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Arts Organizations Have Always Been Masters of Customer Relations & Data Management

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Earlier this month, I talked about how working at nonprofits that produced live theater taught me oh-so-much about effective management and internal communications and continuous improvement. In this blog, I’m going to focus on what that experience taught me about managing and leveraging customer data.

Back in the 1980s, professional nonprofit theaters had already mastered customer data management: such was fundamental to their cultivating recognition and value in their communities, support that translated regularly into donations. And regular donations mean an organization is sustainable – it means it’s not completely reliant on an angel donor, which is fine until that angel donor dies or gets bought out by a company with no interest being an angel donor.

Most of these nonprofits used a program called ArtSoft to manage data regarding their audience, both program attendees and donors. ArtSoft dominated the market for managing customer and donor data at nonprofits that were focused on live performance. Back then, it felt like every theater, every dance company, every performing arts center used it. It’s sad that it doesn’t have even a Wikipedia entry – it deserves such.

But it wasn’t the software that mattered: it was the human protocols and processes in place to ensure audience member information was regularly gathered and updated. At any theater I worked in the 80s or 90s, there were protocols in place so that every single ticket buyer, every season ticket buyer, every special event attendee, every class participant, every donor and every volunteer went immediately into the master database system, ArtSoft or not, at the moment they paid money or signed up for any activities. And each person – each entry – was tracked regarding their relationship with the organization and their activities from then on.

The goal of this data tracking? To communicate with the people in the database such that:

  • season ticket buyers came back year after year,
  • single ticket buyers either became season ticket buyers or kept coming back as single ticket buyers
  • that people that purchased tickets to events or classes were encouraged to buy tickets to stage shows
  • that everyone was encouraged to donate financially, annually, to the organization
  • that volunteers were encouraged to do any of the above, and that any of these audiences were encouraged to volunteer

35 years ago, these arts organizations were already experienced in target marketing in a way that I feel like so many nonprofits now, particularly those started by corporate folks, are still learning.

Those arts organizations had a relationship with every person in that database, everyone of a few thousand people. The organizations could target market to single ticket buyers based on the kinds of shows they liked in the past. We could target market events based on ages. We could engage in highly-targeted correspondence and phone calls that built relationships such that individual donors came back year after year after year. At one theater, we decided to stop trying to convert single ticket buyers to season ticket holders because, reviewing our data, we felt like we had “enough” of the latter, and wanted to still have an avenue to cultivate new customers. These arts organizations were regularly engaged in highly successful, annual crowdfunding – but they didn’t call it that.

These organizations were successful because of the relationship they built and sustained with individual donors, and it was individual donors, not large grants, that provided MOST of their funding.

That was all before “big data.” Those relationships happened because every person that touched that database understood that the people in it were humans, many of whom had emotional moments when they came to performances. They weren’t just a record number – they were real people, and they felt an emotional connection to the theater.

Not because of the software we used, but because of the protocols that were in place, everything about every program participant ended up almost immediately in our master database. How did we do that?! This way: at nonprofit theaters, absolutely everyone in every audience and every program came through the box office staff or the fundraising staff. That’s easier for nonprofits built around attendance to one primary series of events than an organization that has a range of programs each managed by different people. In addition, there was one person whose primary responsibility was to oversee all of the correspondence to everyone in that database, with the goal of either encouraging participation (including buying tickets) or donating money, and that messaging followed a strategy – it wasn’t haphazard.

Absolutely, individual staff sometimes exported certain data and worked with that data on their own. A staff member might have his own volunteer management database with very specific information to track about volunteers, information that should be kept confidential for the rest of the staff. Another staff member might have a database of media contacts with information separate from the main database. But the main database was the MAIN database, a precious asset as important as anything that went on the stage.

One of the many things I learned in working with these databases: you didn’t delete anyone from them. Duplicates, yes, but if someone called and requested to not be on the database anymore, or died, the recorded got marked as such, but not entirely removed, at least not for a certain number of years. Why? Because the data from the precious engagement was still needed for at least five years on, or because of the very real possibility that someone would re-input that person if they weren’t there already, not knowing the person had requested to be removed or had died.

It’s just yet another example of how arts organizations are often so far ahead of supposedly more tech-savvy nonprofits. And how there are lessons from 35 years are still oh-so-relevant.

This experience was the basis of one of the first web pages I created for my new web site back in the 1990s, about how to manage customer databases. And I can still see the influence in these pages on my site:

Keeping Volunteer Information Up-to-Date.

Advice on Choosing Volunteer Management Software.

Basic Customer Database Principles (an updated version of that first advice page on my web site).

Customer Database Regular Maintenance .

Has working in arts-related organizations affected how you work in other environments? Please share how below in the comments.

If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help. 

what theatre taught me about management & internal communications

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Working at nonprofits in the 1980s and 1990s, nonprofits that produced live theatre, deeply affected me in terms of how I work in management, communications, customer service, team support and client data management in organizations that have nothing to do with the arts. The things accomplished in producing live theater that I had the privilege of being a part of – with few or no computers, and no Internet – seems astounding now. Back then, it was just business as usual.

How theatres approach project management offer great lessons for any nonprofit and their staff.

I started writing a blog about this long ago, but realized it’s really two blogs. This is part one of two on the subject of how working in nonprofit live theater back in the 1980s still affects how I work to this day, and how your nonprofit or company that is NOT focused on the arts can learn from such:

  • Everyone at the organization, whether full-time employee or short-time contractor or volunteer, whether on stage or back stage or up in the administrative offices, was committed to the success of the stage production and would do just about anything within their role to make sure it was a success. The executive director, the marketing director, the actors, the designers, the stagehands, the box office manager, the volunteer ushers, the intermission bartenders – EVERYONE wanted the production to be successful and cared deeply about it happening as close to the vision as possible. Everyone had each other’s backs – yes, I have jumped behind the bar to clean glasses when I realized intermission staff was overwhelmed, and I was the marketing manager.
  • Deadlines are absolute when producing stage productions at a theater that sells season tickets. Dress rehearsal happened on the date on which it was announced to happen. Opening night happened on the date on which it was announced to happen. Delays were oh-so-rare and, on the rare occassion they happened, deeply shameful. To miss that date gave the impression that the team was a poor planner and, perhaps, lacking in basic competence. It’s because of my background in theater management that I have laughed at web designers or tech developers who feel deadlines should be fluid or that say that what is being asked for is impossible or too much. They wouldn’t last a day in most professional nonprofit theater companies I’ve worked in, where a deadline is real, it’s non-negotiable. In my 15 years in live theater, we made every opening night. There might not be working light cues, there might have been an understudy in a role, but the audience saw a show the night we said there would be a show to see.
  • Meeting all the deadlines associated with dress rehearsal and opening night – for the play program to be printed, the volunteers recruited and scheduled, the press contacted and their seats booked, the costumes and props and sets fully constructed and operational, etc. – required frequent, continuous communication among various staff and departments, with all staff feeling empowered to communicate with absolutely anyone across hierarchies and departments. We didn’t have email – we still visited each other’s offices and still put things on paper. And at the weekly staff meeting, we were focused on exactly what needed to be done and WHO would be responsible. The house manager would a short report after EVERY performance noting ANY issues AT ALL, from a cell phone going off during the second act to late patrons not being seated until the first scene change. The stage manager wrote a short report EVERY performance noting ANY issues AT ALL during the performance. A senior staff member read that report EVERY morning and was not surprised when a patron called with a complaint about something they were angry about, or when an item showed up in the press noting a mistake in a performance, because they already knew about it. No one claimed they didn’t have time to write those reports or read them. I have stared dumbfounded at senior managers at non-arts-related nonprofits who want to focus on how they first heard about a program problem – the messenger – rather than the problem itself.
  • Hierarchies existed, but not when it came to communications about the quality of the “final product.” If the marketing assistant attended a rehearsal and sat in a seat and realized the staging would keep certain audience members from seeing a critical moment, that marketing assistant woud be welcomed to tell either the stage manager or even the director, directly – that assistant didn’t to have to go to the marketing director, who would then go to the executive director, who would then go to the artistic director, who will then go to the stage director.
  • Absolutely, we were happy with full houses and sold-out shows, but we were just as thrilled looking out and seeing a half-filled but completely diverse audience, with people of ethnicities or ages we didn’t usually have in those seats. We also were thrilled when we put on a show that was challenging in terms of its theme or how it was presented, and it connected with the audience, even if we weren’t playing to full houses. I’ve never been able to relate to corporate folks that want nonprofits to focus exclusively on numbers instead of other factors, like the diversity of the audience and feedback from that audience, when judging marketing success.
  • EVERYONE took part in celebrating the success: on opening night, the box office assistant manager was as delighted as the show’s director that the play – the project – was off and running successfully, and they were side-by-side celebrating at some point.

I miss that environment so, so much. I’ve kept those lessons in my work, much to the frustration of some managers. I still think it’s a great way to operate.

Next week, I’ll share blog number two on how working in nonprofit theater taught me so much about customer relations and data management.

If you feel that your work or volunteering at any arts-related nonprofit has positively affected your work at other nonprofits, or even in the corporate sector, please comment below!

If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.