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12.14.2004
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Volume Two
Issue Twelve
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Welcome
to the last Arts Marketer of 2004. For this winter issue we visit
sunny Gainesville, Florida to feature Deborah C. Rossi, Director of
Marketing for the University of Florida Performing Arts.
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Featured Arts Marketer: Deborah C. Rossi
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Deborah C. Rossi
Director of Marketing
University of Florida Performing Arts
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Deborah came to the University of Florida Performing Arts with 30 plus years of marketing and market research for consumer, OEM, health care, and non-profit companies ranging from Ford Motor Company headquarters to the local PBS station.
As Director of Marketing her responsibilities include website, public relations, community relations, art, market research, box office, promotions and advertising. Deborah works with a team that consists of five full-time staff (including herself), part-time box office supervisors and sellers, and a web consultant. This staff designs all materials in-house.
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Q & A with Deborah C. Rossi
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Curtis M. Phillips Center
for the Performing Arts
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Tell us about the University of Florida Performing Arts. What is the scale and scope of your season and how does it fit in with the university?
During the 2004-05 season UFPA will present over 60 performances in three venues including artists such as Branford Marsalis, Ravi and Anoushka Shankar, David Sedaris, the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Carmen, Vince Gill, the Kronos Quartet and 42nd Street - representing thirteen different countries. University of Florida Performing Arts is known throughout North Central Florida for its world-class programming in diverse venues - the Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts mainstage and black box, University Auditorium, Century Tower and the Baughman Center. Internationally, UFPA is recognized among its peer institutions as a leader in the commissioning of new works and providing space for the mounting of new art forms. UFPA reports to the Dean of the College of Fine Arts.
What specific issues or barriers do you have to deal with in working as part of a larger institution, and how do you get around them?
There are no specific barriers to being part of a larger institution, other than people thinking that we are totally funded by the University of Florida. In fact, only about 20% of our operating budget is funded by UF. Tickets sales provide about 50% and the remainder is rental income, gifts from individuals and businesses and grants.
Who makes up your audience? Are you mostly catering to students or do you serve a mixed demographic? Do you market differently to these segments and if so, how?
As would be expected our audience varies considerably by the type of performance. Older, well-educated, high income, white people tend to attend the orchestral and chamber performances. Our musical theatre audience is mixed and come from all of North Central Florida, not only the Gainesville area. Dance and world tend to have younger, less affluent audiences. The Peru Negro audience was largely Latin. Indigo Girls and Laurie Anderson had younger mostly female followers. In recent years, opera is drawing a younger, as well as the more traditional patron.
Students represent about 10% of our audience overall, but again it varies tremendously by genre. The majority of our patrons are from the community not the university. We conduct audience surveys to quantify this and to determine how the patron learned about the performance so that we might make future advertising and promotion more cost-effective.
Although attendance by African-Americans is about 35% for jazz and some black artists, we are working with a committee of prominent local African-American leaders to encourage increased participation in all aspects of UFPA including becoming members of the Board, affiliates and sponsors.
Our marketing strategies vary by performance genre and patron segment. The audience surveys have also shown us that the younger and international patrons tend not to subscribe to newspapers or even watch much TV or listen to radio. The Laurie Anderson research indicated that the MAJORITY of the patrons did not listen to radio, watch television or read newspapers on a regular basis. That is why e-marketing is so important.
For the student market, we use flyers, posters, UFPA website coupons, and e-mails to student organizations and faculty. To reach younger people we use cable TV, radio and local throwaway weekly and monthly magazines, as well as, banner and tower ads on electronic versions of the local newspaper. The e-mail postcards to organizations are an increasingly important component of the marketing strategy to them.
Tell us more about the development of your e-marketing strategy.
E-marketing became important to our marketing strategies during the 2001-02 season for two primary reasons. First, our programming became more diverse with a new director and we therefore had to reach new audiences who were not on our patron mailing list. There was also the fact that more people were turning to the web for information.
Since then our budget for printing and print ads has decreased and this season we have a budget line item specifically for e-marketing. We no longer print postcards to promote a performance we use e-mail instead. We use fewer print ads and rely more and more on e-mail. We search the web for university, local and state organizations that might be interested in our performances and add them to our e-mail lists. We have a permission-based list for past patrons who can sign up to receive e-notices.
With PatronMail we are now able to send patrons reviews of performances for which they have purchased tickets and also let them know who is giving the pre-performance discussion. After the performance we send surveys to evaluate the impact the live performing arts performance had on their lives. We ask other organizations to include notices for our performances in their newsletters or forward our information to their members. With PatronMail the recipient can then elect to sign up to receive our UFPA e-postcards directly from our web site.
What kind of results are you seeing? Can you share with us what you have learned about using the web as a marketing tool?
The e-mail postcards are improving our pass-along rate. People are adding themselves to the list after they have received a forwarded message from a friend. The ability to include a web-based picture is an asset. Before we had professional e-mail software, we were unable to use artists' photographs because some recipients could not open the graphic or it took too long to load. Although the percentage is still small, patrons are responding to our audience surveys noting that they learned about the performance from an e-mail.
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Visit UFPA's Web Site
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How Does Your E-Mail Look?
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Are you doing your e-marketing in-house? If you're using Outlook, your mail probably looks like the first image - not exactly the kind of professional image you'd like to project.
In addition, you're probably having to handle opt-out requests and bounced e-mail in your inbox.
If you're feeling that you'd like to move up from your "in-house" method, we'd welcome the opportunity to demonstrate PatronMail to you.
With PatronMail you can:
* Create and Send professional looking e-mails without knowing HTML
* Track & Compare your results with other arts organizations
* Build your list automatically on your web site
* Ensure your mail is not mistakenly blocked by ISPs as Spam.
* Manage undeliverables and "remove" requests automatically
We invite you to schedule a free 15-minute phone demonstration to see how easy and cost-effective PatronMail is.
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Click here to request a 15 minute PatronMail demonstration
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If
you have interesting and creative initiatives that you would like to
have featured or know of an arts marketer that you would like to
recommend for one of our upcoming editions, please contact
info@patrontechnology.com.
Please watch for the next edition of our Arts Marketer of the Month, coming January 11, 2005.
Note:
The CAN-SPAM act mandates that all commercial e-mail contains a
physical mailing address, and ours is: 850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 704,
New York, NY 10019
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