Use volunteers for non-vital tasks

When it comes to picking the people who are going to run your audience development initiatives (be it the producer of the show, the person writing your email newsletters, or the person sending out your press releases, etc.) organizations generally have two choices: barter for cheap or free using an existing relationship with a volunteer who knows how to do the stuff, or hire someone to do the work (either staff or freelancer).

Many organizations go for the former, thinking that a volunteer or “social relationship” is excited and capable to do the job, maybe even at no cost. And many an organization suffers a lack of fuel in their engines because of that choice.

The free arts website scenario

It’s attractive, I totally agree to that. Let’s say you’re the artistic director at a small theatre company, and you need a new website. You lament about this with your theatre friends (as you should, because it’s fun) and one of them says “Oh, I set up websites, I’d be happy to knock something out for you, free of charge.” And you think to yourself “Yes! New website for no money!”

And indeed, a few weeks or months later (probably longer that you had hoped) he/she launches a pretty good looking site for you. You’re thrilled to announce it. People tell you it looks great. And for awhile, everything goes smashingly, until one day you send an email to your friend, asking he/she to update a section of the site for you, and you don’t get a response. A few days go by. You need to get this updated. You call, and finally get them and they say they have “just being swamped.” But they do the update for you, and things are good again… for a little while.

Then the cycle repeats. He/she is your friend, so you don’t have the heart to tell them to shape it up (and you don’t really have a right to anyway, since you’re getting the service for free). Your relationship starts to go South due to the tension, and he/she wants out of doing the updates. And more mayhem occurs. And what’s really happening is your image is suffering — people can’t get the information they need when they need it. Press people can’t get the photos they need. People can’t see how to purchase tickets. Etc.

Sound familiar? This is a very common occurrence in the nonprofit world.

Organizations have chosen low-cost or free as the most important factor, and for that, they’ve given up reliability, the ability to enforce requests, and ultimately a friendship. And they’ve wasted all of that energy hounding somebody to do work that could have been spent following up on some other marketing idea. The upside just simply doesn’t outweigh the downside.

Volunteers: use them for non-essential tasks

Nobody meant to hurt anybody’s feeling here. It all started with good intentions. But since there was nothing but favors involved, there was no way to enforce people becoming flakes for whatever reason.

One of your goals as the manager of an arts organization is to create a business model that doesn’t allow for flakiness. How do you do that? Pay people who are doing the vital tasks.

You can do this by using volunteers only for non-essential tasks, so if they flake, you’re not hurt. Examples of non-essential tasks are redundancy in house management (have two volunteers, if one doesn’t show, you’re still ok), set painters, dressers, etc.  “Assistants” to everybody where appropriate, so that the main person can have an easier time, but if the volunteer doesn’t show, the main person who is getting paid can still get it done.

The main check is to ask yourself “if this person doesn’t show up for some reason, would I be dead in the water?” If the answer is yes, pay them.

By keeping your vital tasks assigned to people who have a financial interest (however small or large) you gain the ability to keep running your organization like a business, which is how it should be. If someone is not performing the things they are assigned to do, you have the power to let them go and to find someone to replace them, and the people being paid know that, and function with that in mind.

This is a powerful control that shouldn’t give up in the name of low budget.

Marketing and audience development is not something you want to have being done some of the time. There needs to be a system you’ve put in place that guarantees that it is running at least at a minimal level, all the time. And paid staff or freelance help can be set up to do that for you, and will do it, because they want to keep their job or your good business respectively.

Volunteers, as much as they want to help, are not good to count on for reliability (and as I say that, I know that you may have a volunteer that is as reliable as the sun rising — but from my experience that is an exception to the rule.)

But what if we can’t afford to pay people to do those tasks?

If you’re ok with non-reliable performance from your vital people, you can skip paying them. And some people are ok with that level of performance at their arts organization, and I’m not saying that’s not ok, for them. But if you’re struggling with the scenarios I’ve described above, just realize what the cause is, and find a way to fix it.

Maybe that means you do a less-expensive show this season, so that you can pay less in royalties, and use the saved money to hire someone to rely upon to run a marketing campaign for you. Or that you increase your ticket price a couple of dollars so you can pay a small staff. You’re worth it, and they are too.

What you get is marketing that works. Outreach that works. Websites that you can update on your own or know will get updated by your paid help whenever you need it. Lighting designers who want to do this for their art, and still be able to eat. Actors who get paid at least something for their craft. Yes, it costs more in the short term, but the reliability is there for the long term, which leaves you with the peace of mind that it’s getting done, and that you have options if there’s a problem. It’s a nice, relaxing place to be.

Like this post? Please share it with others who you think might benefit from it, via the links below, and subscribe via email or RSS to receive future updates. Ron Evans is an arts marketing and technology consultant with Groupofminds.com in Sunnyvale, CA.

Have an opinion about the content of this post? Start or join the conversation on our Facebook page.

Online video is one of the most effective and personal ways you can communicate your arts and cultural messages. And YouTube continues it’s reign as the most popular online video sharing site. After five+ years in business the company recently announced that YouTube’s viewership now exceeds that of all three networks combined during their “primetime” evening time slot, with more than 2 billion views per day. That is a lot of “backyard wrestling” and “check out the world’s fattest cat” videos.

But it’s not all videos on YouTube are sill time wasters. Many arts organizations use YouTube as their video hosting service of choice, listing clips from shows, interviews with staff and artists, audience reactions, informational pieces, and much more. But I’ve had several organizations ask me if they should move to other video hosting services, with a variety of explanations for why this should be considered — some strong arguments, others not so much.

What does YouTube have going for it?

YouTube is free — Quite possibly the most compelling reason to use YouTube is the fact that you can store unlimited videos (of a defined file size and length) for free. In comparing any service, free is a great place to be, and YouTube has effectively cornered the market (thanks to help from parent company Google) on free video hosting. A lot of arts organizations can’t afford video hosting and bandwidth charges (which can be quite high based on the number of videos being served x the number of people watching them).

YouTube is easy to use — YouTube is used by millions of people every day, and has been improving technology for five years — it is a stable system that has been polished by heavy use for a long time. Consequently, people find YouTube easy to use when watching and uploading and watching videos. And as some organizations don’t have a great number of “tech people” on staff, this low barrier to success is useful and appreciated.

People know how to use YouTube – Another very important feature of YouTube is the years of experience users have using it. There aren’t very many options to watching or even uploading a video, and people can easily figure out how everything works. You may find more whiz-bang features in other video hosting services, but if people need to stop and scratch their heads as they try to figure out how to watch your video, you’ve become penny wise but pound foolish.

YouTube is fully social — It’s super easy to embed and play youtube videos on social networking sites such as Facebook. Being able to play a YouTube video in a newsfeed on Facebook is what people expect.

YouTube is doing the software work for you — Hosting your video on your own server is not the easiest thing in the world, and over time it requires you to maintain software that you don’t need to worry about when you’re using YouTube — they take care of all the nuts and bolts so you don’t have to. You just upload video, and share it.

Arguments against YouTube

Video quality — While generally YouTube videos “look pretty good,” there are other video hosting solutions, such as vimeo.com, that have a much higher video quality. And this makes sense when you think about it — YouTube is trying to provide unlimited video hosting for free, and to do that, they have lowered the quality of the videos on their site so that everybody can have more. Sites like vimeo offer paid services, so for that money you’re paying, you’re getting higher quality, more customized features, and larger video sizes.

Length of video/file size — YouTube limits your videos to no greater than 10 minutes in length, and/or 100mb file size. Again, this is an effort to reduce resources that they are providing for free, and YouTube shouldn’t be faulted for it — they are trying to run a business, and are limiting their expenses. The good side to this rule though, is that videos stay short (and stay interesting). This helps people to focus on the idea that they are trying to present, and just get to the point. So if your clips are short, YouTube will work great, and if you need longer videos, you’ll have to check out some other video hosting service (and probably get a paid account).

Other “related” videos show at the end — YouTube wants the user to stay on YouTube and watch more videos, which is why they created the “related video” feature, that shows other videos you can watch at the conclusion of the video you’re watching. Many people don’t know that this feature can be turned off in YouTube, and there is a great article on how to do it.

So all in all, I’m a YouTube fan. The service works well, and the price can’t be beat. For everyday online arts video segments, there is no reason to go with any other hosting provider, unless you have unique requirements (such as needing longer videos or more customized video quality/interfaces). If you’re using YouTube now, stay put. Get yourself a nonprofit YouTube page, and brand it like your site (as an example, Artsopolis as a good looking YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/artsopolis.

If you’re still looking for some other hosting providers to compare, here are a few I’ve had good experiences with:

Vimeo.com | Blip.tv | Dropshots.com

-Ron

Like this post? Please share it with others who you think might benefit from it, via the links below, and subscribe via email or RSS to receive future updates. Ron Evans is an arts marketing and technology consultant with Groupofminds.com in Sunnyvale, CA.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Five Years In, YouTube Is Now Streaming Two Billion Views Per Day (techcrunch.com)

I’ve been keeping my eye out to the way some of my favorite brands have been changing their messaging recently. Things of course are getting more filtered and specific to me, which is great, but a few companies are really standing out with messaging that is designed to make me feel good or take action. Take this screenshot from a recent email I received after flying with Southwest Airlines:

Nice Southwest! You didn't ask me for $!

Nice! They didn’t try to sell me another ticket right away. They are inviting me to write about my experience, but that doesn’t cost me anything but my time, and at the moment, I’m feeling pretty good about Southwest Airlines (and they just thanked me, so that might add to my decision to

write something good about them). Even though I may not choose to write anything in their travel guide, the thank you is nice and stands on its own.

Can the arts learn messaging tactics from Ebay?

Next up: Ebay. I recently purchased a piece of artwork on Ebay, and Ebay sent me this email message in an effort to get me to leave feedback for the seller of the item:

A powerful message from Ebay!

Whoa! “You have feedback you need to leave” is not kidding around. They are tapping into a lot of things there. I need to leave feedback. It is my responsibility as a good “ebayer.” If I don’t, I’ll be a bad person. It is something I NEED to do. Then they soften it up by saying “Be an Ebay Star — Leave Feedback!” Ok. All I have to do to have Ebay like me is to write feedback. I’ll redeem my irresponsible, dark-side-leaning self, and come back into the light!

This is powerful stuff. This message went through a bunch of research to be created, I have no doubt. It’s a great message for action. Minus one point for using the word “click” as a command to go somewhere. Personally, I really hate “click” and especially “click here” — that’s why we have underlined links, so you’ll know where to click. But I digress. Ebay wins major messaging points for avoiding a wishy-washy message, and for tapping into some primal emotions for right and wrong.

You’ve just experienced it, are you ready for more?

Finally, I recently did an arts marketing webinar with a friend who was using a piece of webinar software from Glance.net. Like most webinar software, it allows you to share your screen to take your participants on a tour, run a powerpoint session, etc. What struck me was the message I saw when I ended the conference:

At a glance, Glance's messaging looks great!

The software was smart enough to know that I was not the person running the webinar software (and was therefore a participant who might be interested in paying for an account) and the messaging is designed to have me realize that “Wow, that WAS really easy to do. This Glance.net thing might be a good choice for webinars.” I liked this, because it was a surprise to see, and the software WAS really easy to use. They are tooting their own horn, but in a way that is real, with a real experience to back it up.

So how does this play out for the arts?

Many times, I see arts marketing messages that don’t take a stand that sells the benefits and defends the value. We should be telling people WHY they should attend our performance, not just sending an ad with dates/times/prices. If the performance is spectacular, we should be parading that fact proudly to all — “Aren’t you glad you were a part of THAT!” — why not? Let’s ask people for action and tap into who they are as people. “How long has it been since you gave support to the arts and saw a good play?” We are all creating wonderful work that we are proud of. Let’s not be afraid to celebrate and champion it in our messaging.

Like this post? Please share it with others who you think might benefit from it, via the links below, and subscribe via email or RSS to receive future updates.

Get your logins. Store them safely. Celebrate!

Reading time: 10 minutes

Every day is a holiday to somebody. What’s one more to add to the list? Let me give you a little background.

Often, I work with clients who have previously had a volunteer run some important part of their arts marketing arsenal — usually their website, or their email marketing. In many cases, the volunteer is a friend or family member connected to a board member, and the organization is drawn to the promise of free technical help. “My brother is a web developer; let me see if I can talk him into running our website for us!”

The concept of free service

The concept of free service because of a good connection is incredibly attractive to some arts groups where money is especially tight. And sometimes it works out really well for a long time. But it can also easily lead to disaster.

When the board member leaves the board, often the strength of the volunteer connection leaves too. Oh, that free web developer can stick around for awhile, but in many cases the response time to get something updated gets longer and longer. Finally it starts to damage the organization’s ability to manipulate their own marketing information, such as being able to update the website, send out the email, etc. And in the worst cases, your volunteer website updater just disappears into thin air, taking your logins and passwords with them. That’s bad. But it is not as rare as you might think — I’ve now worked with four clients who have had it happen to them. The most recent two needed to register totally new domain names and set up brand new websites at considerable expense, because they couldn’t get access from their previous web developer.

Volunteering isn’t a bad thing. Many arts groups wouldn’t be able to get by if they didn’t use volunteers to get things done. But volunteers need to be managed, and they shouldn’t ever have access to things we don’t have access to ourselves. And that means access to all of your login information to your website, Facebook/Twitter, email marketing software, etc., or what I call “the keys to the kingdom.”

If they have passwords, you should know them too — they should be stored in a word document somewhere and marked “to be used in the case that our web developer disappears.” How do you get this information if you don’t already have it? Simple: ask your developer. But do so carefully.

How to get the logins

Now, a lot of developers are a little paranoid about logins and passwords. And you’ll need to be tactful when asking for this information, and do so in a way that does not make the developer feel like you want to can them. Everybody wants to feel useful, and if you put yourself in their shoes, without knowing the reason for the request, you might be a little nervous too.

The easiest way to get this info is to ask for a “check in meeting” with them. First, compliment them on how much they’ve helped your organization, and mention that things are going great, and that you hope they’ll be able to continue to help your organization for a very long time. Then, tell them that the board is going through a process of doing a record keeping/information inventory, and they would like a document with all login information, passwords, urls, etc. so in the *knock on wood* case that something were to happen to any staff member who holds key information, the organization could continue with its work. Then say “Even though it’s a little bit of a hassle for us to gather this info together, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a reasonable and smart request.” That last part is important to gain agreement, as nobody wants to be thought of as unreasonable. Then, set a date that the information is due by, get their agreement, tell them that you’ll be updating the document every 6 months, and finish off with another compliment on their work. Finally, have the info that has been provided to you examined by a different  technology friend of yours, to make sure everything you need is there.

How else can you protect your access?

Potential problems don’t just come from the web developer side of things; the arts organization needs to think in advance and do its part too. For example, make sure that your website isn’t hosted by the volunteer web developer. It should be hosted with a reliable 3rd-party company such as dreamhost.com or mediatemple.com (those are just two examples of many), so that a potential problem with your volunteer doesn’t mean a problem with your web hosting. As you make technology decisions, ask yourself “Will I be relying on only this individual to gain access, or could someone else get access if I needed them to?”

Any reputable web developer or “tech person” won’t hold on to your information. It isn’t theirs — it’s yours. They should only be acting as a steward of your data, making updates as needed. If they balk, find out why, and try to talk to them. It’s always easier to blame the request on somebody else (such as your board) so that you don’t get into a shooting match. But if they won’t give it up, you’ve already got a problem, and it’s better to know about it now than later.

At that point, you should try to get the original board member involved and see if they can come to your rescue to help the situation. But if you follow the outline of the conversation above, you should be able to get all the important info you need without causing any problems, and you’ll still have your volunteer working with you.

But it’s not just for the “problem people”

“Ahh but our tech volunteer is fabulous… he/she would never disappear like that.” Great! In most cases, that will be the case.  Then please consider getting this information from them simply a form of digital insurance. Something you know you’ve planned for, even though it may never happen. And this is no-cost insurance — the very best kind!

Personally I think that volunteers should be only used in situations where the volunteer could be easily replaced with somebody else. The very nature of volunteers is that they are more flexible than an employee, but they don’t have a paycheck governing their behavior or trustworthiness. I’m not trying to put down volunteers. Love them, thank them, count on them, but please don’t risk having them be the only ones who can do “that one thing,” when that one thing can break your organization. Most likely, you now have and will continue to have a great, positive working relationship with your technical person, and this article shouldn’t cast a shadow on that. Just have your info stored for safe keeping!

Spread the word!

So, to help spread the word that arts organizations should walk through this process and recapture access to their own login information, I am declaring this Thursday, September 24th, “National Know Your Arts Marketing Logins Day.” On this day, across the land, I want arts groups everywhere to open their email, and contact their tech helper to get this information. Store it for safe keeping in a couple of places and/or share it with another staff member in your organization for redundancy. What will take your 5 minutes to do could help spare you weeks of lost time, ticket sales, and happiness.

So spread the word! This Thursday is “National Know Your Arts Marketing Logins Day.” Will you celebrate with us? (And if you’re reading this after Thursday, please just go and gather the info now!)

Like this post? Please share it with others who you think might benefit from it, via the links below, and subscribe via email or RSS to receive future updates.

Only follow folks who post content you're interested in.

I usually write from the perspective of helping arts organizations in a promotional aspect, and I wanted to change lanes for a moment and talk about Twitter use by arts administrators as individuals who may be struggling with “why.”

“Why do I want to use Twitter?”

“What’s the point of knowing what somebody had for lunch? I really don’t care.”

“I followed everybody and now I can’t handle all the tweets.” (Or “twits,” perhaps if you’re referring the the people who tweet stupid things.)

To help answer these questions and more, I’m going to tell you a bit about how I use Twitter. Now, I’m coming from the perspective of using Twitter as a professional and artistic resource, not just another place to gab. More on that below.

1. Use Twitter as a human filter.

Many of you are I’m sure aware of Google Alerts, which is a service by Google that will deliver content via email to you, based on the keywords you select. I use Google Alerts to bring me all sorts of information. As an example, Google sends me alerts based on the keyword “Arts Marketing.” Most of the time, what is sent to me as something to do with the arts. But sometimes, Google does its best and sends me webpages about “Martial Arts Marketing” since it contains the keywords I told it to look for. That’s a little annoying, and I’m sure I could enter more information into Google to get it to subtract “martial” from any searches, but the point is, Google is programmatic and brings back literal results without any consideration to how valuable it will really be to me. Kung-fu is great, but not in my inbox when I was looking for something else.

My Twitter friends however, are smart. They come across a ton of interesting arts articles each day, they scan them, and then tweet about them on Twitter to spread the word. I do the same. Suddenly, I have a “human search engine network” of people that only pass along the really cool arts stuff that is exactly what I am looking for. That saves me time sorting through stuff that doesn’t matter, and fosters collaboration.

But what if your friends are tweeting things you’re not interested in? That’s simple.

2. Only follow people that post content you’re interested in.

The idea that you should follow everybody that follows you on Twitter is just a recipe for information overload. I’m sure you’ve seen people with 15000 followers, who are following 15000 people. How can you realistically keep track of the constant updates of 15000 people? It’s not possible and you shouldn’t waste your time trying it. I’ve always thought its a little rude actually — since I know the person is following 15000 folks, how important are my individual posts to them? Not very. So, follow those people who provide information you’re interested in most of the time, so that you can really use Twitter as a resource for information.

3. 90% of your posts should be information that is useful to those that follow you.

The lunch updates, the random quotes, the posts that don’t mean anything — just don’t post them. People follow other people for useful information, and I ruthlessly unfollow people who don’t post useful content or who I’m not personally connected to. On the flip side, I try to make each one of my Twitter posts link to an interesting article, useful website, great statistic or other resource that arts folks will find helpful. Cut the noise — make your posts helpful, and don’t follow folks who’s posts aren’t helpful to you.

4. Only use about 120 characters in each post, which leaves room for others to retweet.

Twitter gives you 140 characters, which I know is short. But for people to be able to pass your tweet on to their networks, they need to be able to “quote the source” and mention @groupofminds or @yourname or whatever as the originator of the tweet. If you use all of the available space for your message, there won’t be room for them to add their footnote. This drastically reduces the viral-marketing aspect of your tweets. Just use the Twitter character counter to tell you when you’ve used up 120 characters, and leave the rest.

5. Use a url shortener.

I’d like to hug the person who invented url shortners — you may have heard of one of the most popular: http://tinyurl.com. A url shortener is just that — it takes a really long url such as:

http://groupofminds.com/articles/arts-marketing/dear-facebook-want-a-new-revenue-stream-that-will-help-arts-marketing/685

and makes a shortcut to it that lives permanently on the web, that looks something like:

http://tinyurl.com/n4s7lw

because a shorter url means fewer characters used in Twitter. Pretty smart eh? There are many url shortening sites; a quick search of Google will reveal a bunch of them.

Twitter can be extremely useful to arts administrators, as a way to keep up with people they respect in the field, and as a source of knowledge about trends in the arts. With these simple rules of the road, you’ll be able to tame the Twitter information overload beast, and really get to using the system for the elegant communication it was designed to create.

Ron

Like this post? Please share it with though who you think would benefit from it via the links below.

(Author’s note: this is an unreleased post from February 2009, which I’ve recently updated due to Zoomerang making some good changes to their website [good job Zoomerang!]. The process is a good exploration of user interface design consultations we do).

Do you have an easy-to-navigate arts website?

What information can we glean for our arts websites from the homepages of commercial companies? Turns out, quite a bit. Let’s look at online survey providers Zoomerang and Survey Monkey as examples. It’s a no-brainer that your website should be easy to navigate. People should be able to find the information they need, with a minimum number of clicks, and there should be as few things to steal my attention away as possible. No annoying ads (are you really making any money with google ads on your site? If not, take them down), no “website hosted by” badges, etc. Just the facts about your organization ma’am. But as I’ll show you in this article using Zoomerang and Survey Monkey as examples, we need to go deeper to make sure we’re displaying what are patrons are looking for right away.

I needed to do some research on online survey capabilities for one of our clients, an ethnic dance festival. I know that Zoomerang and Survey Monkey are the Coke and Pepsi of the online survey world, and for this round, I just needed to know:

• How much does using the service cost  for how long
• Does the service offer secure, encrypted surveys via SSL (https:// style), and how much was that in addition to the regular cost.

Pretty simple laundry list. Before I go into this article in detail, just a note to say that I have no real affiliation with either Zoomerang or Survey Monkey, other than I have used both of their products in the past for various reasons, and found them both to be robust, capable, online survey programs. I do have an acquaintance at Zoomerang that I know through a previous position, and at one time we discussed some potential contract work related to Zoomerang, but I didn’t end up doing any work for them.

I took a look at SurveyMonkey first:

Survey Monkey's homepage as of 2-15-09

I saw the pricing button right away, and after clicking on that, I was able to see that my client could pay for a couple months of service and that would work for them.

Survey Monkey's pricing page

Survey Monkey didn’t have anything on the homepage about SSL being a feature, but they did have a “need help” in the upper right corner, and so I clicked it and got a search area. I typed in SSL and got the response “What is SSL encryption and what level do you offer?” where I found that I could add it for $9.95 a month. That’s all the info I needed.

When I went to Zoomerang, I searched the homepage, but couldn’t see any clear area to go to see pricing information:

Zoomerang's homepage as of 2-15-09

So I clicked on “online surveys” thinking I would get more information (which was a little odd because I originally thought that online surveys is all that Zoomerang offers, but that is not the case it seems). On that page I could see some pricing information, but it was written in such a way that I couldn’t tell for sure if I needed to sign up for a whole year at a time, or if I could just pay monthly:

Zoomerang's "online surveys" page

One might be tempted by the multiple “sign up now” and “use it free” buttons, but we all know that the free version isn’t going to have everything the paid version does. We want to know what those differences are before we sign up for anything. SurveyMonkey gave us a nice chart, but I don’t see an obvious chart on Zoomerang.

I also got stopped up for a minute considering the links on the left for “Event Planning,” “For Business,” “Non-profit,” etc. It seems that Zoomerang wants me to self-identify with one of these categories, perhaps to offer me a special deal. But as a user, let’s say I’m a small theatre company. I’m a non-profit, so that fits. But aren’t I also a business too? And if I’m doing a survey about an upcoming event, does that mean that I am “event planning”? Author Barry Schwartz (watch him in this video) in his book “The Paradox of Choice” says that when people are presented with too many options, they become paralyzed to taking any step. One of the reasons they become paralyzed is that they are unsure if they will make the “wrong” choice and miss out on the “best” option.

I never did find any search on Zoomerang that allowed me to look for SSL as an option, or any feature page that mentioned it. But I didn’t look for more than a minute or so. That’s about all the time you can ask somebody to search for something on your site.

How does an easy to navigate site impact your arts group’s website?

What information are people looking for on your arts website? And how is that information being displayed to the user in a useful way? If you are a presenting organization, people are probably looking for an easy way to see how much tickets cost (including fees, people don’t like surprises). Do you list the ticket prices with associated fees right on the page for your event? Or do you just have the user find out the actual costs once they start to buy a ticket in the checkout process? Displaying the former will lead to more people doing the latter.

Are there useless choices on your arts website, that clutter things up and increase my choices to click, without helping me to buy a ticket or find the info I need? Remove them. Google ads that aren’t bringing in any money? Remove them. Links to individual past shows on your homepage? Put them on a separate page called “Our Past Shows” and link to it from the homepage.  Are there directions to get to your location as a link from the homepage, or are the buried under a “contact us” page? I shouldn’t need to contact you to ask for directions on how to get to your theater, so why would I expect to find that information under the “contact us” page?

It’s these sorts of things that when done right, give patrons the subconscious idea that you have a “good” website. They are able to find what they need quickly and easily, with a minimum of thought. “Bad” websites “make you think” as you hunt to find the information. Remove anything that is unneeded and dilutes my choices. Allow me to search your site for a keyword I may be looking for so I can find the information. And put things on pages where I expect to find them (such as finding directions on a page called “directions” and not on “contact us”).

Ultimately, it was my recommendation to the client that they use SurveyMonkey, because I was able to find the information I needed quickly, and that gave me the confidence that using their system would be just as easy for the client. Don’t get me wrong, Zoomerang is a great system, but their website could use improvement to the ease of getting the information I’m looking for.

How does your arts website stack up as far as ease of use? Want to have it evaluated? Email us and we’ll take a look. We may even feature it on an upcoming blogpost!

UPDATE — August 25, 2009

Zoomerang has made a few changes for the better to their homepage design:

Zoomerang has made changes to their homepage -- you can find pricing easier now.

They’ve reduced the clutter, added an attractive face, and most importantly, included a choice to get to the pricing information quickly. This is a great improvement. There still is no search capability that I can see, and under the “Online surveys” tab at the top they still have the difficult to understand list of the surveys they have for different groups (nonprofit, business, etc.) but I think what they’ve done in this round is a good step towards a more friendly and easy to use site. Keep it coming Zoomerang!

What incremental change for the better can you make to your site? Have us review your web presence and tell you simple, low-cost user interface improvements. Contact us to have us take a look.

Ron

Like this post? Please share it with others who you think might benefit from it, via the links below, and subscribe via email or RSS to receive future updates.

We estimate roughly 10% of your arts audience is playing around with Twitter.

By now, you know about Twitter. You can’t avoid it — the mainstream media has picked up the love affair and is spreading the Twitter love far and wide. I recently did a bit of analysis on the Twitter account saturation in the email subscribers a few of our clients, and the results were intriguing.

I scanned the email address databases of five of my arts clients, looking for people who were in their email database, who also had a Twitter account. The five arts organizations were a variety of genres and budget sizes from small to large, so it was interesting to see the same statistics across the board.

Twitter statistics

• 10% of the email subscribers had a Twitter account associated with their email address.
• Roughly 1/2 of those patrons with Twitter accounts had not uploaded a picture to use as their Twitter avatar.

I interpret the latter to mean that those people who have not uploaded a picture are still in the “sampling Twitter” phase — just logging in and “lurking” around trying to figure it all out. That’s actually good — we want our audiences to be playing with the new tools. But I don’t count these folks as being “power players” yet, as they probably won’t be following a lot of people or participating to any great degree until they decide if they want to fully get on the bus, which I measure by the action of them uploading an image of themselves. That action is sort of “staking a claim” on your own little corner of Twitter, and letting everybody know you’re ready to play.

Twitter use by all arts organizations?

So, if you’re ok with making the jump to roughly apply the above data to all arts organizations, Twitter campaigns currently reach about 5% of your existing audiences who are active Twitter users. That’s pretty low currently, but it’s growing rapidly, and you should participate and continue to help it grow, as more and more focus is moving towards up-to-the-minute feedback and reviews after a performance for example.  Also, the ability to acquire new Twitter followers through friends of current followers IS a powerful reason to keep using Twitter, along with the generally younger audience base that comes with Twitter. But it is important to remember that “recently new” communication tools like email marketing are still the workhorses of arts marketing, reaching a much higher percentage of your arts patrons, so you definitely don’t want to slack on the “tried and true.”

I’m sure the above stats are changing as time marches on. Those 5% that are just experimenting right now may jump on board, and new folks will take their place experimenting. In a year, I expect more than 10% of arts audiences to be “actively” using Twitter (with their image uploaded) and a new 10% will be in the experimentation stage. We’re planning to repeat the same experiment in a year with these five clients, to see how the numbers changed. If you have any stats of your own on Twitter saturation in your arts audiences, please leave a comment and let us know. Also, groupofminds is on Twitter, so if you’re not currently a follower and would like to see more of the in-the-moment posts, please follow us.

Ron

Did you like this post? Please share it with those it may benefit via the links below!

A revenue stream for Facebook -- a benefit for arts organizations!

When Facebook first launched, many people were confused about the two options available for featuring arts organizations: Facebook Groups vs. Facebook Pages. (I need to stop for a moment and mention that Facebook needs to work out a different name for “Facebook Pages” — isn’t every page on Facebook a Facebook page? Most people commonly refer to Facebook Pages as “fan pages” now, but Facebook has yet to officially update their documentation to reflect this. But I digress.)

In the beginning, there were Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages. Groups offered the very special ability for the arts organization to directly connect with members of the group via a sort of intra-Facebook email system. So you could (and still can) use this tool to send a message that will arrive in the person’s “Facebook email” inbox. Fan pages offered a messaging system called an “update” that would allow you to send a message to all of your fans, but sadly the message would go to place in the user’s profile that most people never check. I’ve known folks to say “Yes, I became a fan, but I never hear from them” only to discover that their fan update inbox was filled with notes they had never seen. Given the checks and balances between the two options, Facebook Groups used to be the better way to go.

About three months ago, Facebook made a very significant change to the way fan pages function, making them much more powerful…

The change allowed Facebook fan pages to post to the individual fan’s newsfeed — that long, scrolling tickertape of never-ending messages from all of your friends. Depending on when you logged into Facebook, this allowed a fan page to place its message right in front of your eyes, where you could comment on it, “like” it, share it, or interact with it in other ways. Each interaction you made would also be shown to your friends on their newsfeeds, and thus your interaction had the potential to become viral. It’s this reason that we now recommend Facebook fan pages over Facebook groups for arts organizations. (Use the group for your intra-company members, use a fan page for patrons).

But that newsfeed thing… here’s the problem. Let’s say you, regular Joe, have two hundred friends on Facebook, and each friend of yours is posting three or four status updates on Facebook every day. So we’re talking six hundred to eight hundred messages in your personal newsfeed stream every day. You are also a fan of several organizations, and those organizations post throughout the day. If you, Joe, login to Facebook a couple of times a day, you’ll see whatever the latest posts in the newsfeed are, but you’re not going to go back and read the six hundred status updates that have happened since you last logged in — You just dip your toe in the stream and read the latest stuff, and go about your other Facebook business.

This means that it is very likely that the fan page post from the Cupertino Theatre Company that came out an hour before you logged in is not one of the posts you’ll see in your most recent newsfeed items.

Now, if the arts organization fan page has a lot of fans, that’s great. Every post that is sent out from the fan page will be seen by a few fans that happen to be logged on at the time the post is sent out, and they will have the opportunity to react to it in the ways I’ve outlined above. It’s a numbers game really. But for a fan page with not many fans, you’re not going to see a lot of interaction, as not many fans will see it when the post is sent.

So, Facebook, want to make some money?

Give arts organizations the ability to buy a new special posting feature:  allow a fan page post to “pause” in the stream of the fans. So that it doesn’t matter when Joe logs into Facebook, he will see the fan page post at the top of his newsfeed, just like it had just been posted a minute ago. All fans of a fan page will see the post whenever they login — not just the select few that happen to be logged in right when the post goes out. Consider this a sort of “perma-post” or perhaps a “stickypost” that sticks around and doesn’t get washed away in the stream. Only the latest post from a fan page would be sticky — this prevents a bunch of posts from “stacking up” in the newsfeed. The post doesn’t need to look any different than a regular post — the patron actually doesn’t even need to know that there is a sort of paid placement happening — to him/her, it will always look like they timed it “just right” and their connection to the fan page will increase. Facebook, I would pay something for the ability to do this, and our clients would too. If you consider that Americans for the Arts estimates that there are roughly 100,000 arts groups in the U.S., and let’s say 40% of them have a presence on Facebook, and 10% of those groups use this service, that’s 4,000 groups. If you charged $20 a month for a “super fan page” with this ability plus a few additional bells and whistles (which would be well worth it to arts organizations), that’s a cool $960,000 a year just from arts groups. Just from arts groups mind you — this isn’t considering all of the other business genres on Facebook.

FB friends, it’s a cash cow that requires very little maintenance and can be self-managed by the user. How about it? -Ron

Like this post? Please share it via the link below with arts folks you think it might benefit.

Freedom from annoying audience members looks like this in France.

The French are known for many things… their appreciation of great food and wine, their love of art and culture, and now, by me, for their valiant belief that concert halls, movie theaters, and other public performance spaces should be free of that person next to you jabbering into his/her cell phone. Thanks to mobile phone jamming devices, you can actually hear the music without patron accompaniment.

Cell-phone jammers

We’ve all be sitting in the audience in the middle of a brilliant monologue, deeply in the moment, when someone’s ring tone starts chirping. It gets louder as the person digs it out of their pocket/bag, and hopefully shuts off. (Even worse, I saw an audience person answer it and carry on a conversation until the people in front of him got up, turned around, and shhhhhed him). Enter the cell-phone jammer.

A cell phone jammer is a (usually) small, hand-held device that transmits white noise on the same radio frequencies that cell phones use, thus scrambling their signal to the cell tower and rendering them useless. Usually they have a range of about 30 feet, and all cellular communications are interrupted within that radius with a simple flip of a switch. It sounds like the perfect form of revenge. Somebody being annoying on their phone? Hit the switch in your pocket and their line is dead. A larger version could blanket a concert hall with blissful silence during performances. Which is why the French jumped on the idea and in December of 2004, legalized cell-phone jammers in movie theaters, concert halls, and other performing-arts spaces. Brilliant!

But not in the U.S.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case in the U.S., as being in possession of a cell-phone jammer can land you in hot water with the FCC, and possibly stick you with an $11,000 fine or imprison you for 1 year. The ban is based on wording in the Communications Act of 1934, which prevents people from interfering with radio communications. And it is seen as property theft, because telecommunications companies such as AT&T have paid the government billions to be able to use those frequencies, and blocking those frequencies disallows access to what they have paid for. So kids, don’t try this at home.

The other argument against is the issue of emergency calls. Having a heart attack? Your jammed phone would be useless to call 911 — all signals are blocked, not just the “bad” ones. French technology firms are reportedly working on solutions to this that would have the devices jam all calls except the ones going to police, fire, etc. Makes sense… people have gotten by just fine watching arts events without cell phones for the last couple of thousand years — most things are not THAT urgent. At a time where we are seeing people interacting with their phones more, I’d love to see this technology linked with the house lights. House lights up? Take pictures, text, call your folks, whatever. Lights go down? Signals jammed until intermission. This would allow you to more fully enter the world of the art, with quick access back to the “real” world when the art wasn’t being performed. What about people who like to tweet during performances? Perhaps data access is allowed but calls are blocked. But I’d ask folks who want access during the show to sit in a different section so that the visual noise pollution of their screens doesn’t bother other patrons.

Since jammers are out of bounds in the U.S. at the moment (drop a note to your congressperson if you’re for them) so what can an arts group do to control calls? One way is to build a theater space that passively blocks cellular signals by putting the patron inside thick walls of concrete or a steel cage around the space. I’ve even read about certain wallpapers that have tiny metal fragments in the paper to block cellular signals. Stick a wifi access point inside the space for people to be able to tweet or text (if that’s your thing) and you’re good to go.

Many audience development tactics are based on new technologies being introduced to increase interaction and participation — not nearly as many are designed to reduce distraction and take away obstacles to engagement. Let’s hear it for the French government, and their belief that performing arts spaces should be free of the wrong type of stage chatter!

-Ron Evans

Like this article? Please share it arts folks who might find it useful via the Share/Save link below. Thank you!

Only accept credit cards in a secure way, to protect your patron's information

I’d be hard pressed to find a member of an arts organization who doesn’t believe in the power of providing the option to sell tickets online. It gives many people a way to serve themselves (thus reducing your manpower needed at the box office to answer the phone), offers the patron the peace of mind of knowing that the ticket has been purchased, and usually offers additional benefits such as seeing your seat location, and being able to buy a ticket any night or day.

Some groups I know have chaffed at the additional credit card processing fees, merchant account fees, or ticketing vendor fees of using a real ticketing system, and opted instead to collect credit card information online via a form, through an email, or into an unsecure database. Yes, you avoid additional fees that way, but is the cost of potentially exposing your patron’s credit card and identity information to hackers and thieves worth it? I don’t think so — and one lawsuit from an angry patron would seal the deal.

Typically, groups get in trouble when they set up their own form to “reserve your tickets online” via their website, and that form asks for credit card information. Once a patron fills out the form and enters his/her credit card information, the form sends the patron’s info in an email to the box office staff. The email is usually passed through many computers on the internet, before it gets to the box office staff: imagine an old-fashioned fire brigade, where townsfolk are passing bucket after bucket of water down the line:

In this case, each “bucket” is an email. And for a moment, each email is available to be read by each computer that passes it on. It just takes one random computer in the system to be set up to snoop into your email looking for credit card numbers as they pass through, and poof — card number stolen.

“But we’ve got a security certificate for our form page… there’s a lock and it says “https://” some have said. While this is a good step, you’re not necessarily out of the woods — if you are still getting credit card numbers delivered to your box office via email, it doesn’t matter if the form used to submit the email is secure, the security breach happens when the email is passed from internet computer to computer and finally to your inbox. The golden rule is: no credit card numbers should be sent or received via email, ever.

The benefits of using a “real” ticketing system

The benefits of using an actual ticket system, such as tix.com, vendini.com, brownpapertickets.com, etc., is that each of those vendors actually processes the card for you — the card is submitted via an encrypted, secure https:// form, “run” (card is charged) and then the card number is deleted as soon as the transaction is complete. Everything stays secure from start to finish, as nothing goes over email, and the card number is not stored, so it can’t be hacked into or stolen at some other time. The processor only stores the credit card number long enough to run the transaction, and that’s it. The card is either accepted (ticket sold) or rejected due to it being expired, limit exceeded, etc.

In addition to the card processing security, by going with a “real” ticketing vendor, you’ll receive updates to the system that will make it easier and safer for patrons to purchase tickets as time goes on.

Credit card processing fees are a cost of doing business, and should just be factored into your planning. Some groups make the consumer pay for the convenience of helping themselves online, which, if you’re trying to make your life easier, isn’t the way to go. Cut it out! Decrease phone calls into your box office by people that could be helping themselves online, and thus staying out of your hair — it’s simple. Make your ticketing fees less expensive when purchased online, and more expensive when people call the box office. The airlines have been doing this for years — book online, no fee. Call an agent, pay $15. It works — it helps automate the system, and that saves you time and money.

But to do all of this in a way that protects the security of your patrons, you need a real ticketing system like those mentioned above. There are thousands of ticketing software vendors — too many to research yourself, so contact us, or ask a fellow arts group who they use. Depending on your needs, different vendors offer different advantages and disadvantages. By going with a mainstream vendor, you’ll help ensure safe ticket sales for your arts patrons.

-Ron Evans, groupofminds.com

Like this post? Please share it, tweet it, post it, and generally spread it around to those you think it might help!