On August 29, Data Center 2.0 will launch. Based on feedback from superusers during beta testing, here are our top three favorite new features: 

1. A New Interactive Dashboard: snapshots of your patron data that allows you to quickly manage your campaigns and organizational health.
2. New Campaigns Module: a better organizational structure to easily monitor all your marketing and fundraising campaigns in one place, with statistics about each list.
3. New Interface: a modern design with improved navigation and an intuitive user experience, that is now mobile-friendly!    

Over the years, Data Center has helped organizations like New York City Ballet, Delaware Theatre Company, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra attain their marketing and fundraising goals. 

At TRG Arts, we talk a lot about patron loyalty – and for good reason. Data tells us that the more loyal a patron is to our organization, the more revenue they provide and the less it costs to keep them.

Over the last year, I’ve watched Performing Arts Fort Worth (PAFW), the organization that owns and operates Bass Hall and presents Fort Worth’s Broadway series, grow subscription revenue by $1.2 million—a 53% increase. Part of the revenue increase was because they added a show, but they also grew their subscriber base by 1,289 subscribers, a 26% increase.

Impressive results, but the truly cool story is the retention effort that happened afterwards.

Patron loyalty was viewed by many in the organization as marketing’s responsibility. Other people understood it was important, but weren’t actively involved. We wanted – we needed – to tap into the experience of front-of-house and box office staff to actively support patron loyalty efforts. The patron experience starts long before the performance begins. It starts at the time a patron buys a ticket, and continues through travel to the venue, parking their car, getting to their seat, seeing the show, enjoying intermission, and as they leave and travel home. (And, then it extends beyond the venue again when the organization follows up.)

This post is cross-posted on the National Center for Arts Research blog.

Jill Robinson,  President & CEO, TRG Arts

 “How do we stack up?”

Everyone is curious about how their arts organization compares with others like them. There’s really not been a good place to find that information, though.

Until now.

Recently, our partners at the National Center for Arts Research launched the NCAR Dashboard. It uses data from DataArts (formerly the Cultural Data Project) to explore how organizations from a variety of sizes and artistic disciplines perform on a variety of standardized financial and operational indicators, called KIPI’s. Even better, it allows you to compare your organization to others in its own size category and artistic genre.

Photo: Chris Devers via flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Cue the Dies Irae—it’s August. This time of year brings single ticket on-sale day for many performing arts organizations, also known as the day of reckoning. Do the titles that your organization programmed actually resonate with your community? Your single ticket sales will tell you loud and clear.

It’s extremely difficult to program a “perfect” season. Lots of factors play into artistic programming decisions. We have identified nine for our upcoming online workshop on data-driven artistic planning:

• Artistic or program availability
• Time of year (holiday, renewal season, etc)
• Artistic director’s/curator’s vision
• Requests from donors/board
• Artistic needs for the ensemble
• Audience opinion
• Commercial appeal/demand
• Community engagement potential
• Appeal to specific demographic segment
• And, of course, mission

Keri Mesropov,  VP of Client Services, TRG Arts

ALERT: Arts administrators in your area have been overtaken by a new obsession. Believed to be a relative of the mania induced by Pokémon Go, symptoms include an insatiable desire to find brand new patrons for your organization.

If you’re not obsessed with new audiences, you are really behind the trend. You’re missing out on spending hours and big bucks curating and searching for those you don’t have and yet, want with delirious desire. Some might judge you in quiet. To you, I say:

Good. Bravo. Standing O. You may be on to something.

Yes, we will always need new people to buy tickets to our art in order to ask them back and ask them to commit more through a membership, a subscription and one day, a philanthropic donation. It’s the evolution of an arts patron.

But, before we go spending beyond our means to find new fish for our pond, let’s explore a few facts.

We think of legacy as something finite—the thing, within measure and boundary, that someone leaves behind.

Sometimes it is—a building, a cherished heirloom, a constellation of memories.

And sometimes, among the things that are left behind is a seed, small but powerful.

In the case of our founder and friend Rick Lester, his legacy feels less finite, more expansive. It’s impossible to believe that this month marks three years since he passed unexpectedly while riding the Courage Classic in to support Denver’s Children’s Hospital in the mountains of Colorado. Yet, he started a company that continues to innovate and grow beyond what he’d built. And he’s left more than an office and group of inspired, intellectually curious people.

He also left us a seed.

This is the second in a series of two blog posts by TRG and Spektrix, where we examine the role that the box office plays in retaining patrons and providing great service. This series goes beyond discussing ticket sales and focuses on the four key elements of any successful modern box offices; proper data capture, enhancing the customer experience, playing an active role in retaining existing customers, and upgrading customer purchases to increase basket size or organizational investment.

In the last post, we covered the basic actions that will help you lay the foundation for your organization’s new strategies. In this post we’ll cover some more advanced tactics.