Data Center Case Study Featuring Philadelphia Ballet

Success in any job, project, or goal requires the right tools. For those whose job it is to build audiences for arts and cultural venues, we believe TRG Arts Data Center is the right tool. Whether this is your first time hearing about Data Center, or you already have it, but aren’t sure you are maximizing its uses, this case study will showcase for you how Data Center is the tool that Philadelphia Ballet uses to build their audiences.

Churn

One of the most concerning statistics that every arts marketer should be aware of is that audience churn rates are very high. TRG Arts Benchmark shows that sector-wide, 66% of audience members throughout any given season are first-time patrons, but 75% of them never return. We spoke with Christian Brown, Marketing Director for Philadelphia Ballet, who shared that the churn they experience is at about 40-50%, but this still means that they need to attract something like twenty-five to thirty thousand new ticket buyers every year. “We had an ‘AHA’ moment where we realized we were not getting out of our database enough and therefore we were talking to the same people repeatedly, even though we were advertising across every different medium we could think of. What we've learned through getting outside of our database and into other organization’s databases, via list trading with Data Center, is the importance of diversifying our audience and targeting specific segments.”

Data Center has 24 community networks around the United States. Participating organizations can give permissions to trade mailing lists with other network members in their area. This is valuable because it’s well established that arts patrons who visit one venue are likely to visit another. The TRG Arts Philadelphia Community Network has 50 organizations that help each other prospect for new audiences and with each new organization that joins, the entire network gets stronger. When asked about how Philadelphia Ballet strategically uses Community Networks specifically, Christian shared “we look for like-minded organizations regardless of their size. If one list is going to give us 47 households and the next one is going to give me 3,000, we want them both.”

The Nutcracker

Data Center is integral to strategic marketing investment decisions for Philadelphia Ballet, and helps them maximize their key annual programs. Last season, Nutcracker tickets sold as an add-on to subscribers only totaled 3% of the sales for the show. This data was used to save Philadelphia Ballet money because it meant they didn’t need to send a dozen mailers to each of their subscribers to get them to come see the blockbuster, the yield is just too low to justify that investment, and those dollars could be spent in more strategic ways to invite higher yield segments. Even if you frequently hear from your subscriber base that seeing a show like The Nutcracker is a holiday tradition for them, check your data, did your subscribers come last year? These insights from Data Center can help you drive strategic key investment decisions with data and logic.

Audience Training

One of the key strategies driving success at Philadelphia Ballet is audience training. Your audience will become accustomed to the ways your business operates. If you offer last-minute discounts, they will wait to book, but you can also incentivize behaviors that you actually want. Philadelphia Ballet uses demand-based pricing, which incentivizes and trains their audiences to book early for the best prices. The result is higher yields on ticket sales as the hall fills. Christian cited early offering as another key when it comes to audience training, “Of all the new things we are doing the most important is audience training. We didn’t use to put single tickets on sale for The Nutcracker until late August or September. If they aren’t on sale, we can’t sell them. Why cut off 120 days or more from our sales cycle? It can be as simple as letting people who come to the box office know that The Nutcracker is on sale and that buying now rather than later will save them money.”

Audience training isn’t about never discounting, its about discounting to the right segments, at the right time, to incentivize the right behavior. “We don’t do what I call ‘spray and pray’ offers, things like 20% off to everyone”, Christian explained, “we might offer a 50% discount or a buy-one-get-one, but these offers go to specific segments, not people who are already buying multi-tickets.” These discounts reward customer frequency, which is an example of behavior you definitely want to foster in your audience. “Once you train your patron base to wait for a discount because you need to fill seats, it could take you years to correct that behavior. I don’t think this is talked about nearly enough by marketing managers and directors around the nation.”

The Right Tool

We asked Christian to tell us more about his experience with Data Center as a strategic tool to help guide marketing efforts at Philadelphia Ballet, “I think it's easy to pick up and use, even if you have a complex ticketing system, most people aren't super users of their CRM. Having a resource like Data Center allows more team members to have a powerful tool that doesn't take years of training to get actionable data. Marketing professionals get asked not just to market, but also to answer analytical questions like, ‘how are we doing on lapsed subscribers coming back’? I don’t always know how to pull specific things from Tessitura, but I can get what I need out of Data Center.”

In addition to its uses to drive marketing, Philadelphia Ballet has also used Data Center to gather demographic data needed to strengthen applications for government funding grants and individual donors to support a building expansion. Data Center allows them to be informed and eloquent about how they are serving the city of Philadelphia, who they are reaching and how they are reaching them.

Data Center Can be a central part of your marketing and data analysis. With basic and advanced plans, there is a solution for all organizational sizes. Schedule a free demo if you’re ready to ask us questions, or read more about what Data Center can do for you!