employ the customer relationship management (CRM) features with the ticketing and donor software we do use. In the sense that arts organizations aren’t using whatever resources are available, including integrating their daily practices toward a common goal, I would say Bauman is correct.

The thing is…it may be too late to pursue CRM. The trend is apparently heading in the opposite direction.

According to a articles Thomas Cott distributed the link to this past week, the government of the United Kingdom is strongly encouraging businesses to give control of customer data back to customers moving from customer relationship management to customer managed relationships.

Writes Tim Roberts:

In April this year, the UK Government launched a new consumer empowerment strategy “designed to encourage businesses to release their customer data back to them so that consumers can use this data for their own purposes.”

The Government has boasted that the ‘midata’ project will “turn the existing approach towards consumers on its head (with) a shift away from a world in which certain businesses tightly control the information they hold about consumers, towards one in which individuals along or in groups, can use their data or feedback for their own or mutual benefit“.

In the context of everyone’s worries about what Google will do with all the information it is collecting on you, this opens the possibility that we may actually find out what it is they know about us.

But it also occurred to me that while it may initially be frightening for people to learn what sort of profile has been synthesized about them, it may also prove illuminating if people came to realize their actual practices differed from their assumptions about themselves. For instance, they may attend shows every so many months not really considering themselves a fan of music as much as live theatre only to see that over the course of 5 years there is a record of them attending 12 concerts vs 5 plays. It might encourage people to be a little more open minded and adventuresome with their entertainment choices when they realize their tastes are more diverse than they realized.

In the other article quoting Alan Mitchell whose company has been advising the UK government says:

“And the second thing is that it is not only about a message going through to the customer, it is also that the organisation needs to be creating some sort of value in the information sharing – why should I share information with you? It is not just about receiving messages, it is about getting some sort of value from the process.”

When I shared my thoughts about the data contradicting people’s image of themselves with Drew McManus, he commented

“…think about all the box office and CRM solutions that require patrons to create accounts but provide next to zero outlet for patrons to do much with their user account besides update info. What sort of message does that send?”

Sharing that information would actually keep people more engaged and interested in your organization. It would probably also solve the problem of people creating multiple ticket accounts I groused about a couple months ago if they had a reason to use the same account for every interaction with your organization. Which means the organization has a much better sense of their relationship with the person since the history isn’t dispersed across multiple accounts.

CRM has been invaluable to companies because customers have had an expectation for decades now that if they patronize a place regularly, it will be acknowledged in some way whether it is the amount of starch in their shirts or the way they take their coffee. Even though CRM may be on its way out, many of the customer service practices it allowed companies to extend aren’t going away. Even if you have been behind the curve on using CRM software effectively (or at all) you still have an opportunity to participate in the next phase of relationship building.

Info You Can Use: Reward Disloyalty

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H/t Daniel Pink who linked to a story about a “Disloyalty Card” being used by independent coffee shops in Singapore. If you go to one of 8 coffee shops and pick up a card, go to any of the other 7 to get stamps and then come back to the original, you get a free cup of coffee.

I know some arts organizations who have tried these sort of programs to encourage patronizing other organizations with mixed results. What appealed to me about this approach was the rebellious, counter culture feel of it. I had this image of a program that encouraged people to be disloyal to movie theatres and Netflix.

What probably works for the coffee houses is that they can create a bit of an edgy or cool vibe with their stores. If arts organizations are going to try this, they either need to have the same vibe or link it to a series of shows that have that sort of feel. No one is going to feel like they are walking the path less traveled if they find themselves in a staid, completely conventional experience.

My impulse would be to avoid using it during something like a First Friday event where it might look more like a bingo game where people breezed through to get their cards stamped. That doesn’t seem particularly productive. An opportunity to do it across the course of a few months to a year could encourage people to make a more deliberate progress- see a show one weekend, walk through a gallery the next month, go to a dance concert and take visiting friends to the contemporary art museum.

It doesn’t appear that the Singapore disloyalty program requires you to visit all 8 of the coffee shops, just frequent more than one. Even disloyalty programs need to be convenient so it doesn’t make sense to force people to wander all over the place just to get a free cup of coffee. The same would likely apply to a similar program with the arts. Even if all the participating venues were in close proximity, it wouldn’t really be effective to force people to frequent places that didn’t appeal to them.

Structuring the program to encourage people to try a few new things is good. There should be a variety of disciplines represented, but they should get credit for going back to the places they liked rather than only rewarding them for hitting every place once.

Heck, it probably shouldn’t be confined solely to places that were built with the intention of housing art. Get the coffee shop or bar that hangs work by local artists involved. Even better–approach the bars and coffee shops with some opera or classical music performances like the Yellow Lounge program in Germany I wrote about a few years ago or Opera on Tap. Getting these sort of performances into the mix would make for an interesting disloyalty program.

History Repeats Itself…Wait, Didn’t I Just Use This Post Title?

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You may have read Kurt Andersen recent piece in Vanity Fair noting that fashion, art, design and culture in general hasn’t really changed much in the last twenty years. Or maybe like me, you started to get the sense of this some time ago when you realized the rebellious college/high school kids today were wearing the same clothes and essentially listening to the same music as when you were a rebellious college/high school kid 20+ years ago.

Reading Andersen’s article, I recall a piece in Rolling Stone back around 2000 where they said the 70s didn’t deserve the reputation for being an awful decade for music given that it saw the rise of so many different genres of popular musicians from Led Zeppelin’s rock to Ramones’ punk to Donna Summer’s disco. As Anderson points out, (as well as Weird Al) there hasn’t been much difference between Madonna and Lady Gaga.

Andersen attributes the lack of innovation to a desire for stability in an unstable world.

“People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.”

I just wonder why the Depression, two World Wars, Vietnam and the Cold War didn’t cause a longing for stability that froze popular culture (though I will concede the latter two may have planted the seeds.) Rather, I think that in making the world smaller and enabling us to all experience the same things at the same time, technology has started to introduce a uniformity. It is tougher for regional quirks to gain enough influence to bring about changes. Instead everyone consults the same sources.

As Andersen points out, the ubiquity of so many retailers across the country means that it is possible for us to access the same resources as everyone else as well. There used to be a minor plot element in stories where residents of smaller communities would ask a newcomer what the fashions were in Paris or NY. Now there is no need to do so. Not only does everyone know what the styles are, they are readily available.

What does this have to do with arts organizations these days? Well, for one, there has long been a conversation about how everyone in theatre is taking their cues from what is being done on Broadway. There has also long been a conversation about how everything being done on Broadway is a revival, revue or dramatization of material which has proven itself in some other format.

It seems that what we have here is an opportunity not only to break from our own past practices but to become agents of change for general culture as well. I am not so idealistic that I can’t admit that is a lot of inertia to overcome for non-profits. But since it appears increasingly likely a change of business model is in order, we might as well include artistic and cultural innovation while we are in the process of re-invention, right?

Will Perform For Snacks

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On the Marginal Revolution blog, Tyler Cowen has a short post about a psychology professor who requires his students take turns bringing a homemade snack in to each class. If they don’t bring in a snack, he doesn’t teach. I was initially pretty cynical about this approach as a valid teaching technique and was surprised to learn he had actually been doing it for over 30 years before it became an issue.

While I was still a little cynical after reading about his rationale for the requirement, I could understand how it fits into a psychology class that runs 3 hours at a stretch.

Parrott said that he’s teaching students to work together to set a schedule, to work in teams to get something done, and to check up on one another, since everyone depends on whoever has the duty of bringing snacks on a given week. Typically, no individual should be involved in preparing the snack more than twice a semester, he said.

Parrott said that considerable research shows that students learn more if they develop the skills to work in teams, to assume responsibility for projects, and get to know their fellow students. Team members need to count on one another, he said, and his students learned Thursday that if someone fails at a task for the team, there are consequences. “They need to learn to check on one another and clearly they didn’t get that done,” he said. “This was an important lesson.”

It struck me that this might be a good approach for building/engaging community around an arts organization (with the punitive elements de-emphasized, of course.) An arts organization might have a performance/gallery series where attendees were required to bring food as payment. Some times it might be the orange ticket holders, other times the blue ticket holders, so that an attendee isn’t bringing food for the whole audience every time they attend.

Allowing for a snack period like this will change the dynamics of the relationship with the audience. It isn’t going to pay the light bill, but it can get people involved and invested enough in the organization in other programs that do earn revenue and donations. I suspect the staff will do a much more effective job of convincing people their organization is worthy of support while chatting over chocolate chip cookies than pitching them during a curtain speech.

I can envision scenarios where groups bond over their shared responsibility to provide snacks to try to outdo the other groups. If that turns into its own type of headache and introduces stress to an event intended to be informal, that impulse could be channeled to support a more formal series of events to increase the investment in its success.