Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance

Recap of our March Techniculture Salon

For the second Techniculture Salon, once again culture workers and technology professionals gathered at the Comcast Collaboration Studio to hear a panel discussion of digital marketing professionals before our our final 2017 Techniculture event on May 2.

At the first Techniculture Salon in February, we talked about managing data – how to collect it and how analytics make it more useful. During the second salon, Cultural Alliance President Maud Lyon talked about managing relationships with customers or audiences with:

First, Marion talked about how she works directly with clients through her role at Curalate. One of Curalate’s clients is Urban Outfitters, who has been a major success story in how they work with digital media with their customers. Urban Outfitters showcases the UO Community on their pages which features customers’ Instagram posts of real Urban Outfitters products. They collected these images by curating them through Instagram.

Marion mentioned how one might think it would be easy for Urban Outfitters to get this content, but it was not. In order to obtain this content,  Urban Outfitters asked their store associates to lead the way by posting images from their local stores first, later seeing their customers follow suit.

Up next Lyon spoke to Winters from ANRO, a print company that produces 250 million pieces of direct mail a year. ANRO recently worked on a direct mail campaign for the Philadelphia Zoo, which focused around data driven membership renewal, with every piece being personalized.   

Winters noted that they saw the highest response from the personalized, 1-to-1 print direct mail campaign. Using data, they were able to personalize messages based on favorite zoo animals or previous event attendance .

A key point that the Zoo and ANRO brought up was that the first renewal year is highly important in that  if you can convince a patron to renew their first year, the chances of future yearly renewals is much higher

Moore, who works with the 76ers, reiterated this message with his team’s experience: once they get someone to renew membership once, return membership rates continue to increase.

He also noted that the 76ers use data to determine how and when to target season ticket holders. For instance, someone who has been a season ticket holder since the beginning probably only needs a quick phone call. On the other hand, someone who has expensive seats and only attends 80 percent of games will potentially require more effort to get them to renew. To tackle this, the 76ers create a priority list.

Finally, Lyon talked to Raybould, President at TicketLeap. He shared that the ticketing industry is crowded and has many competitors like EventBrite, which are all struggling to do the same thing. They also  have the same model: sell your tickets in our store. To stay competitive, TicketLeap has been working on differentiating itself. In July of last year TicketLeap released Port, a service which allows you to sell tickets directly on site, like Shopify does for e-commerce.

To wrap up, Lyon asked the audience for questions. One included how can smaller organizations start doing this type of work--the consensus seemed to point to the important point is to just start collecting basic data about your users (such as emails) and doing surveys.

Want to learn more about arts marketing? Attend the keynote at our Philly Tech Week event, Arts Marketing in the Digital Age! RSVP here.

TechniCulture is generously supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

For the second Techniculture Salon, culture workers and technology professionals gathered at the Comcast Collaboration Studio to hear a panel discussion of digital marketing professionals before our our final 2017 Techniculture event on May 2.