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Info You Can Use: Too Many Calls To Action

December 12, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

I had meant to post this link a few weeks ago, but you know how things get around the holidays. Back in May, Jeff Brooks at Future Fundraising Now listed 20 Mistakes that Drive Away Donations. He saw the applicability to fund raising of the same list by Greg Digneo on Copyblogger who listed 20 Mistakes That Undermine Calls to Action in commercial marketing.

Given that so many non-profits are making a fund raising push for the end of the calendar year, I thought the list might be valuable to look at. The good thing about the list is that it covers mistakes that the beginner, intermediate and advanced practitioner will make.

One thing that caught my eye from Digneo’s list,

6. Multiple Calls to Action

What’s the one thing you want readers to do on your blog?

Do you want them to sign up for your list? And click on ads? And buy your products? And go to your social media profiles?

When you have too many calls to action on your site, your readers become paralyzed by the choices and leave your site.

Pick one or two actions you want your readers to take, and build your design around that. Don’t leave readers confused about what they’re supposed to do next.

Since a performing arts organization’s website is generally used for provide information that will move people toward buying tickets, as well as donating and perhaps a number of other things, it can easily devolve into something that does none of those well. I think it is good advice to focus on having your website call to visitors to take a couple actions and let everything else take the backseat.

At this time of year, many performing arts organization present shows that sell themselves well: Nutcracker, Christmas Carol, Handel’s Messiah, etc., it might be worth temporarily diminishing the ticket sales focus of home page a little and shift the emphasis to donations.

Digneo lists other mistakes that are worth pondering that might be applicable to your operations: Wrong Offer, No Urgency, No Empathy, No Social Proof; as well as some reminders about smart graphic design and positioning.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Fundraising, Info You Can Use

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Stuff To Ponder: The Fairness and Transparency of Ticket Lines

December 11, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

Seeing and hearing about people queuing up this year for Black Friday sales on the Monday prior reminded me about an article Tim Roberts wrote on Fullhouses.org this September. In it, Roberts asked if making people line up for theatre tickets was really the fairest way to distribute them.

I am sure the British Commonwealth nations who sponsor Fullhouses.org don’t experience the homicidal shopping frenzy that is Black Friday, but it occurred to me that it is something of a double standard to expect arts organizations to be fairer than retail stores.

It isn’t fair to have to take time off of work to stand in line for theatre tickets, but people camp out for a week to get $50 off a flat screen TV and no one blinks, eh?

Arts organizations are expected to operate more like businesses, aren’t we? Why not make people line up and wait? We may be worried about hurting our relationships with our patrons, but it doesn’t seem to hurt retail stores even when customers know they are being manipulated with sale prices.

Shakespeare in the Park in NYC has a long history of making people line up to get free tickets to their shows. And from their website, apparently people are queuing up before 6 am to be online for the 1 pm distribution. My suspicion is that their policy of randomly distributing seats rather than giving the closest seats to those at the head of the line is probably meant to dissuade people from lining up even earlier. It probably also keeps things from getting as emotionally charged as the Black Friday conflicts.

I did a couple posts on the subject a few years back. Now that I look at their site again, it appears they now offer an online lottery of sorts for tickets. While there are some alternative options, I am guessing your best bet is probably still going to be on the line in the park.

I know there have been some grumblings about the Shakespeare in the Park ticketing process, but I think their long history of requiring people to line up proves it is a viable model.

Back to the original question, is it really important to be fair? People generally have no awareness of whether the organization they are buying from is for-profit or non-profit. They are mostly motivated by the content of the show and tolerate quite a bit of unfairness.

People will go online to buy tickets and are poised to make a purchase at the exact moment they go on sale only to find they are all snatched up in a blink by automated processes. The fact people will still crave those tickets at a higher price on the re-sale sites empowers the very practice people say they despise.

A physical line is actually solid proof of your relative standing. If the line snakes down 5 blocks and you don’t get tickets, you may be disappointed but you could see that there really were 500 individuals ahead of you who had invested more time and effort than you did into making the purchase. While more inconvenient, it would seem a much more transparent and fairer option than online and over the phone ticket sales.

What I think the defining factor is is what your audience values as the basis of your relationship with them. In terms of retailers, the whole relationship is based on price. JC Penny found out people don’t care if they are being manipulated, just so long as the price is right.

So even if most people don’t discern between for and non-profit performing arts events, as a non-profit you can’t pursue a relationship based on price for the simple reason that price conscious people don’t make $1000 donations on top of their ticket purchases.

Patrons of non-profit organizations also don’t generally encounter having all the available tickets disappear in a matter of moments so aren’t likely to crave the transparency of physical lines.

Ultimately, how you handle the process of ticket sales is going to depend on your community and what they value. As a non-profit you are working on showing value in areas retailers often ignore.

There is part of me that thinks that if people are willing to queue up to buy something, either physically or virtually, it is hard to buy the sort of buzz and publicity that generates. It may be ill-advised to try to replace that in deference to some sense of fairness if people are not resentful about it.

Even if they are, it could be the sense of excitement inspiring that resentment. People are more likely to be angry that they have to go to work rather than standing on line to buy tickets if they drive by and there is a line of people threatening to buy up all the tickets before lunch break. Without that line, there is less urgency to see the show.

Before Thanksgiving I was listening to NPR as they interviewed people who had already planned to skip Thanksgiving dinner with their families in order to camp out in line–or they made arrangements to essentially tailgate their Thanksgiving dinner. As much as I thought they were crazy, it was clear even over the radio that people viewed the whole thing as a rite of passage type bonding experience.

I don’t think it was that long ago that people regularly did this sort of thing to get tickets for concerts too. I am betting there is an element of the concert tasting all the sweeter for the effort invested too.

The more I think about it, if you are going to have a physical line up, I think Shakespeare in the Park’s solution of providing a chance to be selected to receive tickets provides the best balance. You get the uncertain convenience of online acquisition balanced by the inconvenient certainty of gaining a ticket of your own merit by lining up early. I am not exactly sure how Shakespeare in the Park handles it, but if they keep the percent of the house they are releasing online a secret, they can vary it according to demand and maintain their attendance numbers.

Audience Relations, Business Models, Marketing/PR, State of the Arts

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We DO NOT Need Another Abraham Lincoln

December 10, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

Last month, Drew McManus posted that we need another Abraham Lincoln. He didn’t go into many details, but I wonder what he could be thinking. Since he suggests replacing Henry Ford with Abraham Lincoln as an exemplar, perhaps he is implying musicians need to be freed from the slavery of assembly line performance where standardization makes one concert interchangeable with any other concert.

All Abraham Lincoln exemplifies is lead from behind disengagement. When Republicans met in Chicago to nominate someone for president, Lincoln was in Springfield content to let his surrogates drum up support. After he was nominated for president, he didn’t even hit the campaign trail, again content to let surrogates like Henry Seward, a former rival for the nomination, speak for him while he sat in Springfield never making a speech.

Heck, Lincoln was so disengaged, he wasn’t even going to go vote on election day until someone pointed out it was his civic responsibility to do so for state and local races also being run that day.

This is not the type of leadership the arts need, especially orchestras. They need leaders who are engaged and involved with all their constituencies.

You may say that this is unfair and the Lincoln was only following the custom of the time and you would be correct. In Team of Rivals , Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that Lincoln’s opponent in the presidential race, Stephen Douglas,

“Disregarding criticism that his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country…becoming “the first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in person.”

Even though Douglas was supportive of the spread of slavery, shouldn’t we look to him and the strength of character it took to break with tradition and face criticism when the country was at the brink of a national crisis as an example of leadership for the arts?

All right, so…. admittedly I am exploiting the fact Drew was a little vague about what characteristics of Lincoln are needed and quoting from a book whose premise is that Lincoln was a good organizer of people rather than a solitary leader to refute Drew’s thesis. Lincoln was faced by challenging circumstances which forced him to alter his position and practices throughout his career. That is what makes it so easy for those with opposing political view points to claim him as their own. It is easy to cherry pick from different periods of his life.

Not to mention that some people’s strength lies in mobilizing capable subordinates while others are really only effective when they step to the fore. There is probably more blame to be attached to bowing to pressure and adopting practices that run counter to your leadership strengths than to resisting popular expectations in order to operate effectively.

The fact that I was being intentionally inflammatory doesn’t diminish the fact that we are at a crossroads in history that will demand changes in behavior. Some aspects of how we operate may never change.

Lincoln stayed at home and didn’t make speeches because he didn’t want to commit to any course of action or give the newspapers anything to misconstrue. Today we expect presidential candidates to make an appearance everywhere, but they still try their hardest not to commit to anything specific and fear what the media may make of what they say.

For his time, Lincoln was actually rather politically savvy and aware of all the different constituencies he needed to please. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of the reasons why Henry Seward didn’t get the nomination was because he spent the summer touring Europe while Lincoln was shoring up his support among key groups.

The changes the arts world need to effect are numerous or else there would be little for myself and hundreds of other arts bloggers and writers to talk about. So in effect we DO need someone like Lincoln as a leader, one who can recognize they stand at the crux of complicated times that requires one to change and respond in a nuanced manner.

There is a lot to admire in Henry Ford. He did much to improve the lives of his workers, but like the parts of his automobiles, they were viewed as parts that could be replaced without any impact to the viability of the company. Ford created a system where the means of production was low skilled labor. That is not necessarily the case with the arts.

Business Models, Leadership, Management Philosophy

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If You Believe In What I Am Doing

December 5, 2012

by:

Joe Patti

Some data on the most successful of President Obama’s fundraising letters is really destroying what I thought I knew about constructing emails. It turns out, the most informal subject lines garnered the biggest donations. His campaign would do extensive testing on dozens of variations in the formatting, amount requested, tone, etc before discovering a winner they would send to the millions.

According to the campaign, the less professional the email looked, the better. They were a little incredulous at how good a response the most ugly emails received (my emphasis)

It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “ ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million.

Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.”

Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild curse words such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks. But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life.

In light of this, I am starting to wonder if perhaps I am working too hard on the monthly newsletters we send out with information about upcoming shows.

Actually, the real lesson here isn’t that the pared down approach works but rather than you will never really be able to predict what will connect with people and you need to be constantly testing.

With as many people sending out as many emails as the Obama campaign had, none of them seemed to be able to accurately predict what approach would work best and even then, the appeal quickly waned. Which I am sure can be partially attributed to the sheer number of emails that people were receiving each day. I suspect a performing arts groups could probably experience success with the same approach over the course of a few emails.

One question I had given that my email list does not measure in the tens of millions was how large a sample size do you need to accurately measure the effectiveness of an approach? Has anyone worked with A-B testing enough to know?

By the way, the title of this entry is stolen directly from Obama’s list of effective subject lines. I will be interested to see what the response rate is.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Fundraising

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