Event of the Month: The Big Bucks Raffle

The benefits of music education are vast and varied, but sources for fine arts educational funding are, unfortunately, not. A commitment to music education is all too often a commitment to seeking out donations to music programs, and every school has its own solution.

Pope John Paul II Catholic Academy has made good on both those commitments.

Serving pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, the private Catholic school is located on multiple campuses in the Dorchester and Mattapan neighborhoods of the city of Boston. The faculty, administration, and staff, including M. L. Greenidge, the Director of Advancement, pride themselves on an “exciting and challenging curriculum based on high academic benchmarks,” including, the “largest fine arts music program in Boston for elementary schools.” Every week, six hundred fifty students at PJPIICA take music classes.

PJPIICA’s year-round fundraising campaign involves the sale of Bishop’s Blend Coffee, a premium coffee roasted exclusively for the Academy by Caffe Appasionato Coffee Company in Seattle, Washington. One half of the proceeds support overall student experience. More information on purchasing Bishop’s Blend Coffee can be found here on the school’s website.

But, as in most schools, there is always a need for more funding.

To help support this amazing music program, along with other student needs including scholarships and reading and writing literacy, the school runs their annual Big Bucks Raffle, a cash raffle. This year’s raffle will be held on March 30^th, with the students selling tickets beginning in March when they return from their vacation.

For the last two years, raffle ticket printing was done in-house, but this year the decision was made to outsource the job to a professional online ticket printer. Greenidge had never used such a service, and didn’t really know anyone who had, so she went to Google and came across TicketPrinting.com.

The website, she found, was “easy to use,” so she had no trouble designing the tickets just as she wanted them. She chose the Color Money Raffle Ticket, and when her order arrived a few days later, she was impressed with the product and the quality. “I didn’t know what I was buying,” she explained, and had never purchased raffle tickets online before, so she “just went based on the website, which was accurate.”

The turnaround, Greenidge says, was “faster than I expected.” Her tickets actually arrived before she thought they would, and she was very happy with the order, which exceeded her expectations but was still very affordable.

{ 0 comments }

Pitching a Music Festival Fundraiser: The Diversity of Community and Communication

Frank Murdoch has Master’s degrees in Social Work, Vocational Rehabilitation Counseling, and Vision Rehabilitation Therapy. He serves as vice president of a small local non-profit organization devoted to providing services to the physically disabled in the region of Lafayette, Louisiana. Their goal is to provide access to media that might not otherwise be available to those unable to read print materials. Murdoch, an avid comic book fan who lost his vision at the age of twenty-four, has a personal interest in this goal and can readily communicate the importance of the project.

The long-term fundraising goal is $10,000 over the next two years. In the short term, they hope to raise $3,000 to get started.

The group has held successful fundraisers in the past, but they have also experienced some fundraising disappointments, so it’s important that they get this one right. Murdoch plans to offer the board his own pitch for a music and cultural festival, dubbed “The Diversity of Community and Communication.” He likes the theme of diversity because the program addresses “the diverse ways in which to provide information to all of us equally.” The theme would allow him to “incorporate multiple things from the community to our advantage and still press our agenda: more inclusive inclusion of persons with disabilities into the community.”

Murdoch envisions an event showcasing a diversity of cultures, especially in regards to food and music. If his idea is approved by the organization, he will then pitch his idea to various sponsors.

“The first thing I’ll do,” he explains, “is pitch my idea about diversity and equality… then talk about the richness of diversity in the community appealing to their cultural backgrounds and appreciation for food.” He would also discuss how the proposed program could create “more access [for recipients] for everything from cultural awareness events to important governmental practices and then into their pockets: sales and advertising.”

To create a diversity of music, Murdoch would like to approach a diversity of artists. With help from others in the organization, he has complied a list of acts he hopes will agree to perform, including Acadian musician Nellie Harrington, indie group The Wooden Wings, classic rockers Strazza & Company, blues musician Dege Legg, rockabilly group The Howdies, Cajun rock and rap artist Michael Juan Nunez, zydeco groups Nathan Williams and the Zydeco Cha-Chas, Curley Taylor, and Rosie Ledet, and Southern Creole Blues group Henry Gray and the Cats. In addition, he hopes to showcase “an interactive act in between set-ups and breakdowns,” including belly dancers from long-time supporters, Desert Shadows, Oasis Bellydance Studio, and Trybe Habibi Bizarre.

In order to arrange for a prize draw, Murdoch wants to approach local restaurants, to showcase the diversity of food in the community including Cajun, Creole, Asian, Italian, Mexican, and Middle-eastern cuisine. He knows that many businesses “are happy to provide a thirty-dollar gift certificate to promote their restaurant at the gig,” and adds that he could further help his sponsors by providing them with additional publicity. If his pitch goes forward, “several weeks before [the event] people see four thousand fliers around the city and residential areas to inform people that there is going to be an event and who is sponsoring it.”

Murdoch advises those hoping to pitch a similar music festival to think about reaching the broadest possible audience. Of course, you want to create something new and different. Figure out who your crowd is, and then “appeal to that crowd’s mental and emotional aspects that will get them to help you out.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

{ 0 comments }

Small Scale Online Educational Fundraising

Peace and Education Coalition, Second Chance Campus offers a year-round alternative high school that “services urban at-risk youth, ages sixteen to twenty-one, who have left their traditional neighborhood school for various reasons such as safety, teen parenthood, going into the workforce, [or] relocation.” For the last nine years, Nancy Salas-Herrera has taught literature and art at one of Peace and Education’s two Chicago campuses, where approximately eighty-five at-risk students work toward their Chicago Public Schools diploma on an accelerated track, in a program that acknowledges their unique needs with features such as on-site daycare and classes held later in the day than at traditional high schools.

Salas-Herrera’s love of teaching originated, she believes, in eight grade, when Ms. Rosemary Shedor at the Sacred Heart of Jesus asked her to teach a history lesson. She remembers, “I jumped at the opportunity!” and she “even threw in a pop quiz.” Then, she realized, “I knew I had to—not wanted, had to—get into teaching.” She wanted to “share, interpret, discuss, deconstruct…to inspire others.”

She describes her art classes as “organic and free,” including “touches of the traditional with a flavor of the unpredictable. I like to incorporate functional crafts, like paper lanterns and loom knitting, and multicultural art from around the world.” To imbue her students with a sense of ownership, she requires them to evaluate and critique their own work, with the help of a guiding rubric, and to defend the grade they feel they deserve.

As a literature teacher, she employs a decidedly interdisciplinary technique, bringing “art, food, film” into the lesson and using whatever methods she can think of to illuminate the subject. While teaching The Kite Runner, for instance, she invited an Afghani restaurateur to cater the class and speak about his homeland. The students also made and flew their own kites, researched the history of Afghanistan and, after they finished the book, watched the film. Other innovative lesson plans have included making papier-mâché helmets for Beowulf, hosting a costumed medieval feast for Canterbury Tales, and evaluating their own homemade Rorschach tests when they read “Flowers for Algernon.”

The Chicago Teacher’s Union provides all CPS teachers with a one hundred dollar stipend, Salas-Herrera’s yearly supply budget.

Typically, her principal provides a ballpark figure regarding available funds for art and selects and purchases student text books. Salas-Herrera researches economical novel sets. “Many times,” she explains, “I get free supplemental materials from the web or swap with other teachers in order to save money.” To supplement her funding, she finds free materials on Craigslist; asks friends, family, and students to donate materials; or chooses projects that require “recyclables or natural objects” such as “branches and sand.” But, to do the project she had in mind for this quarter, she needed markers.

Last year’s markers were done for: old, dried up, and unacceptable. Salas-Herrera required $186 for new markers, to complete a large poster project, as well as teach future lessons in which she wants to “introduce Seurat and pointillism, and pigment dispersion.”

The principal of Peace and Education Coalition, Second Chance Campus encouraged teachers to try a website called DonorsChoose to raise additional funds, and Salas-Herrera was further encouraged in this by the endorsement of other teachers, in addition to such personalities as Ophrah Winfrey and her “darling” Stephen Colbert (to whom she adds: “Mr. Colbert, I have another project brewing. Won’t you please, please help me?”). She found the site “easy to use” and its staff “quick to respond to questions.” She adds, “I like that they are honest [about] how and where the funds are being applied to satisfy the request.” To that end, she created her own DonorsChoose project, “Craving for Crayola Markers.”

Her students were encouraged to spread the word, and Salas-Herrera publicized the project on her own Facebook page. In short order, several patrons of the arts donated the money and she soon had her new materials. “It was a wonderful feeling,” she recalls. “People still believe in art education.” She will “definitely” be using DonorsChoose again.

The students at Peace and Education Coalition, Second Chance Campus face challenges that many high schoolers will never know. They may be culturally limited because they are “are afraid or reluctant to venture out of their neighborhoods,” and they often cope with “financial difficulties, run-ins with the law, drug/alcohol abuse, lots of peer pressure, and teen pregnancy.” Some of them are “struggling learners” who require assistance from special education teachers. Often, their emotional issues come to the fore of the classroom, resulting in “disruptions” and student who “shut down” until Salas-Herrera must talk to them individually to “get to the root of the matter, as much as they allow me to know. Sometimes, they just need to cool and calm themselves down before they can approach the daily lesson.”

It’s a challenging atmosphere, and while the work can be difficult, Salas-Herrera says it’s “awesome that I am teaching right by my old neighborhood, the Back of the Yards. I am grateful that I am giving back to the community where I was born and raised.” Alternative schools, she feels, often get a bad rap, but she wants the world to know that, “these kids are not bad. Most them just made some bad choices, but…aren’t we all flawed at some point in time? I commend them for trying to make it right and graduating with a high school diploma. I think it  is an excellent step onto the right path!”

{ 0 comments }

Performing Humor and Smart Comedy on Stage

According to his website, robertmac.com, “Robert Mac is a comedy creator, collaborator, connoisseur, and critic,” as well as “the thinking man’s non-thinking man.” A rare breed, he is a stand-up comedian who doesn’t resort to profanity, misogyny, or chest-beating, and still made the Entertainment Business Journal’s list of top one hundred comedians. How does he define his act? That’s “the hardest part of the job,” he says. “How can I tell you what my act is when I can only see it through me-colored glasses? Other people say it’s smart, clever, silly, cerebral.”

He readily admits that he’s chosen a difficult path in life, or, as he puts it, “stand-up is a tough racket.” Still, Mac has been able to find success in his chosen field, performing not only at comedy clubs around the country, but also private and corporate gigs, along with the much-coveted television appearance.

Daily, he battles the dichotomy of the life of an intelligent stand-up performer. “I put a lot of thought into my material,” he says. One the one hand, while “it’s easy to make people laugh…it’s much more rewarding to make them think and keep them guessing.” On the other hand, his experience is that his job involves, “mostly performing for drunks.” The club scene seems to be about “free comedy and expensive drinks, which devalues the comedy. It’s really backward in many ways. The club owners make their money on booze, so they offer cheap or free comedy to get drinkers into the clubs.”

But Mac is committed to this life, and has been for some time. He remembers, as a child, listening to a Steve Martin routine and thinking, “Do people do that as a job?” His first foray into stand-up took place around 1992. He provided some written material for a friend to perform at a local club’s open mic night. “When he did my material on stage, and got laughs, I felt betrayed in a way,” Mac remembers. “I wanted those laughs. After much cajoling, he finally pushed me onstage and my first set was a hit. I was hooked.”

Almost twenty years later, he performs regularly, an iconoclast in an industry where many performers are seeking to reach an audience that is “there to do shots and whoop it up.” By contrast, Mac plays well to a “bright and attentive” audience. Where is his base? He reports, “I do well with people with glasses,” and that he can judge how successful his set has been by how well he feels when he’s done. “If I’m having fun,” he says, “they’re having fun.” His favorite shows, naturally, are “the ones where they are in the palm of my hand the whole time and they let me run the show.”

What else could a comedian ask for? Reportedly, “a few more television appearances.” But he’d settle for the ability to “make a comfortable living as a comedian . . . and I’m making my way toward that.”

Mac uses social networks to share the news about upcoming performances, including Facebook to direct his fans to hyperlinks where they can purchase tickets or make reservations for upcoming shows. Fans can watch clips of his performances on his YouTube channel. He sells CDs and digital downloads online (and hopes to offer more merchandise in the near future), and even writes an occasional blog called Comedy DNA, discussing humor. In terms of weird publicity stunts, however, he rates this article as “probably the unusualest,” thing he has ever done.

Humor, of course, is subjective. “There’s funny in everything,” Mac says, “but it takes a lot to make me laugh. I think I need to be caught off-guard. Today I laughed out loud, literally, watching my friend Myq Kaplan perform on Letterman—funny, smart stuff.”

{ 0 comments }

QR Code Posters for Educational Fundraising and School Events

What do you know about QR codes?

You’ve probably seen these distinctive, randomly-checkered, black and white squares on advertisements in magazines and other print publicity. Anyone with a smart phone can scan them in an instant, and be transported to a sponsor’s web page for more information.

How does that help your raise more money for your school?

What if that QR code sent students, parents, and other potential donors to a website where they could instantly purchase tickets to an upcoming dance, theatrical performance, fundraising event. What if that site allowed them to make an instant online donation? What if you could do it all at an affordable price?

By combining the power of QR codes with the convenience of our TicketRiver online box office, we’ve created a reliable tool for your school. TicketRiver helps you collect money, whether you’re selling tickets or just asking for charitable donations to support the arts, athletics, the building fund, or any other program that requires cash.

It’s Elementary

We know you’re busy, and that’s why we’ve made the process as streamlined as possible. You can start with a call to our friendly customer support staff at 888.771.0809 and tell them you’d like some QR Code Posters. While you’re setting up your page on TicketRiver (totally free, really easy), they’ll help get your Posters started. You can send our designers any image you’d like to use, have a custom design created just for you, or even choose a combination, like a custom design that incorporates your school logo.

We won’t print or ship your posters until you’re satisfied with the proof, so there’s no risk. When you receive them, the unique QR code will feature prominently in the image, letting everyone know that they can instantly buy tickets or send money with their smart phones.

Time to Shine

Just hang your Posters around the school or wherever you suspect your supporters may lurk. Wherever you go, whatever you do, those QR codes keep working for you, so you can sell tickets or collect donations literally any time, utilizing zero human resources. No one has to sell tickets, collect money, count change, or answer questions. Your TicketRiver page does it all for you!

If you’re looking for a way to move your fundraising campaign into the twenty-first century, capitalize on your students’ love of technology, or raise more money while committing fewer resources to the cause, QR Code Posters are smart way to achieve your goals!

 

 

{ 0 comments }

QR Code Posters for Fast, Easy, Online Ticket Sales

What if your publicity posters could sell theater tickets for you?

I don’t mean in a metaphorical way: of course, great PR helps you sell tickets. I mean, what if the posters literally sold the tickets, to people who saw them, while they were standing there admiring the posters? What if the moment your patrons saw your advertisement, one feature of that ad was that it would instantly allow them to buy tickets to your upcoming show?

That’s what QR Code Posters from TicketPrinting.com do.

QR codes, those little black and white squares that appear more and more often in our visual environment, allow users to connect directly to websites. Anyone with a smart phone can instantly scan the code and be taken to a page where further information awaits them.

Box Office Bliss

But our QR Code Posters go even further. They don’t just take your patrons to any website; they direct them to your performance’s actual event page at TicketRiver, our online box office. With just a few clicks, your audience can purchase tickets to the upcoming show, without having to walk away from your advertisement, without the possibility that their desire to attend will slip their minds. It’s an instant-gratification ticket sales.

Setting up your event on TicketRiver is fast and easy; the process takes about five minutes and is as simple as entering data into a webform. As long as you have a title and description for your event, along with the time, the location, and the ticket prices, you can get started. The website does the rest: sells seats and collects payments.

Getting your QR Code Posters is even simpler, because our Customer Support staff and talented designers do the work for you. All you have to do is place your order by calling 888.771.0809. You can send us any design you’d like, or let our graphic artists create a custom design for you. We’ll generate the QR code that links to your show and send you a proof for your approval before we start printing.

Waiting in the Wings?

If you’ve been toying with the idea of updating your box office, transitioning to online ticket sales, or just want to add another convenient way for your patrons to get their seats, these QR Code Posters really pull their own weight. They do all the work of your ordinary print publicity, with the powerful bonus of actually selling those seats for you.

It just doesn’t get any simpler than this. Purchase Posters. Sell tickets.

 

{ 0 comments }

QR Code Posters for Music Event Ticket Sales

Your fans love your music.

Your fans want to see you perform live.

Your fans have smart phones.

Your fans have lives.

Do you love your fans? Show them a little love by making their lives a little bit easier. How? Make it simple for them to get tickets to your upcoming show the moment they see your print publicity. You can make the experience totally hassle-free for you and your fans with QR Code Posters advertising the gig. They actually sell tickets for you, so your fans don’t need to search around for the right link, stand in line at a ticket counter, or deal with any exorbitant ticket broker fees.

It’s So Easy

We’ve streamlined the process. First, we created an online box office at TicketRiver.com. In five minutes, you can register your show and set up an event page where your fans can find all your event details and purchase tickets. You can even sell different kinds of tickets—VIP Passes, 18-over, ½ price, whatever you like—to the same event. It’s fast and easy to create your page, complete with its own unique URL.

A Little Help from Your Friends

But that’s not all we’ve done for you. We’ll get your fans to the link in no time at all with a custom QR Code Poster. Whether you’ve got a design in mind or need one of our graphic artists to create an image that suits your particular needs, all you’ve got to do it is call our customer support at 888.771.0809. They’ll help get your order going. We’ll design your posters, generate your QR code, and send out a proof for your approval. We never print until you’re satisfied you’re getting exactly the Poster or Flyer you need.

Waiting Here for You

Wherever you hang your high-resolution QR Code Posters, your fans can scan the code with their smart phones. It will take them right to your TicketRiver event page where they can buy tickets right away.

TicketRiver sends users print-at-home tickets to save you time and money, but, if you still want to use paper tickets, you can order those too (at a discount for TicketRiver users) and mail them out, or hold them at will call.

It’s that easy! QR Code Posters are there for you, selling tickets night and day, from the moment you hang them until you sell out your event.

It’s just one more way to show your love to the people who support your music.

{ 0 comments }

A Hole In One! Annual Summer Swing Charity Event

“Healing through Sports Foundation (HTSF) is a non-profit, public-benefit organization having the purpose of funding cancer research, patient services, and education programs focusing on prevention. By communicating the benefits of regular participation in physical activity and sporting events, we believe we can make a difference.”

~ James Johnson, HTSF

This July the Healing through Sports Foundation held its 9^th Annual Summer Swing Charity Event at the Tijeras Creek Golf Club in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA. The event featured rounds of golf, a charity raffle, silent auction, cocktails, and a dinner buffet. Attendees could participate in a number of ways, from sending in a donation of a certain amount, buying raffle tickets, attending one or all of the events, to becoming one of the event sponsors.

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society was chosen as the charity benefactor. The mission of LLS is to “cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families.” The goal of the Summer Swing Charity Event was to raise at least $15,000 for the cause of curing blood cancers.

Along with the golf tournament, the charity fundraising event featured a Helicopter Ball Drop Raffle. In this type of raffle, numbered tickets are sold to participants. Then numbered golf balls are dropped from a helicopter above a specific spot on the golf course. The winner is determined by how close to the target, usually a tee or hole, the numbered golf ball lands. Proceeds from the raffle go to the designated charity.

For this event, the organizers chose the Golf Tournament Raffle Ticket. The ticket features a bright blue sky, a well tended green and a golf ball waiting on a tee to be put into play.  The ticket has room for information about the event and the raffle. An individually numbered, detachable stub allows organizers to keep track of tickets and prizes.

I asked James how the TicketPrinting.com raffle ticket benefited his particular event. He said, “It clearly communicated what our event was and what we were offering. Also, the quality of the product was outstanding!”

To sell event tickets, James and his team relied on several proven methods: “email, online, and in person.”  Reaching out through an email list or listserve to individuals who have had contact with the organization can be very rewarding when it is time to sell tickets. It also pays to maintain an up-to-date online source to disseminate information about the event and sell tickets. Whether an event organizer chooses to maintain a website dedicated to the event or a Facebook Event page, information should be relevant and drive attendees to the event. Leveraging personal contacts can also be very important when planning a similar event. The power of word of mouth sales cannot be underestimated.

What advice did James have for other event organizers? “Have plan and stick to it. A clear roadmap is the key to any successful event.” Real planning and dedication make big events like this possible and successful.

{ 1 comment }

Country At The Cabin: Vacaville’s First Country Music Festival

“Our ticketprinting.com experience was very good. I was impressed by the quality, speed, and ease of ordering… We got several compliments from the venue, other bands, and guests by the quality and professional look of the printed materials. It definitely made us look legit and like we knew what we were doing even though we didn’t.”

~Austin Jansen

On Saturday, July 16, Vacaville’s First Country Music Festival was held at The Elmira Cabin in Elmira California. Acts included  48 Straight, the Jesse Woodside Band, the Taryn Cross, and the Amber Snider Band. Free mechanical bull rides , dancing lessons, catered barbecue and drink specials were a part of the night’s festivities.

To promote Country at the Cabin, the organizers chose collateral from the Natural Riffs collection on Ticketprinting.com. The design features an acoustic guitar against a sepia background with stage lights, invoking the feeling of a country music venue. Natural Riffs collateral has space for logos and photos of performers and the text is customizable.

I recently caught up with Austin Jansen, promoter for the event and drummer for the Jesse Woodside Band.

I asked Austin about the role his organization played in organizing Country at the Cabin. “My organization is an event promotion company. We organize/plan music, fundraising, and special events based around music. The particular event we ordered products from you was a first (hopefully) annual country music festival held locally to our organization.”

How did Austin and the other organizers promote the event?  They relied on more than one method to get the word  out. ” We distributed our tickets between the bands, the venue, our Facebook page, a radio ad, an online tickets sales site, and several local businesses. We pre-sold most of our tickets through our bands and the majority of our tickets were sold at the door the night of the event.” Austin explained. ” We started selling our tickets 2 weeks before the event and started our radio ad 1 week prior due to budget limitations.”

What might he do differently next time, and what advice would he offer to others hosting similar events? ” If I could do it again I would start the radio ad 1 month prior as well as selling tickets earlier. Next year we hope to have a larger headliner and charge more for the event.”

What was the highlight of Country at the Cabin? ” The highlight of our event was how busy it got. We were concerned with low pre-sale figures that event attendance might be low,  but we packed the house!

“My band had the largest crowd, and they were completely involved and loved us! My band also played the best we have ever played. Everything actually went pretty smooth.”

Country at the Cabin sounds like it turned out to be a great event! We definitely look forward to hearing about it when it comes around again next year!

{ 0 comments }

Theater Promotions and Theatrical Marketing: Online and in the Real World

Like many theater people, Alexandra Kesman discovered the stage in high school. She dabbled in acting, but spent more time backstage: stage managing, designing lights, running sound, and crewing a variety of shows. She attended Antioch College, where, thanks to an extensive co-op program, she graduated with an impressive résumé: The Magic Theatre in San Francisco, The Cincinnati Fringe Festival, Know Theatre of Cincinnati, Live Bait Theatre in Chicago, The Yellow Springs Kids Playhouse, and The American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA. In 2008, she took a full time position at the Know Theatre of Cincinnati, and today serves as Manager of PR and Marketing.

Kesman is in the vanguard of theatrical marketing professionals, comfortable with virtual promotions and prepared to do whatever it takes to start selling seats. Viral, stealth, and underground marketing? As “a mid-sized theatre with little to no budget for promotions,” she explains, “we are forced to rely on such types of marketing to get the word out.”

The Know Theatre’s mainstage season, from October to May, produces shows in their versatile black box, where seating is deliberately limited to ninety-nine or fewer, to keep shows intimate. Every June, they produce the Cincinnati Fringe Festival: thirty-five shows, twelve days, one hundred fifty performances, sixty-five hundred spectators. This season, they launched The Jackson Street Market, a series “dedicated to fostering and growing our local artist community” including “space for several groups to host salons and performances and the launch of a resource sharing website where Know Theatre’s resources can be utilized in exchange for volunteer hours.” On New Year’s Eve, they host their popular Speakeasy Party Fundraiser.

So, how does one go about promoting theater on a shoestring budget?

Kesman can rattle off myriad low-cost options, which have varying effects on ticket sales. In regard to free video content, she says that the theater was “one of the first in the area to really jump on the Youtube bandwagon,” offering, “video trailers, snippets, and ‘funny things that have nothing to do with our show’ videos,” which don’t necessarily sell tickets, but have a positive impact nonetheless. Due to the nature of the Internet, such clips, “create a conversation, show an insight into our company, and engage audiences.” Kesman suggests that, by opening a dialog, free content allows theaters to talk with potential patrons, rather than at them. She says that, once such a conversation has been started, “maybe they’ll buy tickets farther down the road. A good deal of our social media, blogging, and video efforts revolve around that.”

What of social media and blogging? The Know Theater maintains a Twitter feed and a Facebook fan page, each of which has over fifteen hundred followers. Facebook’s new tagging feature means that posts, “are mentioned periodically through other patron’s pages…helping drive traffic to our fan page and Twitter.” Even Kesman was surprised by the Facebook effect. She noticed that after inviting a few hundred Facebook friends to an event, a certain percentage would click “like” and soon enough, “I was surprised…to find out that Facebook was the number two referrer of traffic to our website, right under direct links and entries..”

Social media helps the theater share updates about shows and tickets, but Kesman sees the main purpose of such pages as, “being silly, fun, and engaging with our fans, rather than just posting ‘Get your tickets!’” A popular example? One snowy day, they created some cool buzz using “a photo of our building with the K in our logo replaced with an S, making it ‘Snow Theatre’.”

The Know Theater’s blog also serves to “engage our patrons.” Content is created by staff, actors, directors, and designers, and while Kesman sometimes has trouble motivating them to sit down and blog, she’s managed to get some exciting content for fans: tutorials on making fake blood, photographs taken by the touring cast in different parts of the country. For the basics, the Know Theater relies on their homepage, where readers can find “info about all of our productions, special events…staff, mission, history, production history, your average fundraising pages…and headshots and bios for our company and guest artists.” This site gets about three thousand hits a month, and, with an “in-house ticketing system that allows online purchases as well as over the phone and in person” is responsible for about thirty-five percent of the theater’s ticket sales!

And everything that Kesman does, she has to do twice. The Know Theater and the Fringe Festival maintain separate, but connected, Facebook, Twitter, and home pages!

In the real world, Kesman knows that “reviews in the paper can really get the word out about a show like nothing else.” She also makes certain to hang Posters and Flyers in the city and the suburbs. Another tactic is to target specific groups in advance, such as “major distributions with the city’s library systems and sneak-peek performances at bookstores,” for family-friendly shows based on books.

The possibilities seem endless. Kesman can drive even more traffic to the website by sending announcement to local community calendar sites. She counts about thirty such pages for her area and says, “You’d be surprised how this can actually sell tickets. People always say, ‘Oh I saw it online somewhere’.” The next big thing looks like their upcoming Google Grants account for Google Adwords donations. She advises, “For anyone that isn’t aware, Google provides a budget per day for some non-profits in Google Adwords. It’s a process to set-up if you are approved, but could really help traffic and searches in the future.” She expects to have it up and running by the spring.

Her advice to newcomers to social network marketing? “Reading books on social media isn’t going to get you anywhere. You really just have to dive in and figure it out…. Ask your friends. Everybody uses Facebook these days.” With a little experimentation, you can learn what Kesman already knows: how easy and navigable social media and blog sites really are, how well they allow you to communicate with patrons and draw traffic. Still intimidated? She suggests you research best practices online. Find a marketing blog that emphasizes the arts and the nonprofit sector. “Find some you like and read them regularly,” she advises. “You’ll learn a lot.”

 

{ 0 comments }