Visit Patron Technology

Learn more about PatronMail

Jodee Nimerichter, Associate Director

PatronMail Client Since: November 2005
Starting E-List Size: 2,393
Current E-List Size: 5,922

The American Dance Festival, now celebrating its 74th anniversary, began in 1934 as the Bennington School of Dance in Bennington, Vermont. Founded by Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman, and directed by Martha Hill, it was the desperately needed laboratory in which they could experiment, train students and create the early works that made modern dance one of the great cultural triumphs of the 20th century.

The Festival, held at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut from 1947 to the fall of 1977, was relocated in 1978 to the Duke University campus in Durham, North Carolina, where it remains today, headed by Charles Reinhart, ADF’s director since 1968. With its numerous programs for dancers, students, choreographers and artists, ADF supports and develops new modern dance works, both nationally and internationally, while preserving the history of the field. Its school is one of the country’s oldest training institutions for dancers.

Jodee, start by telling us a little bit about yourself and about your role at the American Dance Festival.
 
I worked for ADF from 1992 until 1997. During this time, I managed international dance festivals in Korea and Russia and dance exchange programs in over 20 countries ranging from South Africa to Poland, Lithuania, Argentina, and the Philippines. I also organized the first U.S. tour of The Guangdong Modern Dance Company from Guangzhou, China and was responsible for organizing the reconstruction of seven classic dance works on repertory dance companies across the United States.

Prior to returning to ADF in 2003, I was a production member of the award-winning series, Great Performances: Dance in America, at Thirteen/WNET New York. I joined ADF as Associate Director in January 2003. I oversee the daily administration and management, including marketing, and assist with the long-range planning of the Festival. I also co-curate the performance seasons and travel nationally and internationally to see work. Most recently, I produced the ADF television special, Dancing in the Light, a performance program for PBS that showcases six historic works by African American choreographers.


As a dance organization, online video offers you a great opportunity to offer a visual preview of upcoming performances. How do you take advantage of this and integrate video into your newsletters?
 
ADF will celebrate its 30th anniversary in North Carolina this season (June 7 - July 21) with over 60 performances. For a new patron or someone looking to try something new, it can be difficult to choose which performances to attend. When we announce the season, we provide video clips of the companies on our Web site, giving our patrons the opportunity to preview the performances in advance and decide what they want to see. Video clips of the 2007 ADF performing companies, as well as a season highlight reel, will be available on our Web site in June.

During the season we send weekly e-mails to patrons who have already purchased tickets. The e-mail includes a link to a video clip of the dance company, as well as a description of the dance companies and a link to the PDF document of the playbill. Each e-mail has a similar layout, making it easy for our patrons to find the information they need before they attend the performance. Our average open rate for these reminder e-mails last year was 48%, and the click-through average was 14%!


Arts organizations are often concerned about the difficulty of posting videos online due to copyright and union issues. How have you been able to avoid this problem?

Last year was the first time we included video clips on our site – but we already have an archive of clips to work with! For the last few years, we’ve included a section in our performance contracts with all of the Festival companies that allows us to make tapes for archival purposes, and to share them for research, fundraising, and PR purposes. We’ve never run into any copyright issues. The videos we share on the site are often archived performances for the previous year; sometimes if a choreographer is performing a new work, we are able to show a clip of a dress rehearsal instead. If we are presenting a company for the first time, we ask them to send a video clip of their past work.


You're a summer-specific organization, with performances in June and July. How often do you communicate with your audience in the off-season, and what kind of response do you get?

Our goal is to send an e-mail once a month to keep our audience informed about ADF events and announcements. During the off-season we send eNews announcements about our season in review, community events, ADF School, upcoming season dates and information, and Friends of ADF program.

The Friends of ADF program was created in December 2006 as a way to offer membership benefits to ADF supporters. Contributors are now eligible to receive benefits such as priority ticketing, invitations to open rehearsals and pre-show receptions, and more as a way to thank them for their support. We hope to use our eNews campaigns as an opportunity to draw interest to this program and our fundraising efforts.

Many of our e-mails are sent to specifically targeted groups, so we have successful open rates between 30-60% with each eNews we send. We have categories for ADF News, Performances, School, Community Events, International Programs, Professional Programs, Children's Programs, and Archives on our eNews sign-up form on the Web site. We also upload lists based on specific requests for information about our Dancing for the Camera film festival and NEA Arts Journalism Institute for Dance Criticism.

This year we sent a Valentine’s Day eNews offering ADF gift certificates as the perfect Valentine's Day gift. Patrons can use gift certificates to purchase performance tickets and ADF merchandise in our store. The ADF season had not been announced yet, but we had many requests for gift certificates the next day! This was the first time we sent an e-mail that did not include program or performance content and we still had an open rate of 29.5%.

Visit American Dance Festival's Web Site

Now you can read and subscribe to regular updates from Patron Technology's President, Eugene Carr. Gene's blog provides a snapshot of his perspective on what's going on in the e-marketing world now, and how it relates to arts marketing.

If you haven't been reading, here's a quick look at what you missed last week:

Women, Online Video and the Arts
We all know by now that women are the key decision makers for arts attendance - the news is that now there are more women using the Internet than there are men! What does this mean for online video and the arts?

Back to the Future Again
The biggest problem in developing mobile content is delivering a consistent user experience...

Arts Ticket Fee Policies Are Pretty Stupid
A rant and a radical suggestion.


Click here to read the blog, and submit your e-mail address in the upper left corner to subscribe to get updates e-mailed to you.