This presentation was given by Will Lester, Vice President of Community Data Networks, during the Lightning Rounds of Research at the 2012 NAMP Conference.
The Art of the Upgrade: A TRG Master Class for BlackbaudBlackbaud
This document discusses strategies for increasing patron loyalty and donations through targeted "upgrades." It defines upgrades as asking patrons to take the next step, such as renewing a membership at a higher level, adding an additional donation, or attending more events. The document outlines how upgrades can be identified through data analysis to recognize patterns. It provides examples of increasing yields from single ticket buyers to renewing subscriber-donors. The key is engaging patrons at multiple touchpoints and across organizational assets. Effective upgrading requires having a plan for every patron type and focusing first on the biggest opportunities to cultivate meaningful relationships and growth.
TRG Arts on the Impact of Loyalty: Success stories of growth through retentio...TRG Arts
1) TRG Arts is a consulting firm that has worked with over 1,000 arts and cultural organizations over 22 years to help them grow sustainable patron bases through data-driven strategies.
2) Building patron loyalty is important as loyal patrons have higher lifetime value and renewal rates. TRG advocates treating patrons differently based on their loyalty level through a "loyalty pyramid" with advocates, buyers, and tryers.
3) Case studies show how organizations saw increases in retention rates, revenue, and numbers of loyal patrons by implementing loyalty strategies like membership programs, dynamic pricing, and focusing on reducing churn of first-time patrons.
Rekindling Subscriptions: A Loyalty Love AffairTRG Arts
This document discusses strategies for rekindling subscription programs and loyalty through targeted retention efforts. It shows that focusing on retaining existing patrons through subscriptions generates significantly more revenue than acquiring new single ticket buyers. Specific strategies that helped increase subscriptions by 470% and revenue by over 500% at one organization are outlined, including flexible package options, value messaging, and a new membership program. The document advocates treating patrons differently based on their loyalty level and investing more in retaining renewing subscribers.
Dynamic Pricing is Not Enough: Webinar (April 2018) TRG Arts
Aimed at those in marketing, box office and senior leadership working in arts organisations, hear from TRG Arts’ Christina Hill and Stephen Skrypec, plus special guest Claire Murray, Interim Chief Executive Officer, Sheffield Theatres, and learn about our three-pronged strategy for pricing and demand management.
Copyright TRG Arts, April 2018
2018 Holiday Season Postmortem with Keri Mesropov TRG Arts
In this virtual discussion group, VP of Client Services, Keri Mesropov guides a panel of TRG Arts experts through Holiday Season sales trends across the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. Holiday programming can make up 60% or more of ticket revenue annually, how are you optimizing this annual cash-cow? Keri and her team answer all of your questions so you can maximize your holiday sales this year.
This document discusses data sharing across cultural organizations through community networks and consulting services. It provides examples of campaign successes from the Museum of History & Industry and Jazz at Lincoln Center that utilized data from community networks. These campaigns achieved increased membership acquisition and ticket sales. The document also discusses insights from a patron loyalty study, including that deeper patron loyalty correlates with engagement across more organizations and that many "inactive" patrons are active with other organizations.
Originally presented at the 2017 NAMP Conference.
Have arts leaders increased the loyalty of their patrons in recent years? TRG Arts is the longest-standing aggregator of loyalty metrics in the arts industry and has recently refreshed its aggregated Patron Loyalty Index. In this presentation, we’ll describe the ways patrons are behaving in terms of their recency, frequency, monetary investment and growth over time, across transactions in single tickets, membership, subscription and donation.
The Art of the Upgrade: A TRG Master Class for BlackbaudBlackbaud
This document discusses strategies for increasing patron loyalty and donations through targeted "upgrades." It defines upgrades as asking patrons to take the next step, such as renewing a membership at a higher level, adding an additional donation, or attending more events. The document outlines how upgrades can be identified through data analysis to recognize patterns. It provides examples of increasing yields from single ticket buyers to renewing subscriber-donors. The key is engaging patrons at multiple touchpoints and across organizational assets. Effective upgrading requires having a plan for every patron type and focusing first on the biggest opportunities to cultivate meaningful relationships and growth.
TRG Arts on the Impact of Loyalty: Success stories of growth through retentio...TRG Arts
1) TRG Arts is a consulting firm that has worked with over 1,000 arts and cultural organizations over 22 years to help them grow sustainable patron bases through data-driven strategies.
2) Building patron loyalty is important as loyal patrons have higher lifetime value and renewal rates. TRG advocates treating patrons differently based on their loyalty level through a "loyalty pyramid" with advocates, buyers, and tryers.
3) Case studies show how organizations saw increases in retention rates, revenue, and numbers of loyal patrons by implementing loyalty strategies like membership programs, dynamic pricing, and focusing on reducing churn of first-time patrons.
Rekindling Subscriptions: A Loyalty Love AffairTRG Arts
This document discusses strategies for rekindling subscription programs and loyalty through targeted retention efforts. It shows that focusing on retaining existing patrons through subscriptions generates significantly more revenue than acquiring new single ticket buyers. Specific strategies that helped increase subscriptions by 470% and revenue by over 500% at one organization are outlined, including flexible package options, value messaging, and a new membership program. The document advocates treating patrons differently based on their loyalty level and investing more in retaining renewing subscribers.
Dynamic Pricing is Not Enough: Webinar (April 2018) TRG Arts
Aimed at those in marketing, box office and senior leadership working in arts organisations, hear from TRG Arts’ Christina Hill and Stephen Skrypec, plus special guest Claire Murray, Interim Chief Executive Officer, Sheffield Theatres, and learn about our three-pronged strategy for pricing and demand management.
Copyright TRG Arts, April 2018
2018 Holiday Season Postmortem with Keri Mesropov TRG Arts
In this virtual discussion group, VP of Client Services, Keri Mesropov guides a panel of TRG Arts experts through Holiday Season sales trends across the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. Holiday programming can make up 60% or more of ticket revenue annually, how are you optimizing this annual cash-cow? Keri and her team answer all of your questions so you can maximize your holiday sales this year.
This document discusses data sharing across cultural organizations through community networks and consulting services. It provides examples of campaign successes from the Museum of History & Industry and Jazz at Lincoln Center that utilized data from community networks. These campaigns achieved increased membership acquisition and ticket sales. The document also discusses insights from a patron loyalty study, including that deeper patron loyalty correlates with engagement across more organizations and that many "inactive" patrons are active with other organizations.
Originally presented at the 2017 NAMP Conference.
Have arts leaders increased the loyalty of their patrons in recent years? TRG Arts is the longest-standing aggregator of loyalty metrics in the arts industry and has recently refreshed its aggregated Patron Loyalty Index. In this presentation, we’ll describe the ways patrons are behaving in terms of their recency, frequency, monetary investment and growth over time, across transactions in single tickets, membership, subscription and donation.
Artistic Programming by the Numbers: A KC Rep Case StudyTRG Arts
One of the biggest challenges for theatre leaders lies in perfecting the balance between commercially popular and artistically ambitious plays. In 2014, Kansas City Repertory Theatre was at a crossroads with programming choices, finding it difficult to grow new audiences and cultivate their current loyal supporters. The artistic and executive director decided to do something quite radical: quantify the impact of programming on audience development. Some of the questions they asked were: Which genres grow new audiences? Which deepen current loyalty? Which plays encourage and discourage repeat attendance? Does venue impact audience behavior? How are factors like per-ticket spend impacted?
Learn what the data said about different artistic genres and the types of audiences it attracted, how KC Rep used the data as inspiration for their new Creative Future Fund, and the results they’ve seen in the following three years in audience and revenue numbers. This presentation was made at the 2017 Theatre Communications Group Conference.
Data Skills: What you and your staff need to know in 2017TRG Arts
You’ve got a CRM system. You’ve got reports galore. But how can you use data to affect change at your theatre? DataArts has partnered with field experts to create a new series of free online courses teaching essential data skills for arts leaders. In this session, TRG Arts will present a brief preview from Connecting the Dots: Audience Data Essentials, a course they co-created with DataArts. Attendees will leave the session with 4 basic metrics to track at their own theatre, plus ideas about how these courses can serve as a valuable resource for their own learning, or as a professional development tool for their staff.
This session was presented at the 2017 Theatre Communications Group Conference by TRG Arts and DataArts.
What changes do you need to make for optimum organizational health? No FitBit required! In this session, presented at the 2017 AAM Annual Meeting and Convention, experts from the National Center for Arts Research and TRG Arts to examine ways to measure and improve organizational health. Using a new free tool, participants will have the opportunity to get individual organizational health scores, discuss what they mean and how they compare to their peers, determine which metrics are most applicable to their organization, and how to change their work to get results. Walk through a process of identifying marketing, attendance, virtual participation, expenses and earned revenue strategies and challenges, as well as examples of data-guided, sustainable change.
TRG's David Brownlee presented new data on touring productions at the 2017 UK Theatre Touring Symposium. David's research (based on 2016 data) illuminates trends in ticket income from touring and non-touring productions over several years.
One major takeaway of the study was that touring accounts for the majority of tickets sold and income at UK Theatre venues, driven by musicals at big venues.
1) There was 13% growth in theatre-going households in DC over the past decade, with increases in new households, returning households, and attriting households.
2) Younger demographic clusters like singles and families saw the fastest growth at 32% and 22%, while older boomer clusters grew 14%.
3) Most patrons (82%) are "Single Ticket Experimenters" who visit only one theatre occasionally, though visiting multiple theatres correlates with more loyal behavior.
Christmas in July: Turn up the heat on the holidaysTRG Arts
Forget about Independence Day. Start thinking about Black Friday.
If not, you could be missing out on your biggest opportunity of next season.
The holiday season starts NOW for arts managers. Don’t let the heat of summer lull you into thinking holiday shows sell themselves—there’s a lot to do. It’s time to dust off and refresh your marketing plan for The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, your holiday concert, or whatever hot ticket event you have this December.
In this free one-hour webinar you’ll hear from arts marketers like you who have maximized their holiday programming and gone on to break revenue records. Just when these arts administrators thought their perennial programming couldn’t garner any more, new highs were reached. These experts as well as the consultants from TRG will share the newest best practices for turning up the heat on the holidays.
You’ll learn:
- What, when, and how often: how to optimize campaign timing and frequency, and content strategies for an event that’s repeated annually
- Why a good marketing campaign is nothing without a pricing strategy that allows revenue goals to be met--or exceeded. We’ll explore how the two work together for high-demand programming.
- The importance of realistic budgeting and revenue projections as well as the basics of matching revenue expectations to historical data
My audiences, your audiences: Developing theatre patrons as a communityTRG Arts
Seven theatres. 10 seasons of data. One community. Learn what this study, completed in January 2015, reveals about theatre patrons in one community and their buying and giving habits. The importance of audience development and retention shines through, in light of data analysis on how Washington, D.C. theatres are attracting and holding on to patrons. Zoom in on trends in patronage in this community, including new theatre-goers and patrons who attend multiple theatres. Learn about the clusters of patrons in this community who look demographically or transactionally similar. Unlock the secrets of audience behavior that may point to trends in your own community.
In this session, you’ll learn:
• The benefits of a community wide market research campaign.
• The actions this community is taking as a result of the research findings.
• The role of audience development initiatives in strengthening loyalty and attendance patterns.
Patron Development: Preparing a path from first ticket to planned giftTRG Arts
A patron’s loyalty is built step-by-step with each interaction with your organization. TRG is a data-driven consulting firm that teaches arts and cultural professionals a patron-based approach to sustainable revenue and discussed patron segmentation strategies and proven practices for closing the gap between subscribers and donors.
TRG Webinar: All in: Developing patron loyalty across departmentsTRG Arts
It’s easy to think of audience development or patron loyalty cultivation as a job for the marketing department. The fact is, all the departments in an organization must align around patrons in order to make a patron-centered business model work.
All in: Building patron loyalty through teamworkTRG Arts
Think audience development is marketing’s job? Think again. All departments play a critical role in retaining and cultivating patron relationships. In order to make a patron-centered business model work, all departments—including ticketing and patron services, artistic staff, development, and executive leaders—must align their objectives with that of patron loyalty.
In this session, presented at the 2016 Chamber Music America conference in New York City, both executives and staff members will reexamine how they lead and collaborate on initiatives that create lasting patron relationships. TRG's VP of Client Development Lindsay Anderson looked at how cross-departmental campaigns build loyalty, how a sales orientation in the patron services department can bolster marketing-development collaboration, and how artistic programming can also factor into loyalty-building.
Seat o-nomics: demand-based pricing strategies for chamber music organizationsTRG Arts
What motivates someone to attend a concert? And, more, importantly, what drives them to attend again and again? Arts managers (and patrons themselves) often cite price as the main and biggest incentive for arts attendance. Certainly price plays a major role in a customer’s decision-making process.
But pricing doesn’t mean anything unless it’s attached to value. It’s a two-sided equation, with price on one side and demand—how much a patron wants the experience—on the other.
Luckily, you have tools that can sweeten the value proposition for your audiences. Ticketing inventory, historical data, discounting, and the choice and timing of programming can help you incentivize audiences to engage with you again and again.
This session was presented at the 2016 Chamber Music America Conference in New York City. TRG's VP of Client Development Lindsay Anderson discussed:
- Strategies to attract audiences to low, middle, and high-demand concerts
- How to incentivize loyalty based on demand for programming
- When and how to approach discounting and dynamic pricing
Developing audiences through data (Desarrollar audiencias a partir de los datos)TRG Arts
As public subsidies for the arts change, organizations must rely on people—their audiences and patrons—to provide the revenue to sustain them long-term. How can organizations build a new business model that both serves audiences and relies on them for revenue? The first step is to see what the data says about building these patron relationships.
In this keynote, presented at the 2015 Conferencia de Marketing de las Artes in Madrid and Barcelona, Jill Robinson of the arts consulting firm TRG Arts offered data-inspired lessons on how organizations can monetize patron relationships. These relationships drive the revenue that allows the entire organization to thrive, instead of merely surviving. Jill also discussed data collection and privacy concerns, and how to create incentives for genuine connection between patrons and organization. You’ll learn how pricing and demand, patron loyalty, database management, and artistic programming each impact patron-generated revenue, and how they can be integrated into an organization-wide culture to drive revenue. When marketers leverage this integrated model, they can make the most of their marketing budget, and start cultivating audiences for a sustainable future. This presentation discussed these specific questions:
1. Why does loyalty matter? How can higher ROI on each patron build sustainable arts organizations?
2. Not all patrons are created equal. How can we right-size our marketing investments in different groups of patrons?
3. Does the type of programming that a patron attends determine future ROI?
Pricing Drives Revenue at New Wolsey TheatreTRG Arts
“Our patrons won’t pay that…”
“Everyone wants to sit in this section…”
Our assumptions about what our audiences will and won’t want or do can stop us from pricing to optimize revenue for our organizations. But we don’t really know until we look at the data. Ignoring what patron data tells us about pricing can lead arts organizations to leave money on the table—money that could be sustaining their mission.
At The New Wolsey Theatre in the U.K., small changes to pricing strategy resulted in big revenue increases. In just nine months, the company reported a 31% increase in box office gross—without selling more tickets. In this webinar, New Wolsey’s Head of Sales and Marketing Stephen Skrypec and TRG’s VP of Client Development Lindsay Anderson shared how the theatre updated daily practices and challenged prior assumptions about audiences, leading to their success. We examined how arts organizations, whether in the U.S., U.K., or elsewhere, can use pricing to drive patron behavior and revenue.
Better Together: Loyalty, Collaboration, and Community in PhiladelphiaTRG Arts
You may know the buying and donating patterns of your own audience. But do you know how they engage with the other arts organizations in your community? And does that mean you’re in competition with them or have opportunities to collaborate?
Seventeen arts and cultural institutions in the Philadelphia area set out to find the answers to those very questions. The study they commissioned investigated the buying and donating behavior of nearly 1 million arts audience and visitor households over seven years, with interesting findings about community engagement and audience loyalty. Researchers profiled how loyal patrons were to each individual organization and tracked patterns of loyalty across the community.
Join the research team from the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and TRG Arts in this hour-long, free webinar. You’ll learn:
- The most relevant findings from this ground-breaking study
- How patrons at different levels of loyalty invested in the Philadelphia arts community at large
Why data shows that collaboration and cooperation between organizations strengthens community-wide arts audiences
- How your own audience may be behaving based on the behavior patterns found in this study
- What your organization can do to create and keep loyal supporters
"Loyalty takes time." That was the key point that Jill Robinson, President & CEO of TRG Arts, put forth in a discussion of young donors at the 2015 Opera America Conference in Washington, DC. The panel's premise was that, with opera audiences growing older, companies must focus their attention on new generations of support. While development departments may have mastered the appeal to traditionalists and baby boomers, Gen Xers and millennials are looking for something else. Attendees at this standing-room only session learned what the data says about these patrons, what matters to next gen donors, and how opera companies can engage them.
The panel was moderated by Erin Sammis, Director of Major Gifts at Opera Philadelphia. Jill was joined on the panel by Yuming Chiu, associate brand manager, Johnson & Johnson; Mary Galeti, executive director and vice-chair, Tecovas Foundation; and Kim Parker, director of social trends research, Pew Research Center.
Chaos, Order, and Innovation: Planning to ImproviseTRG Arts
The poem describes chaos being confined within strict lines of order. Over 14 lines, chaos is captured and contained, forcing it to mingle with order. The hours and years of chaos's arrogance and humanity's servitude are past. Order now holds chaos's essence and shape, and will make it conform to order, rather than forcing it to confess or answer. Order will simply make chaos good.
The death of the subscription has been greatly exaggeratedTRG Arts
Let’s face it; the subscription has been uncool for years. While disruptive technologies and changing arts consumer behavior have transformed the way arts managers see their business model, the subscription has declined and stagnated. “Subscriptions are dead” is now conventional wisdom in our industry.
But, if subscriptions were truly dead, wouldn’t they have just disappeared by now? Inconveniently, subscriptions incentivize loyalty and provide sustainable revenue that's difficult to find elsewhere in any audience-centered business model. Many organizations that have tried to innovate in this area have found themselves in a state of subscription emergency.
The fact is, subscriptions are still viable, but selling them today requires a different mindset than it did 5, 10, or 20 years ago. While it takes work to rescue and resuscitate your subscription program, it's achievable and you already have many of the tools you need to do it. In this webinar, CEO & President Jill Robinson presented:
- Evidence that subscription survives and, yes, even thrives at arts organizations today
- How subscription can build loyalty among audiences
- What it takes in 2015 to rescue your subscription program
Would you like season tickets with that? The Art of the UpgradeTRG Arts
For cultural institutions, the box office is not just the place where ticket orders are passively taken. It plays an active role in growing revenue by developing loyalty. Every time a patron logs in, calls, or visits to buy a ticket, the opportunity exists for them to upgrade and deepen their relationship with the organization. With the right training, the box office can become experts on how to cultivate patron relationships and keep audiences coming back for more.
TRG President & CEO Jill Robinson presented this session at the 2015 InTix conference in Denver with Jeremy Scott of Seattle Repertory Theatre and Molly Riddle Wink of Denver Art Museum.
Time to Change? Pricing, Deals, and StrategyTRG Arts
Pricing strategies can have great impact on deals and revenue for both agents and presenters. In the middle of this mix is the audience and their behavior that either creates demand for your performances, or leaves you with a lot of empty seats. Pricing and audience guru Jill Robinson of TRG Arts, Jackie Knobbe of APA Agency, Jeremy Ganter of Mondavi Center, UC Davis, and Joan Squires of Omaha Performing Arts discussed the ins and outs of maximizing revenue and developing audiences through pricing and scaling in this session, presented at the 2015 APAP conference in New York City.
Artistic Programming by the Numbers: A KC Rep Case StudyTRG Arts
One of the biggest challenges for theatre leaders lies in perfecting the balance between commercially popular and artistically ambitious plays. In 2014, Kansas City Repertory Theatre was at a crossroads with programming choices, finding it difficult to grow new audiences and cultivate their current loyal supporters. The artistic and executive director decided to do something quite radical: quantify the impact of programming on audience development. Some of the questions they asked were: Which genres grow new audiences? Which deepen current loyalty? Which plays encourage and discourage repeat attendance? Does venue impact audience behavior? How are factors like per-ticket spend impacted?
Learn what the data said about different artistic genres and the types of audiences it attracted, how KC Rep used the data as inspiration for their new Creative Future Fund, and the results they’ve seen in the following three years in audience and revenue numbers. This presentation was made at the 2017 Theatre Communications Group Conference.
Data Skills: What you and your staff need to know in 2017TRG Arts
You’ve got a CRM system. You’ve got reports galore. But how can you use data to affect change at your theatre? DataArts has partnered with field experts to create a new series of free online courses teaching essential data skills for arts leaders. In this session, TRG Arts will present a brief preview from Connecting the Dots: Audience Data Essentials, a course they co-created with DataArts. Attendees will leave the session with 4 basic metrics to track at their own theatre, plus ideas about how these courses can serve as a valuable resource for their own learning, or as a professional development tool for their staff.
This session was presented at the 2017 Theatre Communications Group Conference by TRG Arts and DataArts.
What changes do you need to make for optimum organizational health? No FitBit required! In this session, presented at the 2017 AAM Annual Meeting and Convention, experts from the National Center for Arts Research and TRG Arts to examine ways to measure and improve organizational health. Using a new free tool, participants will have the opportunity to get individual organizational health scores, discuss what they mean and how they compare to their peers, determine which metrics are most applicable to their organization, and how to change their work to get results. Walk through a process of identifying marketing, attendance, virtual participation, expenses and earned revenue strategies and challenges, as well as examples of data-guided, sustainable change.
TRG's David Brownlee presented new data on touring productions at the 2017 UK Theatre Touring Symposium. David's research (based on 2016 data) illuminates trends in ticket income from touring and non-touring productions over several years.
One major takeaway of the study was that touring accounts for the majority of tickets sold and income at UK Theatre venues, driven by musicals at big venues.
1) There was 13% growth in theatre-going households in DC over the past decade, with increases in new households, returning households, and attriting households.
2) Younger demographic clusters like singles and families saw the fastest growth at 32% and 22%, while older boomer clusters grew 14%.
3) Most patrons (82%) are "Single Ticket Experimenters" who visit only one theatre occasionally, though visiting multiple theatres correlates with more loyal behavior.
Christmas in July: Turn up the heat on the holidaysTRG Arts
Forget about Independence Day. Start thinking about Black Friday.
If not, you could be missing out on your biggest opportunity of next season.
The holiday season starts NOW for arts managers. Don’t let the heat of summer lull you into thinking holiday shows sell themselves—there’s a lot to do. It’s time to dust off and refresh your marketing plan for The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, your holiday concert, or whatever hot ticket event you have this December.
In this free one-hour webinar you’ll hear from arts marketers like you who have maximized their holiday programming and gone on to break revenue records. Just when these arts administrators thought their perennial programming couldn’t garner any more, new highs were reached. These experts as well as the consultants from TRG will share the newest best practices for turning up the heat on the holidays.
You’ll learn:
- What, when, and how often: how to optimize campaign timing and frequency, and content strategies for an event that’s repeated annually
- Why a good marketing campaign is nothing without a pricing strategy that allows revenue goals to be met--or exceeded. We’ll explore how the two work together for high-demand programming.
- The importance of realistic budgeting and revenue projections as well as the basics of matching revenue expectations to historical data
My audiences, your audiences: Developing theatre patrons as a communityTRG Arts
Seven theatres. 10 seasons of data. One community. Learn what this study, completed in January 2015, reveals about theatre patrons in one community and their buying and giving habits. The importance of audience development and retention shines through, in light of data analysis on how Washington, D.C. theatres are attracting and holding on to patrons. Zoom in on trends in patronage in this community, including new theatre-goers and patrons who attend multiple theatres. Learn about the clusters of patrons in this community who look demographically or transactionally similar. Unlock the secrets of audience behavior that may point to trends in your own community.
In this session, you’ll learn:
• The benefits of a community wide market research campaign.
• The actions this community is taking as a result of the research findings.
• The role of audience development initiatives in strengthening loyalty and attendance patterns.
Patron Development: Preparing a path from first ticket to planned giftTRG Arts
A patron’s loyalty is built step-by-step with each interaction with your organization. TRG is a data-driven consulting firm that teaches arts and cultural professionals a patron-based approach to sustainable revenue and discussed patron segmentation strategies and proven practices for closing the gap between subscribers and donors.
TRG Webinar: All in: Developing patron loyalty across departmentsTRG Arts
It’s easy to think of audience development or patron loyalty cultivation as a job for the marketing department. The fact is, all the departments in an organization must align around patrons in order to make a patron-centered business model work.
All in: Building patron loyalty through teamworkTRG Arts
Think audience development is marketing’s job? Think again. All departments play a critical role in retaining and cultivating patron relationships. In order to make a patron-centered business model work, all departments—including ticketing and patron services, artistic staff, development, and executive leaders—must align their objectives with that of patron loyalty.
In this session, presented at the 2016 Chamber Music America conference in New York City, both executives and staff members will reexamine how they lead and collaborate on initiatives that create lasting patron relationships. TRG's VP of Client Development Lindsay Anderson looked at how cross-departmental campaigns build loyalty, how a sales orientation in the patron services department can bolster marketing-development collaboration, and how artistic programming can also factor into loyalty-building.
Seat o-nomics: demand-based pricing strategies for chamber music organizationsTRG Arts
What motivates someone to attend a concert? And, more, importantly, what drives them to attend again and again? Arts managers (and patrons themselves) often cite price as the main and biggest incentive for arts attendance. Certainly price plays a major role in a customer’s decision-making process.
But pricing doesn’t mean anything unless it’s attached to value. It’s a two-sided equation, with price on one side and demand—how much a patron wants the experience—on the other.
Luckily, you have tools that can sweeten the value proposition for your audiences. Ticketing inventory, historical data, discounting, and the choice and timing of programming can help you incentivize audiences to engage with you again and again.
This session was presented at the 2016 Chamber Music America Conference in New York City. TRG's VP of Client Development Lindsay Anderson discussed:
- Strategies to attract audiences to low, middle, and high-demand concerts
- How to incentivize loyalty based on demand for programming
- When and how to approach discounting and dynamic pricing
Developing audiences through data (Desarrollar audiencias a partir de los datos)TRG Arts
As public subsidies for the arts change, organizations must rely on people—their audiences and patrons—to provide the revenue to sustain them long-term. How can organizations build a new business model that both serves audiences and relies on them for revenue? The first step is to see what the data says about building these patron relationships.
In this keynote, presented at the 2015 Conferencia de Marketing de las Artes in Madrid and Barcelona, Jill Robinson of the arts consulting firm TRG Arts offered data-inspired lessons on how organizations can monetize patron relationships. These relationships drive the revenue that allows the entire organization to thrive, instead of merely surviving. Jill also discussed data collection and privacy concerns, and how to create incentives for genuine connection between patrons and organization. You’ll learn how pricing and demand, patron loyalty, database management, and artistic programming each impact patron-generated revenue, and how they can be integrated into an organization-wide culture to drive revenue. When marketers leverage this integrated model, they can make the most of their marketing budget, and start cultivating audiences for a sustainable future. This presentation discussed these specific questions:
1. Why does loyalty matter? How can higher ROI on each patron build sustainable arts organizations?
2. Not all patrons are created equal. How can we right-size our marketing investments in different groups of patrons?
3. Does the type of programming that a patron attends determine future ROI?
Pricing Drives Revenue at New Wolsey TheatreTRG Arts
“Our patrons won’t pay that…”
“Everyone wants to sit in this section…”
Our assumptions about what our audiences will and won’t want or do can stop us from pricing to optimize revenue for our organizations. But we don’t really know until we look at the data. Ignoring what patron data tells us about pricing can lead arts organizations to leave money on the table—money that could be sustaining their mission.
At The New Wolsey Theatre in the U.K., small changes to pricing strategy resulted in big revenue increases. In just nine months, the company reported a 31% increase in box office gross—without selling more tickets. In this webinar, New Wolsey’s Head of Sales and Marketing Stephen Skrypec and TRG’s VP of Client Development Lindsay Anderson shared how the theatre updated daily practices and challenged prior assumptions about audiences, leading to their success. We examined how arts organizations, whether in the U.S., U.K., or elsewhere, can use pricing to drive patron behavior and revenue.
Better Together: Loyalty, Collaboration, and Community in PhiladelphiaTRG Arts
You may know the buying and donating patterns of your own audience. But do you know how they engage with the other arts organizations in your community? And does that mean you’re in competition with them or have opportunities to collaborate?
Seventeen arts and cultural institutions in the Philadelphia area set out to find the answers to those very questions. The study they commissioned investigated the buying and donating behavior of nearly 1 million arts audience and visitor households over seven years, with interesting findings about community engagement and audience loyalty. Researchers profiled how loyal patrons were to each individual organization and tracked patterns of loyalty across the community.
Join the research team from the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and TRG Arts in this hour-long, free webinar. You’ll learn:
- The most relevant findings from this ground-breaking study
- How patrons at different levels of loyalty invested in the Philadelphia arts community at large
Why data shows that collaboration and cooperation between organizations strengthens community-wide arts audiences
- How your own audience may be behaving based on the behavior patterns found in this study
- What your organization can do to create and keep loyal supporters
"Loyalty takes time." That was the key point that Jill Robinson, President & CEO of TRG Arts, put forth in a discussion of young donors at the 2015 Opera America Conference in Washington, DC. The panel's premise was that, with opera audiences growing older, companies must focus their attention on new generations of support. While development departments may have mastered the appeal to traditionalists and baby boomers, Gen Xers and millennials are looking for something else. Attendees at this standing-room only session learned what the data says about these patrons, what matters to next gen donors, and how opera companies can engage them.
The panel was moderated by Erin Sammis, Director of Major Gifts at Opera Philadelphia. Jill was joined on the panel by Yuming Chiu, associate brand manager, Johnson & Johnson; Mary Galeti, executive director and vice-chair, Tecovas Foundation; and Kim Parker, director of social trends research, Pew Research Center.
Chaos, Order, and Innovation: Planning to ImproviseTRG Arts
The poem describes chaos being confined within strict lines of order. Over 14 lines, chaos is captured and contained, forcing it to mingle with order. The hours and years of chaos's arrogance and humanity's servitude are past. Order now holds chaos's essence and shape, and will make it conform to order, rather than forcing it to confess or answer. Order will simply make chaos good.
The death of the subscription has been greatly exaggeratedTRG Arts
Let’s face it; the subscription has been uncool for years. While disruptive technologies and changing arts consumer behavior have transformed the way arts managers see their business model, the subscription has declined and stagnated. “Subscriptions are dead” is now conventional wisdom in our industry.
But, if subscriptions were truly dead, wouldn’t they have just disappeared by now? Inconveniently, subscriptions incentivize loyalty and provide sustainable revenue that's difficult to find elsewhere in any audience-centered business model. Many organizations that have tried to innovate in this area have found themselves in a state of subscription emergency.
The fact is, subscriptions are still viable, but selling them today requires a different mindset than it did 5, 10, or 20 years ago. While it takes work to rescue and resuscitate your subscription program, it's achievable and you already have many of the tools you need to do it. In this webinar, CEO & President Jill Robinson presented:
- Evidence that subscription survives and, yes, even thrives at arts organizations today
- How subscription can build loyalty among audiences
- What it takes in 2015 to rescue your subscription program
Would you like season tickets with that? The Art of the UpgradeTRG Arts
For cultural institutions, the box office is not just the place where ticket orders are passively taken. It plays an active role in growing revenue by developing loyalty. Every time a patron logs in, calls, or visits to buy a ticket, the opportunity exists for them to upgrade and deepen their relationship with the organization. With the right training, the box office can become experts on how to cultivate patron relationships and keep audiences coming back for more.
TRG President & CEO Jill Robinson presented this session at the 2015 InTix conference in Denver with Jeremy Scott of Seattle Repertory Theatre and Molly Riddle Wink of Denver Art Museum.
Time to Change? Pricing, Deals, and StrategyTRG Arts
Pricing strategies can have great impact on deals and revenue for both agents and presenters. In the middle of this mix is the audience and their behavior that either creates demand for your performances, or leaves you with a lot of empty seats. Pricing and audience guru Jill Robinson of TRG Arts, Jackie Knobbe of APA Agency, Jeremy Ganter of Mondavi Center, UC Davis, and Joan Squires of Omaha Performing Arts discussed the ins and outs of maximizing revenue and developing audiences through pricing and scaling in this session, presented at the 2015 APAP conference in New York City.