Get Season-Ready: Data Center Quick Wins Before Your On-Sale (August 20 2026 Webinar)

 Watch back the webinar below, and keep scrolling for key takeaways.

Why trading matters

Across the DC Community Network, around 89% of households attend only one organization and 11% attend two or more. A split that has barely moved in three years. Multi-organization households convert more easily and engage more deeply, and trading is the mechanism that moves a household from the first group into the second. Ahead of its 2023 production of Merry Me, New York Theatre Workshop traded with other organizations in its network and found that 30% of ticket sales came from patrons discovered that way. 

Why Direct Mail?

Once trading gets you the households, direct mail is how you convert them: roughly a 90% open rate against 20% for email, response rates around 35 times higher, and about $42 returned per $1 spent. It also sticks around the house, acting as a repeated reminder.

Campaign building

Create campaigns by season with the year in the name, give trading partners at least a week before your Trade Approve By date, set your standard suppressions to apply automatically, and always deduplicate before export. Watch the Net Count column throughout — it confirms your filters are working, and it's where trading shows up as genuinely new households.

Requesting a trade list

In your campaign list, click Add segments → Existing and trade segments, then use the organization toggle to switch to the organization you want to request from. You'll only see segments they've marked visible to trade. Add a message with your request, and track it under the Trade requests tab.

Reports worth knowing

All four sit under Reports in the sidebar and can be filtered to a segment, your organization, or the whole network.

1. Demographics compares your patrons to the wider community on income and generation — the gap tells you whether your pricing and messaging match who's actually in your database.

2. Geography maps household density alongside penetration rate, showing both your strongest ZIP codes and the untapped ones.

3. Segment crossover shows how much two audiences overlap.

4. National Change of Address flags patrons who have moved and addresses that are wrong, so a big mailing doesn't waste print and postage.

Three things to do ahead of your next season

1. Run a segment demographic comparison against your community, or your own database if you're not trading yet. It shows what makes that group distinct on income, generation, and lifestyle, so you can write to them specifically rather than sending everyone the same thing.
2. Run a segment crossover on last season's shows. The overlap figure is interesting, but the pattern behind it is the valuable part — if two productions shared an audience, ask what they had in common. Genre, playwright, tone. That's what carries forward. Works internally too: subscribers against donors is a useful view for development teams.
3. Explore a demographic list rental on the Go Deeper page, using the same filters that define your best current patrons, to find households in your community who aren't in your file yet.

If you only do one, make it the crossover. A few minutes' work, and it usually surfaces something you can act on right away.

Questions from the session

Can I run these reports on a list I've uploaded? Yes, every report can be filtered to an individual segment, your whole organization, or the wider community network.

If there's no data for a filter I apply, does the household drop off the list? It can, but it may also be that nobody in the list matches that filter. The Net Count is how you tell.

Can I see how a campaign actually performed? Yes, response reporting is how NYTW arrived at the 30% figure above. It needs a DDX connection for transactional data, so it sits with the advanced license. Get in touch to see what's involved: helpdesk@trgarts.com