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Seminar - Build Audience Loyalty
So many friends and readers ask me when and where I'll be launching this new Loyalty Strategy Seminar. Well, here is the information.
In my entire professional career, I've never worked so hard to develop what I think is critically needed by our sector to reverse a threatening trend of diminishing audience participation.
Three years of research, study, literature surveys, and design experiments have produced this body of work. We've been working with clients for a couple of years using this information. The work has produced some promising results.
I have concluded that the business model in our sector is broken- especially the marketing and fulfillment model.
It is time for innovation, but more importantly it is time for key thought leaders and practice leaders throughout the country to align and take action to address the current trends and issues.
Some sector pundits have observed to me that they think we are at the end of an era - the twilight of a period of growth. I don't believe that we have to surrender or should surrender to the torrent of change we've seen take place. One thing is certain: continuing the same practices while expecting different results is naïve in the extreme.
I hope to see you in New York!
Loyalty Strategies: Keep Them Coming Back for More
Arts Presenters Conference • Winter Institute • January 9-11, 2008 • New York, New York
Some years ago, GE’s legendary Chairman and CEO Jack Welch observed that, “When the rate of change outside an organization is greater than the rate of change inside, the end is near.”
What would you do if you learned that 75% or more of your current audience will not return next year? Can you afford to replace them? How long will it be until you run out of prospective households?
Attracting a new audience member costs from six to ten times more than keeping a current attender. Can your organization afford to keep paying high acquisition costs?
Our research among large and small organizations across North America demonstrates that audience churn rates are on the increase. Most performing arts organizations believe that their marketing departments are failing to attract new audiences. The reality is much different; new audiences are showing up in droves, but organizations can’t keep them coming back.
Over the last two decades social, technological, and economic forces have changed consumers and audience participation worldwide, yet performance offerings, audience development practices, market assumptions, and business models of performing arts organizations remain stubbornly unchanged. As the old axiom says, “To do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the definition of insanity.”
Given disturbing trends in declining participation, increasing audience churn rates, competitive incursion, a proliferation of leisure and entertainment choices – and increasing costs of acquiring audiences – new tools and fresh strategies are necessary.
Working with a select client group, over the last three years The Roan Group has invested heavily in benchmarking research, developing strategies and designing programs that build audience loyalty. Our approach differs significantly from most organizations’ past practices. Our findings show that only holistic and systemic solutions that involve and align the entire organization will work. The default position – It’s marketing’s problem! – is not only factually wrong but cuts organizations off from insights and solutions that are necessary to keep audiences coming back.
The purpose of this two-and-a-half day seminar is to create a high-level, intensely interactive forum where participants from various settings in various job positions (from CEO to Operations to Marketing to Ticketing) – working at different scales – will explore how to most cost-effectively turn the attrition tide. We will share analytics methodologies, research findings, and strategies designed to boost audience retention, strengthen communication channels, increase fundraised income, and build community ownership.
Topics covered in the seminar include:
• Assess your organization’s readiness to put loyalty strategies in place.
• Put segmentation to work in building marketing strategies that will achieve goals.
• How to audit audience experience, inventory brand touchpoints, then develop strategies to deliver added value at each point in the service-profit chain.
• The role of organizational culture in building audience retention.
• Learn how to integrate and harness legacy technology systems and processes.
• Understand how to create synergy between your brand strategy and your loyalty program.
• How to choose and design differentiated loyalty programs that will contribute to your bottom line.
• How to optimize the data-mining capabilities of your audience ticketing database.
• Explore how to make organizational design brand-promise- and audience experience-driven.
• Learn how to sell-in the programs that you’ve designed.
Who is this seminar for?
Unlike most seminars that are targeted at arts marketers, this two-and-a-half-day seminar has been created for people working at the senior staff level. While any individual arts professional can expect value, to create the most value possible, we urge that CEOs attend alongside their operations, marketing, and ticketing executives. While it is true that marketers make experience promises, whole organizations keep those promises. Our research consistently shows that many audience members feel victimized by arts organizations’ chronic over-promising and under-delivering. Retention challenges definitively include operationalizing experience promises. Bring as many team members as possible.
Where to get more information:
Association of Performing Arts Presenters
202-833-2787
http://www.artspresentersconference.org/_CMS.asp?id=1106
Posted on November 23, 2007 12:22 PM | Permalink
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Comments
Hi there - I took your branding seminar through CAPACOA several years ago and it changed the way I work! Any chance of you bringing this new workshop on the road to Canada? I think our membership would greatly benefit from it.
Shana, I would love to bring the seminar to Canada. It all boils down to whether or not anyone decides to take it across the country. There will be a new Executive at CAPACOA and there is a new planning process in place now. I'm not sure what the future holds with respect to professional development. I hope I'll see you!
My fingers are crossed too for a trip to Canada - your branding seminar was amazing!