56,000 new prospects found for new venue
The Smith Center opened in Las Vegas in 2011. In its first season, the new venue planned a Broadway Series of touring productions, and a presenting series of touring musical and dance attractions.
Since the organization was just opening, they needed to find new patrons—lots of new patrons. They engaged TRG Arts to help find patrons based on behavioral and demographic characteristics, modeled after patrons who attended similar organizations across the country.
Broadway Series
The Smith Center deployed TRG’s Prospect Finder service to mine the market for leads based on multiple behavioral and demographic attributes common among the model patrons. Prospect Finder didn’t just find prospects, it found 33,000 good prospects for a series of performances from people who were hearing from the Smith Center for the first time. The first mailing to these prospects generated $206,000 in subscription sales, with an average order size of $731. The Smith Center’s cost-of-sale on the mailing was only 8%, meaning that the Center had spent very little per piece compared to the return on their investment.
The response rate was excellent, especially considering that the mailing was for a series rather than individual shows and that the mailing was going to people who had no previous relationship with the organization.
The response to the mailing was so good that Smith Center used the top part of the list (rated most likely to respond) to do two further mailings, resulting in a further $90,800.
Presenting Series
The Smith Center also used Prospect Finder for the presenting series, which featured variety-type programming. The Center mailed to about 24,000 prospects and made around $80,000 in revenue in 2 rounds of mail.
All total, TRG’s Prospect Finder helped the Smith Center find 56,000 new prospects. (About 1,000 prospects “crossed over”—were identified for both the Broadway and presenting series lists.) The organization developed its inaugural season patron base and $376,800 from this precision-targeted new customer acquisition effort.