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volume four ~ issue twelve
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Welcome to our final issue of 2006. To wrap-up the year, we're presenting a Q & A with Patron Technology President, Eugene Carr, who shares his thoughts and insight into the year that's been, and looks at what's to come in the world of online arts marketing...
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Feature Interview: Eugene Carr
President, Patron Technology
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Eugene Carr is the
founder and president of Patron Technology. During this past year, he has been a regular guest speaker at arts industry conferences and in seminars in 20 cities in the United States. He is the author of Wired for Culture: How E-mail is Revolutionizing Arts Marketing (Second Edition, 2006), Sign-Up for Culture: The Arts Marketer's Guide to Building an Effective E-mail List (2004), and Web Sites for Culture: Essential Principles for Great Arts Web Sites (2005).
Prior
to founding Patron Technology, Gene was the Executive Director of both the American Symphony Orchestra and The Concordia Orchestra, as well as founder and president of
CultureFinder.com, an award-winning arts information portal, which was
funded by America Online and Comcast.
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Q & A with Eugene Carr
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As an engaged observer of the online technology and Internet world, what's of most interest to you in the past year?
When I was preparing for this interview, I reread what I wrote last year and I was gratified to read that a lot of the things I'd predicted seem to be coming true. For instance, the whole idea of convergence - where all types of technology and communication are jammed into a single piece of hardware - is coming true. Today's cell phones are also MP3 players and cameras, and more and more they are including Web browsers as well. Last year I was wondering whether Apple would get into the cellular phone business, and now some of the blogs that I read say that indeed in the not too distant future they'll have something called the iPhone.
What's been amazing to me during this year is the pace at which technology and Web services have grown and innovated. Clearly the second "dot.com boom" is coming, as there is a lot of venture capital chasing new ideas. Every day I read about new and useful services that are going to make the overall Web experience for the visitor that much better.
For us in the arts, one can no longer say that you should get on the train before it leaves the station, because in fact the train has already left the station. Those organizations that are aggressively collecting e-mail addresses and building an online relationship with their patrons are going to reap the benefits when the Web becomes more portable and people's lives become even more intertwined with it. If you've got the ability to communicate with your subscribers and members by e-mail, the newsletter you're sending today is just the very first stage of what will be an amazing next few years of technological development. We're living in a very exciting time and arts marketers would do well to pay attention to it.
What are the trends you're watching that relate to arts e-marketing?
You can't have this discussion without mentioning the whole issue of spam. In fact, a couple of recent newspaper articles have documented the fact that the amount of spam flowing through the Internet has doubled in the last few months. Today almost 90% of all the e-mail that gets sent out is spam or junk mail. That means that e-mail filtering and the incorrect marking of legitimate e-mail as spam is even more likely to happen than ever before. Needless to say, this is something we keep a keen eye on here at Patron Technology.
The next trend that I'm watching is that of e-mail segmentation. Not only can you segment your e-mails based on people's preferences, or internal categories such as whether they are donors or members, but today you can segment based on their own activity. That is, if you want to mail to everyone that didn't open your e-mail last week and send them another reminder, your e-mail system can do that for you. If you're doing a fund-raising campaign, you can target people who have opened all of your e-mails for the last four months, as these are probably some of your better prospects. We're now in the end stages of a beta test of the Patron Technology Advanced Patron List Inquiry system that will enable our clients to do exactly this. We've responded to the ways that the industry has changed by enabling our clients to do more sophisticated targeting of their patrons.
How has Patron Technology fared this year?
Well, we've had another terrific year adding nearly 300 new organizations to our to our client roster which today numbers almost 900 organizations. We've built our UK audience to over 50 organizations and we are expanding into other nonprofit areas beyond just the arts. We've expanded our staff and customer service and the recent customer satisfaction survey shows us that we've got a happy group of customers.
As always, our clients are clamoring for us to add more features and that's just what we're doing. We've introduced several upgrades of PatronMail in the last few months, and we've got another upgrade coming just after the first of the year, with new design features and a whole host of new templates and designs in the works. Design is clearly something that our clients want more control over and that's what we're going to focus on.
In addition, we've been very active in the educational side of our business. I've given over 50 seminars - including three national tours and appearances at many of the arts trade association conferences. I have been delighted to meet many of you personally and look forward to 2007, when I will be continuing with our live seminars around the country.
We updated Wired for Culture last year and we're working on yet again another update with current statistics, as well as an update of my 2004 book, Sign-Up for Culture.
We are also now talking with our clients about blogging, streaming media, RSS, and other up-and-coming new technologies which we think will enhance the online marketing that clients are going to do. We've got some initiatives in these areas and you'll be hearing from us about this in the coming months.
Any final thoughts for 2006?
Time magazine just came out with its "person of the year" issue - in which they chose "You" - a reference to what its editors perceive as the sudden ubiquity of "you-based" Web services. Here they are referring to Youtube and Facebook and other sites that offer interaction with consumers, rather than preaching to them.
What's of most interest to me is that there is really nothing new here. In the early days of AOL, it offered "Hometown AOL" which was nothing more than a service that enabled its members to create and update their own personal Web sites in a common location. There was a site in the 1990's called www.sixdegrees.com which was a precursor to Facebook and other social networking sites.
So, we haven't learned anything new from Time magazine, but we've merely been reminded what we already knew: The Web is about interactivity - online engagement with an audience. It's about online ticket sales; it's about people reading (and commenting) about your performances and interacting with you.
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Improve your E-marketing with books by Eugene Carr, President, Patron Technology
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Wired for Culture: How E-mail is Revolutionizing Arts Marketing (Second Edition)
Learn how to get started with e-mail and do MORE marketing for LESS money and get BETTER results.
- Essential tips for great e-mail marketing
- Why an investment in e-mail marketing will provide a spectacular return
- What arts patrons do online, and why arts e-mail is so powerful
Web Sites for Culture: Essential Principles for Great Arts Web Sites
Provides a structured way of thinking about how to build and improve your arts Web site. You'll learn:
- The basics of site strategy, conception, and design
- What most arts sites are lacking
- What it takes to run your site once it's launched
- How to get properly listed on Yahoo! and Google
Sign-Up for Culture: The Arts Marketer's Guide to Building an Effective E-mail List
Learn how to grow your e-mail list!
- 20 top ideas to build your list quickly
- How arts patrons behave online and how to market to them
- What goes into an e-mail acquisition plan and how to create one
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$15 each from Patron Technology (click to buy)
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Watch for the next edition of this newsletter coming January 23, 2007.
Patron Technology
850 Seventh Avenue, Suite 801 | New York, NY 10019 | 212-271-4328
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