marketing the arts – Evelyn Thorne's ePortfolio

Logbook Entry: March 11th

Logbook Entry: How will you use marketing and the strategies explored in this course with your career as an artist or arts administrator?

I think this class has made more critical of design. Collecting all the marketing materials and reviewing them has made me pay more attention to how all things designed. Writing about these materials has helped me define what I think to be good design and gave me examples to model my work after.

This class also taught me the value of planning out your marketing goals. I had always just been thrown into marketing plans and expected to deliver. Now that I know how to create a strategic marketing plan, I will feel more prepared to take on that responsibility. I also found it really helpful to do the SWOC analysis for my marketing plan. That analysis really put into perspective where we really needed improvements and where we were strongest. I was thinking it might be interesting to do a marketing plan for myself. In this field and age we have to spend a lot of time marketing ourselves. It may be a good idea to have a plan.

Lastly, this class has given me an inside look to how marketers think. The idea of target marketing makes perfect sense, but still throws me. My mission has always been to make art accessible for all, so it’s difficult for me to design a marketing plan that tailors to a specific audience. Though I see how an organization must cater to the right clientele in order to stay financially stable. I just want to figure out how to do that while still maintaining accessibility. It reminds me of a story I hear from musician Bonnie Raitt: She said that artist like her were funded by the big commercial stars; that without bands like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, she wouldn’t have been able to have a career. So, maybe I should think of marketing like this: sometimes you need to pull in the big bucks in order to help the small artists, but in the end we are always supporting the arts.

Collect and Analyze Materials: Signs, Billboards, and Banners

For my last post about collected materials I’ve chosen some unusual marketing materials:

When I think of my favorite sign I automatically think of Portland’s famous white stag sign over the Burnside Bridge. A giant neon sign for a city is not what you usually think of for marketing, but I would argue that this sign has been a great marketing tool for Portland. When people think of the Portland sky line they think of this sign. This image represents Portland. The “old town” part of the sign is often replaced with “made in Oregon” and stamped on products. This sign has become iconic to Portland. If an organization could recreate this kind of branding, that would definitely be a marketing success.

And I shall end this logbook an a comedic note. This is a simple sign but you would be amazed how many shares it has on the internet. Years after I first saw this sign, I still see it posted to Facebook once and a while. We should never underestimate the impact of comedy, even with a sign. I used a picture of this sign to advertise the Whiskey Bike Ride for Pedalpalooza (yes there is such a thing: Portland) on my old blog and that post had more hits than most. I quickly learned when running a blog that comedy is what people repost, what people remember. Marketers should remember this when they design signs, billboards, banners or any marketing material.

Logbook Entry: March 4th

Logbook Entry: Describe audience development programs that would integrate into your plan including permission marketing and customer escalation methods.

One aspect of audience development we really need to work on is keeping in touch with our past attendees. This year we had everyone fill out their bid sheet before they got drink tickets, so we were able to collect a lot of people’s information. We now have their email, phone number, name and how they heard about the event. This will definitely help for next year. We will be able to send out invitations and a call for artists through email. We also have the contact information from artists that submitted their work this year, so we can contact them again. I should probably compile this information into an Excel sheet to be included in the marketing plan.

We could improve on this bid sheet for next year by adding permission marketing questions such as asking how they would prefer to be contacted. We could also ask if they are already a fan of our Facebook page or follow our Twitter. If we did the bid sheets electronically like on an iPad, we might be able to get people become to follow our social media at the event. It would be really cool if we could file everything electronically. Plus we need to have an iPad for charging credit cards anyway. We don’t currently have a newsletter, but if we asked our audience how they preferred to be contacted, they could say email. This would be a good indicator that we should develop a newsletter or create a list serve.

Collect and Analyze Materials: Social Media Tools

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, HootSuite has saved my life. Here is a screenshot of my HootSuite account.

As you can see I have many feeds. I have two personal twitters and the ELAN twitter, plus Facebook. As the Social Media Chair for ELAN, it is very important that I keep these separate. It is easy to tweet on the wrong account and it can get frustrating managing multiple twitters, which is the reason I originally got HootSuite. What I didn’t realize is that HootSuite would allow me to be so much better at Twitter!

Essentially, HootSuite allows you to put the people you are following into categories that are easier to search than one long feed. Then you can actually filter theses categories by keywords. I use this function to look for jobs and internships, which I post to the ELAN twitter every other day at 8pm. I have my feeds sorted by type of connection: Emerging Leaders Network, Eugene Related News, Arts Organizations and Arts & Administration News. This helps me scan each feed to find relevant information to re-tweet for ELAN’s twitter.

Though the feature that has saved my life is the ability to schedule tweets. Each time you tweet, you can choose to schedule it anytime of the day. This way I can spend 30 minutes on Twitter in the morning, but it looks like I’m tweeting all day. This has saved me so much time and it has increased traffic for ELAN’s twitter! People are starting to notice ELAN more often and we even showed up in some twitter arts news blogs! Thanks HootSuite! One day, I want to take their certificate program to learn more about how to use this software better.

Logbook Entry: February 25th

Logbook Entry: List consideration for pricing your product. Consider promotional activity and discounts. When, where, and how will these be implemented? How does “place” influence pricing decisions?

This is definitely a question we should have considered before marketing the event this year. In past years, the price has been a $5 entrance fee that includes 2 drink tokens and food. However, we had a higher fundraising goal this year. After going over the numbers, I realized that we’re probably not going to hit our goal if people don’t either buy a lot of alcohol or spend at least $20 on each art piece. So, we decided to make the entrance fee just include 1 drink ticket. However, we had our event last night and while it was fairly successful (150 people attended, around 70 artworks sold, good reviews), we did not meet our fundraising goal.

I believe part of this is due to the nature of the event. There’s a limit to how much it can grow and how much people are willing to bid on art. However, I did learn last night that $4 was too much to charge for beer. Halfway through the night we realized that we weren’t selling that much alcohol, so we cut the price in half to $2. Though I think it was too late and maybe too cheap. Therefore, I think $3 would have been the perfect price. Cheaper than your regular bar, but still brings in revenue.

One thing we discussed was raising the entrance fee for next year. I’m thinking $8, although I don’t know if that would be too high. Danielle suggested we could sell pre-sale tickets for $5 and charge $8 at the door. Although collecting $8 is always difficult when you are a cash only venue. We need to invest in getting a credit card option for next year. People would be willing to bid a lot more if their bid was not dependent on the cash they had on them.

Overall, if we want to raise more money, we will have to change some pricing. The places we have the event at often limit the number of people allowed in the building to 100, so we can’t increase the attendance, but we could charge more to attend. Through the question still remains: how much to charge at the door? Or should we make money another way?