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Melissa, thanks for speaking with us today. To get started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Skowhegan?
I'm the Program Coordinator, and I've been here since December 2006, so I'm relatively new to the school. I work with Linda Earle, our Executive Director for Programming, and we handle working with the artists, securing the resident faculty, getting the student applications out there, and generally letting people know that we exist, that this program is available. I send out the e-mail announcements, and I make sure that the Web site is updated: a little bit of everything related to the program.
Can you give us a general overview of what role e-marketing plays in your organization?
Because we're a small non-profit with a small budget and small staff (five people!), of course, it’s helped that we don’t need to use as much postage, and we don’t need to keep track of physical addresses, Really - everybody has e-mail, and everyone's always checking their e-mail. We’ve really done as much as we can to streamline our communication with our supporters.
We have an e-mail list of about 5,000 people, and they range from former alumni, to faculty, to trustees, to board members, to people who just like to attend our lectures. We can separate those categories out, pinpointing the people that we want to send certain information to, instead of sending it out to everybody at once – there are artists who apply to the program one year, but don’t get in, and we can send directly to that group the following year, letting them know it’s time to try again.
Our open rates for the last two years average 40% [the average open rate for all PatronMail clients is 24%]. Many campaigns reach over 60% opened. Last January, our “save the date” newsletter, announcing the beginning of the application process, had a 63% open rate, and a 10.7% click rate.
Applications for the artist residency program are due in February every year – how much of the application process is done online?
Already for the last few years, our Web site has been the only place to get the application, and people would download it, and print it out to mail in; but as of this year (the 2008 season), we're going to be switching to a completely online format. Applicants will be able to upload their images directly to a server and fill out an online form. As I mentioned, we're a small office, so dealing with 1,685 applications this year was pretty hectic and crazy – we have only two people opening that many packages. So to be able to do this digitally will definitely help us out - we think we'll even get MORE applications this way, but in a manner that’s much easier to handle.
It seems to me that some organizations might be a bit wary of switching to a completely online format like you describe – what is it about your audience that makes you comfortable with that shift?
We know that not everybody is online but most people are, these days, and we know that our audience is definitely living in the online world. The average age of our students is about 29, with an age range of about 22 to 40.
Also, we do have international students, and they’ve actually been at an unfair disadvantage using the old method: mail takes much longer to get to us, and there’s always that much more potential for applications getting lost. So we decided that this would be the best way to reach out to our international students, too.
Maybe the most striking thing that proves our audience is ready for an online application is that about 70% of our students show up in Maine for the nine weeks with their own computers. We don’t have the most reliable Internet access up here by the lake in the woods – and as soon as it goes down we get lots of phone calls at the office, we have everybody on us, panicking: "There's no Internet!"
Since your e-mail marketing is working so well for you, would you give us one success story from the last year?
Our main offices are located in New York, our summer campus is located in central Maine, and then we have alumni that come from all over the place. Every year we have a New York reunion, because we’re there and a lot of our alumni are in the area, but it does end up restricting our attendance.
But then we had two ambitious alumni from Los Angeles contact us, saying, ”Hey, we know you’re in NY, but we'd love to do an LA reunion this year.” At first we weren’t sure, because we worried that we would have to travel all the way to California to organize this? But using PatronMail's segmentation, we were able to upload a list of all our faculty, alumni, and staff on the west coast, and we e-mailed them to let them know to get in contact with the planners, and we had a really successful turnout – the open rate of the e-mail was 37%, and we had at least 50 people attend. So that’s something that was great for our relationship with our alumni, and there’s no way we could have accomplished it without e-marketing.
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