Talent Development

In the 2013–14 Season, a Professional Development budget didn’t exist for the California Symphony. Since then, the California Symphony has increased its Professional Development budget to more than $1,000 per staff member, and grown total revenue by more than $400,000 during that same time period. Investing in staff leads to results.

Orchestras have THE BEST talent on stage. Our players have been to the best music schools, studied with the best teachers, and must bring their absolute best — nothing short of perfection, really — to ever hope to win an audition in this intensely competitive field. And then they must perform their best again and again if they hope to gain tenure.

And on the admin side, we often don’t measure up to that.

In honor of conference season approaching, which is an opportunity for talent development that frequently gets the short straw, this post explores reasons for why this disparate juxtaposition between the artists and administrative talent often exists (there are actually some very compelling reasons), and why and how the California Symphony has chosen to tackle this issue.

This is definitely number one on the list and is probably the reason most often sited for not investing in talent development, and frequently a big reason for not attracting top admin talent to begin with. It’s true, we all have lean budgets — all of us — from the smallest mom-and-pop organizations to the biggest multi-million dollar institutions, and sadly, being lean and always trying to be leaner is among the most prolific traits of our industry. Money, or lack there of, is a symptom and not the problem though, and lack of money translates to lack of priority. So what is the priority, then? Well, the product on stage is the priority, which makes a lot of sense and is why this issue gets convoluted very quickly, and it brings the discussion to reason number two:

2. The Overhead Myth

The term “Overhead Myth” was coined by Dan Pallotta in a viral 2013 TED Talk and is the idea that nonprofits are wrongly rewarded for how little we spend instead of the impact we’re making. This myth was for a long time promulgated by nonprofit watchdogs like Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and others who evaluated charities on the sole metric of financial ratio (i.e. people expenses as a percentage of total expenses). For example, an organization with a budget of $1Million that spent $100,000 on staff would have a 10% overhead rate, and somewhere just above that percentage organizations would be docked — i.e. have a lower score from those watchdog groups — with not one ounce of attention given to if that organization was executing its mission, saving lives, serving more people, etc. So that’s a problem. The good news is that some of those groups have changed their rating system, including the two named above. The bad news is that this myth is still a widely held view among individual donors and particularly among foundations. To this day, every person reading this who writes grants will agree that foundations often ask questions about staff costs, and we have to tiptoe carefully around how we present our financials, or simply not include overhead costs in a project, which is a total joke because the project can’t get done without people to execute it in the first place. CalNonprofits has gone so far to say that low overhead hurts nonprofits, and they’re right. Why is it that the musician on stage gets to be categorized as an expense that matters and the person bringing those musicians to local schools to build a future audience for our art form has to be categorized as bad and wasteful? All of this is to say that this is a very real reason why our organizations don’t invest in talent or talent development.

3. Fear They’ll Leave

I have heard peers in this industry express this feeling: “I’ll spend the money, and then they’ll get poached by someone else.” Or, “We go through all that effort to train them, and then they’re qualified for a better job somewhere else.” Or, “…and then they’ll go get paid more somewhere else.” Opportunity for growth internally is not why people leave a job. That’s not a thing. No one has ever said, “My organization invested in me so much, I got fed up and went somewhere else.”

One study shows that the number one reason orchestra administrators change jobs is workplace (dis)satisfaction (source: Adaptistration). Harvard Business Review confirms this more broadly by stating that one of the top drivers for employee turnover is allowing workers to stagnate in their role. As managers, we have a real opportunity to keep our staff challenged, inspired, stimulated — and ultimately keep them as high and higher performers delivering more to our bottom line — when we invest in their professional development.

Hopefully the ‘why’ is becoming more obvious, and by drilling down deeper, the California Symphony has connected the reason to invest in talent development to its budget implications.

Forget the cost of training — think of the cost of hiring. People always say it’s expensive to train someone new, but think of the costs you incur before you even get to that point: One job posting on LinkedIn is $500; that pays for the conference fee had that person stayed at your organization. Add in the costs to post that position to a few other job sites, and you’ve also broken even on the cost for conference transportation and lodging for that person.
Acknowledge not everyone in the whole org can go to a zillion (or even two) conferences a year. But there are other ways to foster a talent development environment. About a million webinars are available, and for many of them, if people would stop “multi-tasking” while watching and actually focus on the content presented, there is a wealth of good training being presented in this free or low cost format. We have tried to create a culture at the California Symphony that allows time for this so the multi-tasking isn’t a temptation and the time carved out is a priority. Besides conferences and webinars, there are also continuing education classes, daylong workshops and seminars, and industry boot camps. There are a lot of opportunities of varying time and monetary commitments we can foster.
Take advantage of discounts. Many professional development opportunities offer first timer rates and scholarships (last year we paid almost $0 for three staff members to go to a conference they wanted to attend because of funding for new attendees and emerging leaders). And since you’re only a first-timer once, make sure to go for the early bird rates in successive years. This seems like a no-brainer, but so often our orgs are structured such that sometimes people don’t know if they’ll be able to attend the conference/workshop/seminar until closer to the actual date, and the organization misses out on savings as a result. Plus, hotels and flights are cheaper in advance, too, so when you are budgeting and planning for this expense on a proper timeline, those costs are made as low as possible.
Staff have some skin in the game. The deal we make at the California Symphony is that if you want to attend a conference, you need to become an individual member of that service organization; for most of us that’s ACSO (Association of California Symphony Orchestras), for some it’s the League of American Orchestras, and for others, it’s something else. For example, our Music Librarian recently applied (and was accepted!) to become a member of MOLA (Major Orchestras’ Librarian Association), and she just went to their conference (with all the first timer discounts and scholarships she could rack up, of course), and came back a fireball of energy and ideas of how to make her work better and serve the organization in new and innovative ways. (Side note: I had no idea the librarians’ conference resulted in this kind of enthusiasm and idea generation…those folks are on to something). It was worth every penny (of which there really weren’t that many pennies spent compared to how much more awesome Marcella will be at her job now), and each staff member who invests a little themself tends to maximize the opportunity.
Report back after conference. What’s not acceptable at the California Symphony is to attend a conference/seminar/workshop and feel inspired and warm and fuzzy for about a week. I want action from the investment, so employees are required to report back at a future staff meeting what they learned, their key takeaways, and what they plan to implement in their work here based on all that. This internal show-and-tell is practiced all the way up to the Executive Director. We do this for a few reasons:

This holds everyone accountable, so their performance can be evaluated against the goals and ideas they set for themselves.

2. They’ve just passed on the inspiration, ideas, and takeaways from conference in a personal way to the rest of the staff. #win

Over the last four years, the California Symphony has gone from not even having a professional development line in the budget to investing more and more in talent and their development. And the growth in revenue we’ve seen far outpaces the expense. In other words, it’s an investment that’s paying off.

The California Symphony has increased its Professional Development budget to more than $1,000 per staff member per year, and grown total revenue by more than $400,000 during that same time period. Investing in staff leads to results.

Stealing a few more cues from Silicon Valley and the greater business community, here are some other ideas we are looking to implement:

New hire boot camp. Some firms practice a multi-day or even multi-week orientation curriculum that covers all facets of company culture, cross-departmental and large-scale initiatives throughout the company, and a marketing/brand overview. We do a mini version of this at the California Symphony: every new employee, regardless of department, seniority, or job function is presented our audience development plan (more on that here and here, and you can view the actual plan here) in addition to our SMaC plan (here). We’d like to expand this to include a basic marketing/messaging overview (i.e. brand personality, how we talk about ourselves, key words or messages to use in our public communications…because every single role is public-facing to some degree, not just the marketing personnel).

Professional development stipend. Now that we’ve grown our talent development budget, we’re exploring the idea of including it in our benefits package (e.g. every employee has up to $X to spend on their own growth each year). Then, there’s not a pool of money to which people have to request access, but rather, an assumption that you as an employee are worth the investment — an equal investment to others — and you have the freedom and autonomy to determine how to use that investment to best benefit you. And, for those employees that want to invest in a bigger way, such as a continuing education class or attending many conferences, or traveling to one big, far away conference, they can make that decision and supplement as needed (see “skin in the game” comments above).

Mentorship. Structured mentoring is something our industry needs. Not the wimpy kind of mentoring where someone eager asks in a Dr. Seussian way, “Will you be my mentor?” and the person on the receiving end feels awkward and directionless from the way the too-open-ended-and-goalless question was asked; that doesn’t serve either party well. We need a systematic approach to coaching and development of others: mentorships that have a defined beginning and end, and goal(s) for the mentee, so that the period of mentoring has a clear direction for both parties. Plus, the mentorship needs to be mostly driven by the mentee, which can only happen with some basic training/orientation/expectation setting…again, some structure. While this type of project might seemingly lend itself to a big organization with a large staff, we are in the early stages of developing a plan working across organizations with which we’re connected. More to come on this in a future post. In the meantime, at minimum, finding ways to give direct feedback to your employees is critical in moving your staff and organization forward, and is often overlooked as a non-essential at nonprofits of all sizes. There’s too much at stake to not give straight and actionable feedback to your team.

Compared to other industries that have cultures of professional development, mentorship, accountability, and clearly defined growth tracks, we are behind. Being in service to the art means being in service to the people that produce the art (raise money for the art, market the art, educate others about the art, etc.), and there are a lot of people who never play an instrument on stage who help produce the art.

At the end of the day, people execute the mission — on stage and off — so we need to work on getting, keeping, and growing the best people. Conference season, here we go.

Aubrey Bergauer, Executive Director, California Symphony
Aubrey Bergauer defies trends, and then makes her own. In a time when most arts organizations are scaling back programs, tightening budgets, and seeing declines in tickets and subscriptions, Bergauer has dramatically increased earned and contributed revenue at organizations ranging from Seattle Opera to the Bumbershoot Music & Arts Festival to the California Symphony. Her focus on not just engaging — but retaining — new audiences grew Seattle Opera’s BRAVO! Club (young patrons group for audience members in their 20’s and 30’s) to the largest group of its kind nationwide, led the Bumbershoot Festival to achieve an unprecedented 43% increase in revenue, and propelled the California Symphony to quadruple the size of its donor base. From growing audiences, increasing concerts, and expanding programs to instilling and achieving common goals across what are usually siloed marketing, development, and artistic departments, Bergauer is someone you want to follow — on the nationally-recognized blog she created to discuss what actually works in a changing arts landscape, and in real life, too.

A graduate of Rice University with degrees in Music Performance and Business, for the last 15 years Bergauer has used music to make the world around her better, through programs that champion social justice and equality, through ground-breaking marketing and audience development tactics on the forefront of technology, and through taking strategically calculated risks in a risk-averse field. If ideas are a dime a dozen, what separates Bergauer is her experience and record of impact and execution at institutions of all sizes. Praised for her leadership which “points the way to a new style of audience outreach,” (Wall Street Journal) and which drove the California Symphony to become “the most forward-looking music organization around.” (Mercury News) Bergauer’s ability to strategically and holistically examine and advance every facet of the organization’s mission and vision is creating a transformational change in the office, on the stage, in the audience, in the community, and going well beyond the industry of classical music.

Originally published Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on May 18, 2017.

Never Say “Gala”

California Symphony was the first orchestra to collaborate with Postmodern Jukebox, whose vintage cover songs have garnered over 500 million views on YouTube.

“You say you want to change and want to attract new and younger audiences, but everyone says that. Do you actually mean it?” asked Aubrey Bergauer of Board President Bill Armstrong as she was interviewing for the job of Executive Director in 2014.

“Well, we just cancelled our longstanding annual gala if that’s any indication,” Bill replied.

Fast-forward a few months: Bergauer took the job with the directive to “get new people in the doors” and knew there was a giant revenue line in the budget for some sort of new, to-be-determined fundraiser event in place of the old gala Ball. Her first week on the clock she reached out to Postmodern Jukebox — a band with a tremendous YouTube following for their vintage renditions of pop songs, led by trained jazz pianist Scott Bradlee — and asked if they would be interested in collaborating with an orchestra for a Roaring Twenties style party. What a “supremely awesome request” was the response from the band’s manager. The event went on to achieve triple the attendance of the last gala with more than half of attendees being new to the organization. And, here’s the kicker: the average revenue per patron who returned in the year after the event (i.e. their value to the organization in the 12 months following their first interaction with us at this event) was $438 in ticket sales and donations, all completely new money the organization had not previously seen. That’s not chump change, especially given these people’s previous value to us was zero. In fact, the ROI per each returning patron was 1403% in just one year.

Unpacking this success, there were a lot of things we did as we revamped our special events. In this business, it’s never build-it-and-they-will-come; it’s always work, and a lot of work in a very short period of time is what we hustled to do:

Location/venue. We knew if we were going to attract a different demographic, the country clubs of yore were out. Instead, we held the event on a rooftop in nearby Oakland.

Location = 3 acre rooftop garden with a view of the tops of Oakland skyscrapers

Introduced a new ticket type. Not everyone can afford a $500 ticket, so we introduced what we called a “Cocktail Ticket,” which was $125 and included the performance, plus two drinks, plus appetizers. No full dinner, and no guaranteed seat, but plenty of ambient seating options and cocktail tables to gather around. We sold a lot of these, and this was the entry point for most new people. We also offered our standard $500 dinner ticket and hosted tables, and those folks enjoyed the best seats at tables right in front of the stage, a full three-course meal, and hosted wine all night as usual for high-end special events at that price.

Left: Dinner ticket buyers (higher price more typical of a gala with prime seating and dinner); Right: Cocktail ticket buyers (lower price with drinks, appetizers, and dance floor)

Intentionally sought out young volunteers. Younger audiences need to see others that look like them lest there be any hope of them returning. So we sought out young, fun, smart volunteers. They dressed the part, and we received many compliments from our long-time patrons that the volunteers brought a great energy and were incredibly friendly and helpful.

Volunteer selling raffle tickets. Guests took notice of the young, friendly faces.

Black tie, schmack tie. Newsflash: some people like to dress up and some people don’t. So we said either way was ok. And we encouraged dressing up in the theme even though we weren’t sure how that would play out among our guests. Almost everyone dressed up — whether as the embodiment of the Roaring Twenties or in their designer gown — and everyone looked pretty fabulous either way.

Attendees young and old dressed up, some in the theme and some black tie.

Memory elicitation. If you’ve read our other posts on patron retention, you know this is something we care about a lot (even more than attracting new people). We knew that getting these new attendees to come back again was where the real challenge resided in terms of making all this work worth it, so we created a station where guests could write postcards (fitting with the theme and the new invention of airmail in the 1920s), to themselves or to friends, to whoever and as many as they wanted. After the event, we stamped and mailed all of them, and all those guests received their own memory elicitation device reminding themselves what a great time they had. Note: we also followed up with our regular first time attendee retention efforts.

Station for writing postcards (that we actually stamped and mailed after the event), because the new invention of airmail is the fastest way to communicate in the 1920’s.

Stellar performance. We (i.e. all performing arts organizations) blow people away at our regular concerts, and we (i.e. the California Symphony) wanted to do that here, too. Postmodern Jukebox is known for putting on incredibly entertaining shows (they even have a professional tap dancer!), and we knew that adding an orchestra would only enhance their performance. And we were right; PMJ and the musicians of the California Symphony rocked it. A question we’re often asked is how the musicians felt about it. The answer is good, and almost all their comments were in fact very similar to what we heard from patrons: “What a fun show that was! That was so awesome to see so many new people! Everyone was really into it!”

Performance with Postmodern Jukebox, their first orchestra collaboration.

Didn’t call it a gala. Never once did we call this event a gala — not internally or externally. We gave it a name, Speakeasy Symphony, and we developed a new vocabulary for how we talk about our events. Instead of saying “gala,” we use words like “fun” and “entertaining.” We know, this is [not] deep. But before you think George Merriam and Noah Webster are rolling in their graves, consider the business we’re in, the entertainment business, and at the end of the day, we are vying for people’s entertainment dollars. In other words, we now don’t ask, “What can we do for our next gala for it to really be a great fundraiser?” Instead we ask, “How can we create a program or event that is interesting and entertaining and FUN?” We have proven that if we can do that, people come and then the money follows.

What do you do after an event like that? How do you follow it? Two main tracks emerged for us in our event follow-up:

1. Use the data to see what worked.

2. Plan next year’s event to be just as good, but different.

We have said again and again on this blog that new audiences are NOT the Holy Grail. New audiences matter, and yes, as a field, we must be cultivating new audiences; however, getting someone to attend for the first time is not the end goal. Most orchestras are very successful at getting people to come once; it’s getting those people to come back a second time and ultimately cultivate a longer-term relationship where most of us actually need to focus.

So we did that. We invited those newcomers to return again and again, and it played out like this: now, two years, later, 11% of those first time attendees have returned. In the first year after the event, only 5% had returned, which on the surface, to us sounded really horrible at first. We dug deeper and learned that for those who did return, the average revenue per patron over the following year was $438 in ticket sales and donations. As we said at the top of this post, that’s $438 in new revenue per person in just one year that the California Symphony had not previously seen, and it’s a lot higher than the one-time ticket price that patron paid originally (remember, most of those new people originally came in at the $125 cocktail price….one year later they are spending $438 a year on average, which is nearly two and a half times what they originally spent — THAT’S not too shabby we decided.).

As we set out to plan the following year’s special event fundraiser, we loved the idea of using a non-traditional venue and knew we wanted to keep that element. We also knew we wanted to strike a better balance between new attendees and our core audience. Side note: perhaps this is a consideration more relevant to small and mid-size budget organizations because when you only have 6–7 concert sets a year, it’s really difficult to argue that any of those shouldn’t serve your core audience well.

A new event, called Cirque du Symphonie (think Cirque du Soleil with live orchestra), was the answer to that, and we did land a healthier mix of new attendees versus core audience:

More of our core patrons wanted to come. Closer to a 60/40 (returning/new) split instead of over half being new like it was for Speakeasy Symphony.
New attendees = 37% (again, reflecting a better balance of new and returning patrons)
New donors realized through the event = 30%
New patrons who have since returned (at the time of this writing, we are nine months after the event) = 6%, which is on par with, albeit slightly ahead of, the trend we saw after Speakeasy Symphony (which was 5% first timer return in 12 months following the event).

This season, we are coming up on our third year of this revamped special event series as we celebrate the orchestra’s 30th anniversary. The theme is “Symphony Surround,” and the orchestra will literally surround guests at dinner tables as they perform. Lined up is superstar violinist Anne Akiko Meyers who had a connection to our orchestra when she first performed here at the young age of 24; she returns now in gratitude for the California Symphony’s role in launching her career. Plus, it’s at another rad venue: the Blackhawk Automotive Museum full of one-of-kind classic cars (even the non-gear heads will enjoy the vintage bling on these cars).

Symphony Surround is the third iteration in the California Symphony’s newly designed special event model.

In summary, special events — like almost everything else we do as arts organizations — are hard and getting harder. Board consultant Chuck Loring said it best at a recent board development seminar produced by the League of American Orchestras, “We have to ask ourselves how special events fit in with our overall stewardship plan. We have to make sure we are creating repeat donors. Before you ever plan another event, you should first decide what the second date is AFTER this event before deciding to do the event in the first place.” Here, we are constantly asking ourselves if the juice is worth the squeeze, and at one point nearly four years ago, the board decided the answer was no, it wasn’t worth it, at least in its then format. We took a risk (which in hindsight wasn’t really much of a risk since something needed to change) to hit the reset button and completely re-imagine the way we thought about fundraising events for our organization. And we’ll never look back and say the word “gala” again.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on April 12, 2017.

Arts Advocacy Day Tool Kit

If you follow this blog, you are probably culturally aware enough to know that included in the White House budget proposal released on March 16 was the elimination — not cut, but complete elimination — of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In total, these three agencies’ budgets represent only .02% of the national budget, less than a quarter of one percent. These agencies serve not just all 50 states in the nation, but every congressional district, and produce a return of $9 in economic impact for every $1 spent. In other words, arts and culture in the United States is a $22.3 billion industry (repeat: that’s billion with a “B.”), revenues that are all counted in our nation’s GDP. And then there’s the principle on which these agencies were founded: that art is a part of any advanced civilization.

The Arts Endowment’s mission was clear: to spread this artistic prosperity throughout the land, from the dense neighborhoods of our largest cities to the vast rural spaces, so that every citizen might enjoy America’s great cultural legacy. This mission has lived in service for up to 75 million people annually (source: NEA, 2012) for the last 50+ years.

The California Symphony is raising our voice as part of National Arts Advocacy Day on March 21, 2017. We’ve developed this tool kit to help anyone and everyone be a part of the national conversation. Each tool is outlined below, and everything here is completely free for you to use, download, share, copy, and distribute. Whether you are reading this as a leader of another organization, or as an individual who values the arts, we hope this is helpful to you and encourages you to make your voice heard, too.

You can do this in about 2–5 minutes right now. To begin, click here and enter your zip code, and then your specific elected officials will appear. Check the boxes for whichever of your officials you want to contact. At minimum, we encourage you to select your congressional representative, as Congress ultimately sets the national budget.

Next, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can add your personal message. Here is sample text you can use; copy and paste, and then add 1–2 sentences (or more if you’d like) to make it your own:

SUBJECT: Support Funding for the NEA in FY17 and FY18!

BODY: I am writing to urge you to support FY17 and FY18 funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The NEA is a critical component in the network of public, private, corporate, and philanthropic support. Total direct grants by the agency are anticipated to reach more than 33 million people attending live arts events through NEA-supported programs. Grants to orchestras build innovative and civically vibrant communities such as ours by supporting arts education for children and adults, providing citizen access to performances, preserving great classical works, and nurturing the creative endeavors of contemporary classical musicians, composers, and conductors.

[Add in a few sentences here — or anywhere — to make this personal. Talk about how you’ve been to a California Symphony concert (or any arts performance anywhere!), or have been a beneficiary of an educational or community program. Maybe you know (or are) a musician, amateur or professional, and the arts literally are your life. Whatever your connection to the arts, work it in somehow. Personalization is what makes a difference.]

An NEA grant helps leverage additional forms of support — a dollar invested by the NEA is matched by more than $9 from other state, local, and private sources, magnifying the impact of the federal investment. As your constituent, I urge you to support funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Investments in the arts strengthen our local economy and improve the quality of life in our community. Thank you for your support!

SIGNATURE: At the end, you have the option to sign your name.

Click here to find your representative(s) and customize your own letter. Thanks to the League of American Orchestras for this very handy set up! P.S. It’s mobile-friendly, too!

Read it. Share it. If this inspires you in your own personalized outreach from Tool #1 above, even better.

Save and use any of the graphics we made just for this occasion, or scroll down for the quick share options to post directly to your own social media account(s).

California Symphony owns this image and grants permission to anyone who wants to use it. Save and download, and share as you’d like.

California Symphony owns this image and grants permission to anyone who wants to use it. Save and download, and share as you’d like. Or copy the Giphy URL to paste into social media platforms directly: https://media.giphy.com/media/zWdGcEh6NX5Kg/giphy.gif

QUICK SHARE #1: Share the California Symphony’s Facebook post below. Click, click, and you’re done.

QUICK SHARE #2: Share the California Symphony’s Twitter post below. Click to retweet, and you’re done.

QUICK SHARE #3: Share the California Symphony’s Instagram post below. This works best on your phone and requires a reposting app.

Research shows that when a group of constituents weigh in at the same time on a particular topic, the elected official takes notice. In conclusion, we hope this post gives you tons of ideas of how to join in this day of National Arts Advocacy, particularly at a time when our collective advocacy for the arts matters most.

A graduate of Rice University with degrees in Music Performance and Business, for the last 15 years Bergauer has used music to make the world around her better, through programs that champion social justice and equality, through ground-breaking marketing and audience development tactics on the forefront of technology, and through taking strategically calculated risks in a risk-adverse field. If ideas are a dime a dozen, what separates Bergauer is her experience and record of impact and execution at institutions of all sizes. Praised for her leadership which “points the way to a new style of audience outreach,” (Wall Street Journal) and which drove the California Symphony to become “the most forward-looking music organization around.” (Mercury News) Bergauer’s ability to strategically and holistically examine and advance every facet of the organization’s mission and vision is creating a transformational change in the office, on the stage, in the audience, in the community, and going well beyond the industry of classical music.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on March 20, 2017.

Patron Courtship: Just In Time for Valentine’s Day

Over the last three seasons, the California Symphony has nearly quadrupled its number of donor households, increased the total dollars raised from individuals by 51%, increased subscriber households by 21%, and increased single ticket buyers by 33%. This love affair isn’t a one-night stand.

We love our patrons. Seriously. Patrons are the lifeblood of any arts organization. Without them, our art has no audience, and yet so often arts organizations don’t keep the patron at the center. Or we focus on always getting new patrons at the expense of developing deep, meaningful, long-lasting relationships with the ones we have. And that might be because relationships are a lot of work. That’s true in romance, and it’s true for orchestras. We already wrote a post about why chasing new audiences is not the right answer where we shared why we don’t focus on new patrons despite that being the war cry of virtually all arts organizations, and there we shared why and how we focus on wooing first time attendees to come back again and again. On the audience development spectrum, that post covered first-time buyers, multi-buyers (i.e. repeat attendees over the course of a year), and getting those repeat buyers to become season subscribers — and how we’ve made thousands of dollars of incremental revenue through a very targeted retention plan. Now, in time for the month of love, the patron courtship continues here, where we share our approach to loving forever and ever our first time subscribers, renewing subscribers, and first time donors.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: no matter who you are, from a first timer just checking us out, to a season ticket holder, to a long time donor, the California Symphony has a thoughtful and strategic plan for you. In an industry that often compares patron cultivation with romance/dating/courtship, some of these tactics are things other orchestras are doing. Some are not, and even at the nation’s largest performing arts institutions, rarely are the marketing and development departments working together and taking all of these steps.

Definition: People who bought season tickets for the first time, no matter what size package.

Some research shows that new subscribers make the decision on whether or not to renew next season within something like the first 30 minutes of their time with you. This means they’ve been fighting traffic to get to the venue, searching for parking, trying to find their seat, and maybe waiting in line at the bar — all before a single note is ever played. We try to mitigate these factors that we have very little control over by greeting our new subscribers with a welcome gift: in our case a CD recording of the orchestra that’s not commercially available. It’s an exclusive gift only available to donors at a certain level and these brand new season ticket holders. “I want to thank you,” wrote one new subscriber this year, “for an enriching concert and for the CD you prepared which I was not expecting and was thoroughly pleased by your gracious gift.” Another said, “OH! By the way, I was SO SURPRISED by the CD that was on my seat at my first concert — that was my first real orchestra concert ever!”

Welcome gift for first-time subscribers one their seats at the first concert in their package. First year renewal rates jumped by 10% last year.

Next year, we’re going to take this one step further and also include an insert of all the subscriber benefits (such as free ticket exchanges, discounts off extra tickets, first right of refusal to keep their seat next year for full season subscribers, etc.). In theory, these patrons have seen all those benefits before and hopefully they were part of the reason they chose to subscribe in the first place, but it’s an opportunity for us to remind that subscribing is awesome, and that we try very hard to make it worth their while. Also, it’s worth mentioning that we’re lucky that a CD format is still preferred by most of our subscribers in a world that’s increasingly moving to digital downloads and streaming, but that’s not going to last much longer, so we are also looking into ways we can include a note with instructions to “Download or stream this recording at…” There are certain orchestra union rules around this, so we have a few things to work out here.

Lastly, just as important as what we do for new season ticket holders is what we don’t do. Arts administrators, get ready for this: we do not solicit first year subscribers for a donation. Ever. The only next step we want this group to take is to renew their subscription as that is so critical to the lifetime value of those patrons, and data upon data shows that this group is the most difficult to renew. So why muddy the waters? Why try to move too fast? Well, the reason for most of us is that we’re desperate suitors — we all have big fundraising goals that only get bigger every year — so we ask what seems like a great prospect, a subscriber. And then it works, kind of, because some first year subscribers do donate in response to those solicitations, but we’ve gained that short-term revenue at the cost of the long-term game. It doesn’t help the subscription renewal rates for this very important segment, so stop doing it. We will agree that the first time you pull a mailing list and specifically suppress/exclude this group, it feels unintuitive, wrong even, because we’d done it the other way for so long, but it worked, and our first year renewal rates skyrocketed because of it.

The final thing we don’t do for our first year season ticket holders is try to renew them info a full season package, even if they came in as a full season package. We definitely offer plenty of incentives to renew into the larger package, but we don’t make it the only option. Renewing into any number of concerts > not renewing at all.

Definition: People who have subscribed for two consecutive years or more.

Once our dearly beloveds are a renewing season ticket holder, the romance is heating up, and it’s time for a DTR. This group has a lot of sub-segments: full season subscribers, small package subscribers, subscribers who also donate, and subscribers who have not yet donated. Everything we do with this group is targeted to each of those sub-segments just described, with the one exception being Subscriber Appreciation Day mid-season, which is for all season ticket holders. On that concert series, every subscriber (including the first years) gets a thank you love note signed by members of the orchestra on their seat waiting for them when they arrive. We make a big deal of Subscriber Appreciation on stage in our pre-concert curtain remarks, there’s a full page dedicated to it in the program book, and patrons love it. This definitely falls into the category of “a lot of orchestras already do this,” but here’s a fun tip if you are not already doing this: make sure you have the musicians sign their name AND instrument on the cards; we had so many super zealous subscribers approaching staff the first year we tried this, excitedly proclaiming, “WHO IS ALAN?!” among other musician names, “I LOVE ALAN BECAUSE HE SIGNED MY CARD, AND I NEED TO KNOW WHERE TO LOOK FOR HIM IN THE ORCHESTRA!!” We had to tell a lot of people that first time that Alan plays timpani. We love that patrons cared about these notes and the players that signed them that much; we’d say that’s the home run equivalent of a dozen roses from tú amor on Valentine’s Day. Finally, it is no coincidence that Subscriber Appreciation Day takes place right before we announce next season and start the renewal campaign. Also not a coincidence that we program that concert to be a blockbuster.

Example of subscriber appreciation cards, signed by members of the orchestra and placed on every season ticket holder’s seat. The message is always, “You are our favorite. You get special treatment, the best seats, the best price, the whole enchilada because you are our bread and butter.”

Back to the DTR. This renewing subscriber group is now in various fundraising appeals throughout the year with tailored asks based on their individual donor history, and their subscription renewal forms are just as customized. At this point in the relationship, we want to tell this group that we know them; we’ve been taking the time and care to know what to offer them. No one-size-fits-all promise ring here (and yes, that’s definitely where we want the relationship to be headed). In every case, we want to renew the subscription with an upgrade offer, whether that’s upgrading to a larger package or upgrading their donation. Here’s a little chart we follow for who gets what offer:

Yes, this is a lot of work. Yes, this means marketing and development staff spend a lot of time together to make every patron’s renewal form specifically customized to them. Yes, it’s working. Last year our subscription renewal rate was 80%, and we increased our subscription donation campaign revenue by an outstanding 50% over the year prior.

Definition: People who are brand new donors.

Once a week, we prepare gift acknowledgements, the thank you letter and tax receipt each donor receives for making a contribution, for all donations received during the last seven days. Simultaneously, we run a report for who in this group of donors is a first-time donor, and we specifically call this out in their acknowledgement, saying how we noticed they are new to the family and we are so happy to welcome them.

Example of new donor thank you letter, sent along with a new donor welcome brochure detailing all the ways in which their gift supports the Symphony. The message is that we noticed they are new, are incredibly grateful, and that we’ve wasted no time putting their gift to work.

Then, a musician in the orchestra writes a personal thank you note to the new donor (we also do this for renewing donors at a certain level, and we decided it was worth including the new donor love birds in with this benefit/stewardship activity). As an aside on how this musician note process works, at the beginning of each season we put the call out to musicians who would be willing to help us with this task throughout the year. We tell them up front we’d love their help thanking donors and that we’ll provide everything they need: California Symphony stationery, a few donor names and addresses, talking points and examples of what they can say, and stamps. We try to make this as easy as possible for the musicians to help with this activity, and they are incredible — each year we have several players offering to help out, and they are generally more than happy to do so because they know much of those donations are going to support the work they’re doing. Before each concert set, we give the orchestra members who have volunteered to help with the thank you love notes a packet of all the materials and names and addresses assigned to them. It usually amounts to about 3–4 notes per musician. On the receiving end, donors go crazy for this. Almost every time a round of notes gets mailed, we get calls a few days later from donors thanking us for the wonderful notes they received from the musicians. Donors calling to thank us for thanking them…what a big love fest we’ve developed, or should we say, requited love!

First time donors also receive a New Donor Welcome Brochure that contains information about the organization, our programs, maestro, and upcoming events. We explicitly say we want them to know what their gift is supporting. This group also gets invited to donor events throughout the year according to their giving level. If they’ve given $1,000 or more, they also get a thank you call from a board member (all donors who give this amount or more receive the call, regardless of if they are new or not), because a study showed that a board member thank you call to a donor within 24 hours of making the gift resulted in a 39% increase in giving the next time they were solicited compared to a control group that did not receive a call, and another study showed that a thank you call from a board member led to 25% increase in donor retention versus 10% when the call came from a staff person (Source: Penelope Burk, Cygnus Applied Research). If any board members at any arts organizations are reading this, please make those thank you calls!

If you’re thinking all of this is a lot of work, it is. Few organizations coordinate marketing and development efforts in this way, and we get why. There are easier, less thorough/customized/high-touch ways to manage our subscribers and donors. For almost all of us, we take the easier routes not because we don’t care, but because we are overworked and underpaid and have a million other things to do, AND because it used to work to a certain degree. That is, when every subscriber gets a generic renewal invoice, or every direct mail appeal looks the same for each patron, or there’s no welcome gift or appreciation days or love notes or phone calls, we still make money. But the days of low hanging fruit, or loyal subscribers and donors who care about the arts because its intrinsic value, or people who renew and give and increase those gifts every year because of a sense of civic duty are over. We know all this as administrators, and if we want to be good at our jobs, we need to accept that the work is harder than ever. Just like every successful relationship, right? And like those successful relationships, so worth it:

In the last 18 months, the California Symphony grew active accounts (i.e. accounts with any ticket purchase or donation activity) by 35%.
Over the last year alone, we increased new subscriber households by 29% and increased first year renewal rates by 10%, all in addition to an overall renewal rate of 80%.
Our number of donor households has nearly quadrupled in the last two seasons; individual giving revenue has increased by 51%.
Concert hall paid capacity now averages 90% this season, up from 78% three seasons ago. Plus, this increase is while adding more concerts (i.e. more sales inventory).
In the first year of implementing these patron loyalty steps, we have increased first time attendee retention to 22%, meaning that 22% of new attendees who came in the 2014–15 season returned within 12 months of their first purchase. More on this here.
The subscription donation campaign (i.e. for all those segments that do receive a donation ask during the season ticket renewal period) resulted in a 50% increase in total money raised this season over last season.

We repeat: the work is worth it. So use this Valentine’s Day month to start thinking about the ways you can love, court, woo, and wow your patrons. We hope this post helps you do just that.

Later this year we’ll conclude our audience development series with a post on the less fun segments of lapsed donors, unrenewed subscribers, and lapsed ticket buyers. In other words, what’s plan B when plan A doesn’t work.

A graduate of Rice University with degrees in Music Performance and Business, for the last 15 years Bergauer has used music to make the world around her better, through programs that champion social justice and equality, through ground-breaking marketing and audience development tactics on the forefront of technology, and through taking strategically calculated risks in a risk-adverse field. If ideas are a dime a dozen, what separates Bergauer is her experience and record of impact and execution at institutions of all sizes. Praised for her leadership which “points the way to a new style of audience outreach,” (Wall Street Journal) and which drove the California Symphony to become “the most forward-looking music organization around.” (Mercury News) Bergauer’s ability to strategically and holistically examine and advance every facet of the organization’s mission and vision is creating a transformational change in the office, on the stage, in the audience, in the community, and going well beyond the industry of classical music.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on January 31, 2017.

All She Wrote

“It’s not easy,” wrote The New York Times recently about women who compose classical music (in this case, opera) for a living. And they were right. For the first time since 1903, the Metropolitan Opera, the United States’ and arguably the world’s greatest opera company, is performing an opera composed by a woman. Yet the Met’s choice to program a work written by a woman for the first time in more than 100 years is only one example of the glaring gender gap in this art form. Another example comes from the personal story of female composer Lauren Redhead, who writes about a music composition competition where very few women would even meet the eligibility criteria, let alone apply. And then there’s our own story. Yes, the California Symphony may be guilty as charged, albeit unintentionally (as most gender bias is), as in our composer-in-residence program history — a nationally recognized and praised program celebrating its 25th year — we have never selected a female composer.

We decided to face the music (pun very much intended) and address this issue head-on in our selection process this year. The good news is that classical music has found a very effective solution for an equitable selection process elsewhere that we could look to for inspiration: orchestra auditions. In 1952 the Boston Symphony first experimented with blind auditions, where candidates would perform for the audition panel behind a screen that masked their identity, which would allow for the panel to judge the musicians solely on what they heard, i.e. the merits of their playing. The trouble was that their initial audition results still skewed male. Then they asked candidates to remove their shoes, and that made all the difference. Why? Because the sound of the women’s heeled shoes as they walked on stage unknowingly influenced the panelists. This theory of unintentional gender bias affecting audition results was scientifically tested and famously published in a 2000 study of leading symphony orchestras (Goldin & Rouse, American Economic Review). In fact, having candidates audition behind a screen increased — by 50 percent — the probability that a woman would be advanced through certain preliminary audition rounds, and increased by several-fold the likelihood that a woman would be selected for the final audition round. The blind audition process is now not only standard practice among professional orchestras, but also praised among organizational and social psychologists across all industries (nonprofit and for profit) for being one the most equitable hiring practices in this country in terms of its effects on promoting gender equality. Before blind auditions were introduced, male orchestra members outnumbered female musicians almost 2-to-1. Today, as of 2013, the breakdown of male to female orchestra musicians in professional orchestras is 54% to 46%, almost reaching parity (source: League of American Orchestras). Emulating this model for our composer-in-residence selection process seemed like an obvious and necessary choice.

We decided to revise our composer-in-residence application, directing candidates to submit all their application materials with any and all identifying information redacted. Résumés, musical scores, and recordings were submitted completely stripped of names, and because the application was completely electronic, all open-ended responses were typed, eliminating any gender-suggesting handwriting. Only the staff member administering the application process has access to the candidate names in connection to their application materials.

Lastly, in addition to creating a more equitable process, we also wanted to increase the number of female applicants in the total candidate pool. We chose to invest some of our program advertising budget into a specific recruitment campaign targeting female composers in additional to our regular marketing/recruitment efforts for this program.

Two Facebook ads ran promoting the application period for California Symphony’s Composer-in-Residence Program. On the left, specifically targeting female composers; on the right, targeting all composers.

These efforts resulted in quadrupling the number of female applicants, and nearly 20% of the total applicant pool were women compared to less than 10% two selection periods ago. Our review process is currently underway, and once completed, we will take a closer look at percentages of women who advanced to each round. While we know this process certainly doesn’t guarantee that a female will be selected — that would be the wrong outcome — we do believe we have taken steps to ensure a fair and equitable selection procedure, and we know the final composer will be chosen by the review panel based on the qualities of their work alone. This is a huge improvement in a field very heavily dominated by men, and we haven’t heard of any other orchestra selecting a composer to work with in this way. That’s all she wrote…at least for now.

A graduate of Rice University with degrees in Music Performance and Business, for the last 15 years Bergauer has used music to make the world around her better, through programs that champion social justice and equality, through ground-breaking marketing and audience development tactics on the forefront of technology, and through taking strategically calculated risks in a risk-adverse field. If ideas are a dime a dozen, what separates Bergauer is her experience and record of impact and execution at institutions of all sizes. Praised for her leadership which “points the way to a new style of audience outreach,” (Wall Street Journal) and which drove the California Symphony to become “the most forward-looking music organization around.” (Mercury News) Bergauer’s ability to strategically and holistically examine and advance every facet of the organization’s mission and vision is creating a transformational change in the office, on the stage, in the audience, in the community, and going well beyond the industry of classical music.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on December 20, 2016.

Orchestra X: The Results

The Orchestra X discussion about newcomers’ experiences at the California Symphony lasted 1 hour 20 minutes. They had a lot to say.

Back in August, we rolled out a new program called Orchestra X with the idea that arts organizations must change the way we think about new audiences, and specifically, must change our willingness to have hard conversations about the things newcomers hate, are turned off by, or are just uninformed about. We decided if we at the California Symphony are serious about cultivating new audiences, we better stop talking about how much we care about this elusive group like so many organizations do and actually take an interest in what this group has to say. So we put out the call for people who should go to orchestra concerts — millennials and gen-xers that are smart, have expendable income for entertainment options, and are generally culturally aware — but for whatever reason don’t attend. The set up was simple: come to a few California Symphony concerts and then tell us about it, and we promise to 1) listen only and not jump to defense (an exercise that proved tremendously difficult), and 2) share our findings with the rest of the world. This is that post about sharing our findings with the rest of the world. Get ready, arts administrators.

First, it’s worth pointing out that we held the discussion group at a local craft brewery and served pizza and beer. No wine. No hors d’oeuvres. No pretense. After dinner, we jumped into a facilitated discussion. Some of what we heard was expected and some was not. Sometimes the group agreed on certain elements of the experience, and sometimes they did not — proof that all millennials are not alike, and we should stop lumping them all together every time we talk about them. That’s lesson number one, and below is rest of the feedback we heard, organized by general topic.

“It seemed a little like ‘inside baseball;’ insiders would know these things, but seems like you might be able to engage people with more layman terms.”

“Every time you [change domains, as when buying a ticket], it makes the overall event seem like less of a professional operation if it’s not as seamless.”

“Is this piece going to be more fast paced? Is this one going to be more romantic?” “We can’t tell from the composer…It’s almost like ‘is this a romantic comedy or is it a tragedy?’”

Smart people want information. Some smart people are willing to take extra steps to find it, such as in the case of one Orchestra X participant who manually looked up every piece on the program on Wikipedia before selecting the concert he wanted to attend, but most people aren’t willing to make the extra effort all on their own. This is not lazy when you consider that they’ve already taken the steps to 1) decide that coming to hear an orchestra is something they might enjoy versus other entertainment options (a huge marketing victory — yay brand awareness!) 2) come to our website (a huge marketing victory — go-go gadget remarketing campaigns!), and 3) browse around to find the concert(s) they are moderately interested in attending (a huge marketing victory — a navigable website!). Then, they get to step 4): make a decision on why they want to attend a specific concert, and our response is essentially “WHY CAN’T YOU FIGURE OUT WHY RACHMANINOFF’S SECOND SYMPHONY IS A BIG DEAL? LOOK IT UP IF YOU WANT TO KNOW!” (marketing failboat — why do we set up our sites this way, and then wonder why the sales funnel is getting choked up at the add-to-cart step?).

Through the discussion, it became clear to us that we buried way too much information in paragraph or sentence form. “Some information was in the paragraph language,” said a participant, “but when you don’t go to these things regularly, that made it harder to know what makes going to this concert special.” We’ve since updated all our concert landing pages (examples here and here) to have bullet point content, use less technical language or jargon (or explain those terms when we do use them), and in a time where, as one participant put it, “You’re competing with 140 characters on Twitter about Trump and Hillary,” we made these bullet points much more casual. For the arts administrators reading this thinking that swinging the copywriting pendulum too far could alienate your core concertgoers, consider that your most traditional attendees — your subscribers — aren’t the ones looking at single ticket pages. These pages are (or at least should be) specifically designed for single ticket buyers, who generally know less about the art form, hence why they’re less connected to the organization in the first place. Plus, we can be informative to smart, curious people who want to learn and want to know very much why each concert is special without dumbing it down. Casual and approachable does not equal dumb.

We also decided to link every piece to its Wikipedia article (opening in a new window so people aren’t navigated away from our site). There are several more ideas that emerged that we’d still like to implement, and we’ve included the full list at the end of this post.

“It’s really hard to find a seat next to a friend that’s already bought their ticket. And it’s hard to figure out what is a ‘good’ seat.”

“It wasn’t clear where the stage was until you looked a little closer. Had to assume that ‘A’ was the first row, but it never actually says…”

In general, this group is doing is what every ticket buyer always does: trying to weigh how much they want to spend versus how much value they receive in return. They were incredibly thoughtful about where was the right place to sit, and they admitted to what they called “being spoiled because of the seating apps for sports and concerts” that let you see where your friends are sitting and the view from every seat. Some arts organizations have fairly robust select-a-seat features, but for us, this was one of those areas where we had to just listen instead of jump in with the limitations of our venue managing this part of the sales path. Nonetheless, when LiveNation is the competitor for a lot of high-end events where the ticket prices are on par with ours, the standard is an easy login-with-Facebook feature where you can see which of your friends have already purchased and where they’re sitting, easy see-the-view from any seat in the venue, and easy checkout process that’s finished in 30 seconds. Oh, and then an easy email confirmation that adds the event to your calendar on desktop, phone, iCal, Outlook, or Gmail. Be honest: arts organizations of all sizes generally make it a lot more difficult than that to purchase a ticket.

This is a tough one for us. We have tried working with our venue to move ticketing in-house so we can fully control the purchase path, and we have come to a compromise that we fully manage the process for season subscribers during the renewal period. While this is a big step critical to serving our most loyal patrons, it’s not serving single ticket buyers — which now amount to more ticket revenue per year than subscribers in the latest nationwide data — so we have some work to do. Our venue’s website does have views from the various seating sections, albeit apparently not obvious at all as not one person in the discussion group realized this feature did exist, so we’ve identified this as a feature we can better promote. Additionally, we have made our website match the sales domain as much as possible, and we’ve sent the venue images to use in the sales path that match the style guide of the rest of the images on our own site. We have also added basic pricing info (a comment that came up multiple times: they had to get pretty deep in the purchase path before really knowing what a seat cost), and we took that as an opportunity to talk about dynamic pricing and why you can get a better deal when you don’t wait until the last minute to buy. Again, more ideas on what we’d like to do are at the end of the post.

“I wore my ‘Mr. Rogers’ sweater.”

“You hear ‘symphony’ and you think ‘oh my god that’s so expensive.’ Just the word ‘symphony’…knowing the pricing options that are available would probably aid or dismay my willingness to go.”

“I wanna pluck an oboe…do you pluck an oboe?”

The conundrum of what to wear brought about more drama and stress than we ever imagined. We never knew that attendees were that worried about how to dress for the symphony, especially in cool and casual California. And while we could laugh it off, we shouldn’t, because for multiple people, this really was an issue causing stress and concern, two negative emotions related to the experience we’re trying sell before the experience ever began. Additionally, we wrongly expected people to have a basic understanding of all the instruments in the orchestra, or at least what they’re named. Why, we realized, as arts administrators, do we preach that the decline in music education in this country over the last several decades is one cause of the decline in attendance, and at the same time, do nothing to help grown adults — the products of this lack of education — know “basic” information such as the names of the instruments. It’s not basic if it wasn’t ever taught in the first place.

One participant asked if there is “a separate webpage for younger people we could make?” What was so interesting about that comment is that this person assumed that they were in the minority as far as understanding answers to these types of questions. The assumption was that other, older people are much more familiar with the symphony when in reality, there is no magical age at which one suddenly becomes an aficionado. Yes, there are people who know a lot about the symphony, and many of that kind of person are already subscribers, so when we’re thinking about our single ticket sales (this conversation, this type of page on the website), maybe nobody (or very few) really have any sort of foundational understanding of the symphony concert experience? It’s our job to fix that.

We made a Newcomer’s Guide on our website. Plenty of other arts organizations have first timer pages, so there’s nothing revolutionary here, except that every question on it came from this group. That helped us write answers that are less stale and more honest; we felt like we were talking to a real person on the other end, and we were. We also reexamined our pre-concert emails (i.e. Your Upcoming Concert This Weekend). This is another area of working in partnership with our venue that needs more attention on our part. Currently, our venue sends final courtesy reminders to ticket buyers, but those reminders, we learned, don’t even include the California Symphony by name (!!!), or include other FAQs such as how to pre-order drinks or how you can listen to the music in advance on Spotify. Funny enough, we used to send our own in-house version of the performance reminder email but then stopped last season thinking it wasn’t a helpful service to attendees. We learned that couldn’t be farther from the truth when all these questions came up in the group discussion. Needless to say, our in-house performance reminder customer service emails are back in play now.

“It [program notes] sounds like a wine description.”

“It was so impressive — I didn’t expect it to feel THAT different than Spotify.”

“You go to a place to experience culture, but the lack of diversity made it feel un-cultured.”

“I was in awe. I felt awe.”

In an era where symphony orchestras keep trying to think about how to improve the concert experience (shorter programs! new formats! non-traditional programming!), we were blown away that this — the musical presentation — might be the last “problem” we as arts administrators need to be spending our limited time on solving. Almost every single comment about the performance itself was very positive:

“The music was GREAT.”

“It was so impressive to see it in person. The musicians are so good.”

“I liked the splendor of how it all comes together to make music.”

“I liked the slow build to the full orchestra playing. That was a nice ‘wow’ moment.”

“Live music — it was so good to see it.”

“Seeing it live was so different.”

“I enjoyed the performers performing and the complexity and passion about what they are doing.”

“It was nice to see the passion of the musicians and how much they were into what they were doing.”

“It was weirdly cool to not have to focus on other things.”

“[The composer] thought of all of this in his head so many years ago…that’s amazing that we are hearing this now, today.”

“Complete awe.”

The sentiment of complete awe was echoed by almost every person at the table. We were reminded that symphony orchestras do something that almost no other entertainment option can hold a candle to: be an immersive engine, this incredibly passionate (to use their word) force of sound and emotion, and this music — whether written hundreds of years ago or newly written — is hypnotic yet energizing, and untouchably beautiful when performed at the highest levels as our musicians so often deliver. The programming itself is not the problem.

Diversity is a problem though. So much so that it was the topic at last summer’s League of American Orchestras annual conference. It’s a problem in our audiences and on stage. The comments on this for us were validation. Not that we really needed it, but it hit home that all of us in this industry talk about how white we are, and yes, a first time attendee at our orchestra picked up on that right away, and yes, it did impact that person’s experience.

Other elements of the concert were a mixed bag. Program notes in particular had varying opinions (and a lot of discussion) from this group. While they all wanted more information in advance, some did not want to read the program book to find information once they were there, preferring to simply enjoy the experience and “take it all in.” Others did want to voraciously consume the information in the program book, but were universally quick to tell us how dry it can be. One program book success, we learned, was in storytelling. Almost everyone in the room remembered that Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony “should have never happened,” as one person said, “…it took a lot of gumption to write it.” We recognized the notes for that particular piece were largely focused on the narrative of Rachmaninoff’s life and that his first symphony was a disaster. One participant even said, “Whoever wrote that page should write them all!” To which we replied, “He did.” The fact was that the same person wrote all the program notes for every piece on the concert, and as the conversation unfolded, we realized they want to hear the story behind each piece, NOT the music theory behind it.

We’ve stopped stressing over the concert programming. We don’t have to do a movie concert, or ask if we need to do more pops, or wonder if we can get away with programming a lesser-known composer instead of Beethoven on every other concert. Not one person said, “I need a shorter concert.” Or “I don’t want to hear [insert any classical composer name here].” They do want to learn about all that though, and we as an industry don’t cater to that very well. As such, we have doubled down on our program book. We have already been in a transition over the last year and a half to make our book and the notes in it more accessible, and we have one of the greatest musical scholars who writes those notes; we’re now going to focus that writing on the juiciest parts of the stories behind the music (of which there are plenty of behind-the-scenes and salacious stories to tell in classical music!).

Lastly, we just completed a big push for diversity in the application pool for our composer-in-residence program, which will be its own topic in another blog post, and ideas for diversifying the audience through our marketing plans are in the still-want-to-do list at the end.

If you’re like us and totally geeking out over all the ways we can honestly listen to and act on the ideas from this audience segment we must grow, here’s the remainder of our to-do list.

Include pricing info on acquisition campaigns. We have gone back and forth internally on the right way to talk about price. On one hand, what we offer is not a cheap form of entertainment — as any arts administrator knows, ticket sales cover less than half of what it takes to produce a concert. And at the California Symphony we are staunch believers in the idea that people pay for what they value. Even the discussion group brought up (on their own, without any prompting) the idea that they’ll all shell out big bucks for Taylor Swift. So price alone is never an isolated issue; it’s all about the perceived value one is receiving in exchange for that price. What we did find interesting was the comment of, “I’m more likely to go to three $25 performances than I am one $75 or $100 performance.” Many others chimed in with agreement to that statement. So we’re trying to work through listing a starting price of $25 or thereabouts, or better promoting small package deals such as “Buy 3 concerts for $99.” In probing the group for thoughts on listing a price on marketing materials, we learned not to list the starting price if it’s in the $40s — that’s just too high and will not grab their attention, but in fact cause them to mentally move on as something not worth their consideration.
Include the running time on the program page of the program book. Approximate timing of each piece is ok, as is approximate intermission length. While regular symphony goers know that just about every concert is usually a predictable formula of ~10 minute overture, ~25 min concerto, intermission, ~45–60 min symphony, we realized new attendees have no idea. And why should they? In their quest to be informed and educated listeners, we can assist by including this info and helping them set their listening expectations.
For next season (and beyond) — the title of the concert matters; make it catchy and helpful at the same time. This goes back to comments we heard about participants wanting to know what made each concert special. Just calling it “Opening Night” helped nothing, except to further exacerbate the stress about what to wear!
Add something additional to the experience. Participants want a full evening experience and want social interaction. They don’t necessarily want to spend $200 to do that, but they do want to meet other people interested in the same thing. We asked the group if they would be willing to pay for this added experience, and the group said yes, and that it can be simple: “It’s fine to just say ‘We’re having drinks before hand here’ or ‘Afterwards we’re all going here.’” This matches research released about a year ago at the national level from the League of American Orchestras and Oliver Wyman stating that new audiences are indeed craving these types of supplemental activities and are willing to pay for them.
Fix seat selection so it’s easy and awesome. Could we do this like LiveNation where it connects to your Facebook account and you can see if your friends have purchased tickets and where they are sitting? Or you know how on TripAdvisor, it says next to every place or attraction which of your friends had been there? Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could have this on ticket pages before the sales path, so people could see on the homepage, for example, that many of their friends had been to the Symphony before? And then on specific concert listings it would show if any friends were going to that particular event. Seat selection needs to be on par with any major sporting event or high-end entertainment experience; we are charging too much for our tickets to deliver anything less.
Make changing domains seamless. People can tell, period.
Add sound clips on every piece possible. Prospective buyers want it and need it; they simply do not recognize the piece by title or composer alone.
More info on each piece in advance: hover-over pop-ups or any way to deliver this information. What if we could implement a feature where each concert listing had a hover-over pop up of the Wikipedia summary (rather than our quick fix of directing people away from the website) — and call out that it’s Wikipedia too so people feel familiar with the source of the information (in other words, it’s not like program notes, it’s just Wikipedia which people use all the time, so there’s a comfort and trust level).
Event calendar is important — they look for this and want it to be user friendly and obvious.
Concert suggestions — “You might also like” feature.
Targeted marketing to different races. In the same way we target specific messages to acquisition versus repeat buyers versus donors, or target family ads versus the annual gala, we should do the same for different cultures and races if we truly care about attracting diverse audiences. For example, for our upcoming performance with Rita Moreno narrating Peter & the Wolf with the orchestra, we are running ads targeting families (“fun for the whole family; puppet making in the lobby”), targeting new attendees (“it’s the perfect introduction to the symphony because you learn about the different instruments”), and targeting pop culture aficionados (“Rita Moreno is only one of 12 Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony winners”). We could easily run a campaign to Latino audiences, for example, using the same ad as the pop culture group even; it’s just that we’re intentionally showing that message to people who look like her and might be interested in this performance if we spend some of marketing dollars making them aware of it.
Every performance must be great. While we said that the program itself is not really a problem we need to solve, whether a large or small organization, we do need to be cognizant that every performance needs to be good, “epic” even, as one participant articulated. We can never dial it in, as performers or as administrators. New attendees — heck, all attendees we’d venture to say — deeply want a full experience where they learn, feel inspired, and feel un-intimidated about it. As professional, top quality arts organizations, we need to deliver this every time.

So there you have it: an hour and twenty minute discussion which produced for the California Symphony 11 full typed pages of notes, 4 pages of direct action items, and this blog post we’re sharing with the world as promised. Oh, and tens of thousands of dollars saved over hiring a consultancy to tell us all these same things. We hope you enjoyed it, we hope you will share it, and we definitely hope that as a field, we will take more seriously and act on the feedback we’re hearing from the new audiences we so desperately need.

A graduate of Rice University with degrees in Music Performance and Business, for the last 15 years Bergauer has used music to make the world around her better, through programs that champion social justice and equality, through ground-breaking marketing and audience development tactics on the forefront of technology, and through taking strategically calculated risks in a risk-adverse field. If ideas are a dime a dozen, what separates Bergauer is her experience and record of impact and execution at institutions of all sizes. Praised for her leadership which “points the way to a new style of audience outreach,” (Wall Street Journal) and which drove the California Symphony to become “the most forward-looking music organization around.” (Mercury News) Bergauer’s ability to strategically and holistically examine and advance every facet of the organization’s mission and vision is creating a transformational change in the office, on the stage, in the audience, in the community, and going well beyond the industry of classical music.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on November 21, 2016.

You Don’t Have to be the New York Philharmonic to Stream Your Opening Night Concert on Facebook…

California Symphony Operations & Education Director Sunshine Deffner hosts the season opener live stream, a pilot project the organization executed on a shoestring budget.

“We just don’t have the resources,” said pretty much every nonprofit organization ever. Whether you’ve worked at a nonprofit, know someone who’s worked at one, support one, volunteer at one, or are not connected to one at all but are a living, breathing human, you’ve probably heard this at some point. Nonprofits — particularly performing arts organizations — of all sizes say this like it’s our motto sometimes, and while there are some reasons for this (namely that we are often undercapitalized, don’t prioritize or budget for risk-taking with new projects, and are not generally rewarded by our leadership for trying new things if they don’t immediately produce financial returns), this kind of thinking is holding us back. And at times, this kind of thinking is even a defense mechanism when we’re afraid to try to something new, or even just so overworked that adding something new to our plates seems outright daunting. I admit to that. Since joining the California Symphony, I’ve even thought before that I shouldn’t tackle certain projects and instead leave those innovations to “the big guys,” arts organizations that have much larger budgets, because (here it comes) we just don’t have the resources. Then I realized that when I used to work for those really large multi-million dollar arts organizations, we still used the same excuse regardless of how big our budget was, and we passed up working on some interesting ideas because of it.

All of this was epitomized for me this summer when I attended a conference for the Association of California Symphony Orchestras, at a presentation led by Frank Capek on creating next generation customer experiences. Capek, who has worked with clients such as Marriott, L’Oréal, and Merck, said that size and budget are often an issue, but not in the way you think. He proceeded to say that being large and well funded can often be a greater limitation than being small, and that the small and nimble are the ones who often can innovate better. “The future,” he said, “belongs to the nimble.” That day, I decided that the California Symphony’s size is not a limitation, it’s an advantage, and we would move faster than other arts organizations, large and small, because of this mentality. That day I decided that there was no reason we couldn’t be the first small or mid-size budget professional orchestra to stream a concert online.

Facebook Live debuted to select public figures in summer 2015 and rolled out to all pages and individuals as a free platform in April of this year. Later that month, the San Francisco Symphony was the first professional orchestra to utilize Facebook Live to stream part of a full orchestra concert, and while other orchestras had begun to adopt the platform for streaming events, lectures, and smaller ensemble performances, to our knowledge, no other professional orchestra had since used it to broadcast part of a full symphony concert. The California Symphony is located just 20 miles away from San Francisco, based in the suburb of Walnut Creek. The San Francisco Symphony’s budget is approximately $70 million, while ours is $1.5M. We knew that given our location in the tech-centric Bay Area, we needed to do this, and we also knew we knew that we didn’t have a lot of cash to make it happen. Oh, and the decision to stream the season opener was made in early August at the aforementioned conference, and the concert was September 18, giving us just over a month to make it all come together. Small and nimble, right?!

Initial outline for the California Symphony’s streaming pilot project.

We quickly articulated our goals for the broadcast: 1) We wanted to offer more than only music, making sure that anyone watching the stream, no matter their level of experience with or understanding of classical music would learn something about who we are and what we do, and what goes into producing a concert on stage and off. 2) We wanted to take advantage of the Facebook algorithm, which promotes longer live streams in more people’s feeds, meaning the longer the broadcast, the more people would see it. In other words, we had no expectation or desire for people to watch our entire stream — we knew the main attraction was the concert itself — but by utilizing our already-in-place pre-concert talk and adding in some great behind-the-scenes content, by the time the concert began, the stream would be promoted in up to five times the number of viewer newsfeeds than if we had broadcast for a shorter amount of time. 3) We wanted to tie-in the event to our 30th anniversary (a nice coincidence in timing that this aligned with our season opener and also why we chose not to wait to execute the project until a later concert in the season), and 4) We wanted to integrate the broadcast into a larger community engagement activity, making the California Symphony more open to and known by our own community. Our final project brief:

Offer a free Facebook Live video and audio stream to kickoff the California Symphony’s 30th anniversary season. The stream will last approximately 90 minutes including the first 30 minutes of the season opener concert, and will be available for viewing on the Symphony’s Facebook Page as well as projected outdoors on the Lesher Center Promenade. Additional activities for all ages will take place outside the Lesher Center, including:

2:30 — Food trucks, instrument petting zoo, and Pokémon Go stops and lures

3:00 — Stream begins with pre-concert talk by Music Director Donato Cabrera

3:30 — Stream continues with backstage interviews and a behind-the-scenes look at what happens before a concert

4:00 — Stream continues with the first 30 minutes of the concert (approximately), including “Network” by Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts and the first movement of the Mozart Flute Concerto with soloist Annie Wu

4:30 — Stream concludes

Promotional image shared on social media and shared with community organizations for easy, turnkey inclusion as well as consistent branding.

An additional goal was to capture the information of the people who watched the stream for future marketing. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that we care A LOT about patron retention and getting first-time attendees to come back again. For the people watching the stream online, this is easy: Facebook’s advertising tools now allow for you to run ads to people who have watched specific videos on your page. You can even specify in your targeting if you want people who watched at least 25/50/75 percent, etc., or people who watched at least 10 seconds of your video, and on and on. So the people who watched the video stream online (whether live or later) — especially those who watched within a 10–20 mile radius of Walnut Creek — will definitely be seeing ads inviting them to attend our other concerts this season. For the onsite activities, we set up an enter-to-win station where people could join our mailing list in exchange for the chance to win tickets to future concerts and gift certificates to one of the food trucks on site. People could join via an iPad that was connected to our email software so the entry went straight to our mailing list, and we also offered old-fashioned paper and pencil forms for those less comfortable with the technology. We also pre-printed extra first time attendee postcards to hand out to the people watching the broadcast outside, offering them a discount to attend a full concert in the future and join us inside.

Enter-to-win form set up to directly import new patron contact information to our email software. We also ask for full mailing address information to add these new attendees to future marketing mailings.

We said at the top that we executed this project for $2,500. We scrimped and scrapped everywhere we could, and it’s worth mentioning we simultaneously developed a much more substantial budget so we could apply for funding to do this bigger and better in the future. The point is that it is possible for an arts organization of any budget size to execute this type of project, and here’s the breakdown:

$0 = Facebook Live platform to stream
$200 = Videographer. We hired a college student film major: someone knowledgeable about how to frame a shot (particularly important for the backstage interviews), sound quality, and other similar details, and who is also young enough to be completely comfortable with the Facebook Live technology as well as affordable for us.
$0 = Camera. Our videographer brought his own equipment, but ultimately we decided to simply use an iPhone because walking around filming backstage was going to be nearly impossible with a DSLR camera connected to a cable connected to a laptop connected to the internet. Also, because Facebook Live is so new, very few high-end video cameras are compatible with the platform at this time, and Facebook Live was specifically designed for the mobile app, integrating with the camera on your phone rather than the Facebook webpage on your desktop.
$556.31 = Audio/Visual rental. For the outdoor broadcast, we originally had plans for a giant projection on the wall of the building, and all that ended up going into the “bigger and better” budget. Instead we rented a 55″ television and speakers on stands, and that worked just fine for this pilot experiment.
$338.71 = Labor for AV setup/teardown. This included one IATSE (i.e. union) stagehand and one person on staff at the venue where we perform. This amount includes payroll taxes, pension, and workers comp.
$1,218.92 = Orchestra costs. This line gets a little complicated, but the short of it is that the California Symphony is a professional unionized orchestra, and in addition to our local union agreement, we are signatory to a national agreement with the American Federation of Musicians that governs these types of media projects for orchestras of all sizes across the country. While the orchestra costs are the largest portion of expenses for this project, you can deduce that the musicians don’t individually see much extra in their pocket. It has to be said that we absolutely could not have done this project without the agreement and support of our orchestra members. Not only are they some of the finest musicians in the Bay Area, they are some of the finest people, too, and they were so wonderfully encouraging of this experiment, many of them commenting on and liking the stream, and inviting their students, friends, and family to watch. Their support is allowing us to build new audiences that will in turn patronize more concerts if we’re doing our jobs right. Love them.
$201.94 = WiFi Hotspots. We purchased two WiFi hotspots and data — one that traveled with the videographer as he filmed so that we’d always be connected for the stream, and one located outside so that we could project the feed from Facebook to our outdoor audience. We did several tests in advance to make sure the connection to the hotspot worked and that walking around connected worked, and we still hit some hiccups with bad connections backstage. Lessons learned for the future “bigger and better” streaming projects.
$0 = Food trucks. A whole separate post could be written on the mysteries of working with food trucks, permitting with the city, and coordinating with these entrepreneurs that don’t keep normal business hours. Suffice it to say having a venue on private property makes everything easier, and eventually we secured a fantastic partner who served up ice cream cookie sandwiches all afternoon before the concert began (attendees paid for their own food). It was a hit!
$0 = Instrument Petting Zoo. We operate our petting zoo multiple times throughout the year, so setting it up here wouldn’t have been too much of an undertaking, except that every single staff member was tasked with other responsibilities for the Sunday Funday and broadcast activities. We partnered with another local business, Lamorinda Music, who volunteered their time to fully operate the booth, and even brought all kinds of extra instruments for the kids to touch, hold, and play. Also a hit!
$0 = Marketing. What this actually means is $0 in addition to the marketing budget already allocated for this concert. We were very careful not to advertise the free concert stream to our regular attendees so as not to cannibalize ticket sales, but did advertise the free pre-concert outdoor activities to that group. To attract new people to come in person and watch online, we included the information in our press release so it was picked up by local calendar listings and even a few outlets we don’t normally get attention from such as family blogs and community forums. We also worked with the local Chamber of Commerce for additional social media exposure, as well as the City of Walnut Creek and WC Downtown Association. Lastly, we used about $200 of the concert’s digital marketing budget for running very targeted ads on Facebook promoting the Sunday Funday activities and concert stream to families who did not have an interest in classical music (because those who did have an interest in classical music were receiving ticket sales ads) and who lived within 5 miles of Walnut Creek.

The total spent came to $2,515.88, and we reached more than 5,200 people (and still counting), compared to our concert hall, which seats 800 max. That’s almost a seven-fold increase in people served by one concert, experiencing this art form in which we believe so much, learning about the California Symphony and who we are, and ultimately taking one more step towards classical music as an entertainment choice.

Little did we know, as we were plotting and planning our opening night stream, the granddaddy of all orchestras in America was doing the same. One day after our season opener concert, the New York Philharmonic announced they would be streaming their opening night on Facebook Live that following weekend. Just this week, Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall announced their own Facebook Live projects. What an honor to be in such company, and we hope this posts helps empower you to do so too.

Honestly, almost no one has questioned why we didn’t stream the entire concert, but since a few people have, and in case you’re wondering, the answer is two-fold. One reason is cost. The agreement with the musicians mentioned above has different pay rates depending on the length of the broadcast. If we had streamed the full concert, the project would have cost us more than four times as much for not just the orchestra, but longer labor calls as well, and that would have been closer to a $10k price tag, which we definitely could not afford. The second reason not to broadcast the entire concert is the bigger reason though, because even if we had the funding to cover the larger costs, we still would limit the length of the free concert stream due to principle. We believe in the value of the product we’re offering: a fully immersive live concert experience with amazing, top professional musicians. We want to fund this work in part through ticket sales, so we are happy, eager even, to offer a little taste of a full concert experience — the appetizer if you will (I got in trouble for calling it the gateway drug) — for free, and people who want to experience more need to come in person and purchase a ticket to see the whole thing. We also feel that’s how we do right by our existing subscribers and ticket holders and don’t undercut their purchase by giving it away elsewhere. All told, we are happy to help the community see part of a concert (all concerts if we can secure the funding!) for free on us, and deeply want that to lead to a virtuous cycle of building more fans and audience members.

When we started this blog, we said we were writing for anyone and everyone who’s interested, including our colleagues in the industry. If you are considering using Facebook Live to stream a concert or an event, here are links to our own resources we compiled for this project that might be helpful.

California Symphony Facebook Live General Info and Tips

California Symphony Sunday Funday Overview

California Symphony Sunday Funday Planning Checklist

A graduate of Rice University with degrees in Music Performance and Business, for the last 15 years Bergauer has used music to make the world around her better, through programs that champion social justice and equality, through ground-breaking marketing and audience development tactics on the forefront of technology, and through taking strategically calculated risks in a risk-adverse field. If ideas are a dime a dozen, what separates Bergauer is her experience and record of impact and execution at institutions of all sizes. Praised for her leadership which “points the way to a new style of audience outreach,” (Wall Street Journal) and which drove the California Symphony to become “the most forward-looking music organization around.” (Mercury News) Bergauer’s ability to strategically and holistically examine and advance every facet of the organization’s mission and vision is creating a transformational change in the office, on the stage, in the audience, in the community, and going well beyond the industry of classical music.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on October 7, 2016.

Once and Done

Pictured: a mock-up of the envelope used in the California Symphony’s July 2016 fundraising solicitation.

Just about every arts organization runs a donation campaign as they approach the end of their fiscal year. The California Symphony is no exception as it’s the last chance we have to raise the funds necessary to end our season in the black. The problem is that this mid-summer deadline where we close the financial books on one year and begin another is important for us as an organization, but not in any way relevant — even arbitrary, perhaps — in the eyes of the donor. In other words, this is among the worst times and reasons to raise money.

Despite all that, not running a fiscal year-end fundraising campaign this year was not an option. We needed the money. An added parameter was that we needed to continue broadening our donor base, because our database of potential donors looked like this:

So this summer, we decided to run an experiment to answer the question: how can we tap the largest segment of our database — the people who have had no interaction with us in the last three or more years? No concert attendance, no donations, no special events, no free tours of our education programs, nothing. Zero interaction. Think about that. The largest group of untapped potential in our database is the people who care about us the least. Ouch. To make this even more painful, this absent group is not MIA for lack of us trying: they receive mailings with information for every concert, invitations to special events, and of course other donation appeals about three times a year. And if they’re on our email list (which a little more than a third of them are), they’re hearing from us even more. That’s a lot of effort we spend to invite people to engage with us, and for whatever reason it has all fallen flat for this group. In fact it has fallen flat for three years (and longer for some!).

So what do you do to get this group’s attention? Offer them a chance to have us leave them alone.

Usually, giving someone a chance to opt-out of communications is marketing suicide. That’s why unsubscribe links at the bottom of emails are so tiny and buried…no one wants to actively direct your attention to the place where you can escape all their wonderful marketing and fundraising messages. However, we rationalized that when everything else we’ve done for the last 3+ years has had no effect on this group whatsoever, something — anything — needed to change.

At about the time we were coming to this conclusion, Executive Director Aubrey Bergauer came across the work of University of Chicago Economics Professor and Department Chair John List. He and his team had published a handful of case studies where they partnered with a few large non-profits who purchased mailing lists for their fundraising solicitations. They frequently refer to these purchased lists as “cold lists,” as opposed to “warm lists” which contain people who have made a donation in the last three years. John List and his team experimented with these large non-profits, and in a mailing to 800,000 names (that’s a huge solicitation by the way — nearly a million people!), they offered a test group an option along the lines of “give now and we’ll never bother you again if you check this box.” They also mailed to a control group without the “once and done” option, as they aptly called it (give once and you can be done with us forever). The results were fascinating to us:

They raised 3 times more money from the “once and done” group than the control group
Only about 30% of the respondents actually checked the box
It did not reduce future mailing results

We decided we would try this with our own cold list. Not a purchased list of strangers, but with our own database of people who had gone cold, that large segment of people who had no interaction with us in three or more years. Risky? Perhaps. But what was the worst-case scenario, we figured? Worst case #1: someone who had no desire to interact with us anymore mails us back without a donation and checks the box. In that case, we agreed, we’d remove them from our mailing list per their request and we’d stop wasting money on someone who not only doesn’t want to hear from us, they’ve not produced any revenue for us in at least three years. Worth it, we decided. Worst case #2: people give, but a lot of them ask to be removed from the mailing list. Let’s just stop at the first phrase there — when has “people giving” ever been a problem? Especially in this scenario when these people were otherwise basically dead to the organization. Worth it, we decided. Worst case #3: People just don’t get it, don’t care, or it’s not an effective piece. That would be no different than everything else we’ve tried for the last 3+ years with this group. Worth it. Best case: some people who were cold as ice suddenly jump back in with a donation. Not even a ticket sale, but a cash-is-king donation. WORTH IT.

Over the next three months, we got to work executing the campaign. We developed special campaign materials for this group with “Once & Done” branding. We even added a line to the envelope that said “Make one gift now and we’ll never ask you again,” just to help ensure the open rates were as high as possible, because the first hurdle with a cold group like this is to get them to even look at your envelope for more than two seconds before tossing it into the recycle bin, let alone get them to actually open it and — gasp — read it.

Sample of the appeal letter and actual return slip from one of the “cold” prospects who made a donation after having no account history with us for several years. The red check on the return slip was made by a staff member when they processed the gift.

The mailing hit homes right after Independence Day with a deadline of July 31 (i.e. the end of our fiscal year, which was the impetus for this whole campaign), and the letter talked about the successes of the past year and how we were 94% towards our income goal for the season. (Side note: this idea of listing the highest percentage toward goal possible also came from John List’s research; his data showed that the closer you are to your goal, the more people are likely to give and the higher the average gift received. This is contrary to most nonprofit “best practices,” whereas usually, the industry standard is to publicize when you are at 60–70% towards a campaign goal. So we included that stat as a secondary test — it was true, we were very close (94%) to balancing our budget for the year — in every version of our appeal letter, not just to this Once & Done group.) Here’s how it all played out:

The Once & Done group resulted in 24% of all campaign donors. Of our other segments solicited (i.e. other appeals to people who did not get the “once and done” message such as ticket buyers, subscribers, recently lapsed donors, etc.), only our current, existing donors came in with a higher percentage of campaign gifts.
The Once & Done group made 17 times more gifts compared to the year prior, and generated nearly 15 times more revenue.
The side experiment of listing our very high progress towards goal in every prospect group’s letter resulted in exceeding last year’s totals in every category.
[Updated 9/19] Seven different households of the Once & Done group purchased tickets to attend our season opener concert. Extra fascinating given that they had gone at least three years without attending.
How many people checked the box to have us never contact them again? Only 5.

Just for fun (and full disclosure): we did have one donor mail us back an envelope containing only a dime and two pennies. But they didn’t check the box…

A few more clarifying notes that hopefully are helpful to those who have read this far:

For this experiment, we mailed to a lot of people. Normally, we don’t mail to every person in the database (too costly to always do that!) and generally target people who have interacted with us in the last 4–5 years. We wanted to make a special exception for the purpose of this experiment and mail to accounts that were older and colder, just to see how it would pan out.

This fall we are taking a deeper look at which “cold” people are better prospects to come back into the fold than others. For example, is a person who purchased season tickets three years ago but not since more likely to donate with this type of solicitation than a person who donated five years ago (but not since)? And how do these people compare to someone who came to a special event fundraiser dinner three years ago but hasn’t interacted with us since? Is there any difference in likelihood to donate between a donor who gave four years ago versus five years ago? All of these questions are being explored as we head into our next big fundraising campaign this fall.

And speaking of our next big campaign…shameless plug: through November 4, we’re running what has proven to be our largest fundraising campaign of the year for the last three seasons, a matching challenge where every donation up to $200,000 will be matched dollar for dollar. If you’ve enjoyed reading about the work the California Symphony is doing in this or other posts, please consider supporting these efforts by joining the campaign at any amount and having your donation doubled by the match.

Lastly, we have another plan for this inactive/cold group that we’ll be implementing before this year is over with the specific goal to get them back into the concert hall. We’ll tell you all about it in a future post.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on September 13, 2016.

Introducing Orchestra X

Orchestra X: a play-on name off of an experimental learning lab by a nearby large Silicon Valley technology company.

Our brains are wired against change. Scientifically, this is described as the availability heuristic: humans take mental shortcuts using information we already know to be true. There is nothing implicitly wrong with this; we make thousands of decisions daily without our brains going into overload in large part because of it. The problem is that as a species we often rely too much on what we already know, and that’s precisely what makes change so hard. For orchestras though, we can’t continue to shy away from creating the change we need. We can’t continue to watch our core audience atrophy and be afraid of losing them at the same time. As an art form we must be willing to have hard conversations about the things new audiences hate, are turned off by, or are just uninformed about. We have to change the availability heuristic for orchestras; we have to throw it out the window. This is our job as administrators, and we must help our audience — both existing and yet-to-be-obtained — throw it out the window, too. Also, this doesn’t necessarily mean that programming, specifically repertoire, has to change. It might mean that, but our hunch is that there are a lot of other factors besides the music itself where orchestras are collectively and figuratively standing with their fingers in their ears saying, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening, la la la I can’t hear you.”

Enter Orchestra X: a group of millenials and gen-xers that could or should go to orchestra concerts (e.g. they’re smart, have expendable income for entertainment options, and are generally culturally aware), but for whatever reason just doesn’t attend. This group will come to a few California Symphony concerts and report back on their experience — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and we will listen to them and share our findings.

Orchestra X is for people who meet the above description, and costs $5 (yes, the price of a foot long sandwich). We’ll ask you for your time and thoughts, but never for a donation. Participation includes:

Attendance at our Sunday, September 18 concert in Walnut Creek, CA (San Francisco Bay Area). This is the one concert that’s required, and $5 is the cost you’ll pay to cover the ticket office service fee. You can bring a guest if you’d like for the basement price of another $5.
Spending some time on our website as a regular patron might. This includes searching for information related to the performance(s) you are attending and going through the purchase path (we’ll provide a promo code to complete your purchase for the above mentioned $5 price; actually completing the purchase — even if nominal, rather than picking up free tickets at Will Call — makes it possible for you to have an online experience that resembles a regular patron’s as closely as possible).
Joining our email and mailing list for the season (unsubscribing after the 2016–17 season is fine).
Keeping notes on your experiences with us at the concert, on our website, and through marketing communications (emails, mailed collateral, ads you see). This isn’t meant to be a dissertation, but jotting down a few things as you see something you love or hate is hugely helpful and appreciated.
Attendance at a hosted pizza and beer group in Walnut Creek on Tuesday, October 4 at 7:00 PM to discuss your experience to date. By this time you will have gone on the website, “purchased” your tickets, and will have attended the Symphony’s September 18 concert. And we’ll be ready to hear all about it. Update: this event will be hosted by the new, local craft brewery, Farm Creek Brewing Company; they heard about Orchestra X and wanted to partner with us, how fantastic are they?!
Optional: Attendance at any other performance(s) of your choice during the California Symphony’s 2016–17 season in exchange for your continued feedback of that concert and purchase experience (yep, only $5 a ticket for those as well; yes, you can bring a friend as well for another $5). The more performances you want to attend, the better, as we are truly interested in your interactions with us. Our strong preference is that you attend at least two concerts: the September 18 Season Opener and one other of your choice.

To participate, write to us at info@californiasymphony.org by August 31. Tell us a line or two including how you heard about the Orchestra X program, confirm that you can meet all the required elements of participation, and why you want to participate. Space is limited, but your opinions are not.

We are seeking 15–30 participants, and will respond to selected participants with your promo code to order your tickets in early September.

Know someone who should totally do this? Please share this post with them.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on August 16, 2016.

Changing the Narrative

To be fair, getting new audiences is part of the answer, but it’s not the full answer, and that’s where so many arts organizations miss the mark. And that’s also why we’re starting this blog: to tell others what we’re working on, sharing information with our constituents, the community, and the orchestra world at large. For whoever is interested, really.

Pictured: Music Director Donato Cabrera with the California Symphony after a fundraiser concert in June 2016. Photo: Lindsay Hale

Three years ago, the California Symphony was about to close its doors. Donations and ticket sales were down, concerts were half empty (or filled by papering the house, i.e. comping tickets), the original founding music director and the Board parted ways, and the organization was without an executive director for about a year. Then the Board did two very smart things: 1) hired Donato Cabrera as the new music director and 2) hired Aubrey Bergauer as the new executive director. Cabrera was at the time the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony just 25 miles away from the California Symphony’s home base in Walnut Creek, and Bergauer came from Seattle where she had a decade in management experience at the largest performing arts organizations there. In 2013, Cabrera got to work rebuilding the relationship with the musicians, and one year later Bergauer came on board and got to work rebuilding an audience.

In just two seasons, the California Symphony has grown number of tickets sold by 140% and has nearly quadrupled the number of donor households (180% increase). Looking at earned revenue strictly from subscription concerts (i.e. ticket revenue from our regular season and not counting ancillary events), the California Symphony is up an average of 25% per concert. So how exactly did we accomplish this? We looked beyond getting new audiences, and instead focused on audience retention. Most orchestras don’t have a problem attracting new people. It’s getting those people who give it a try once to come back again that’s a challenge. Now, no matter who you are, from a first timer just checking us out, to a season ticket holder, to a long time donor, the California Symphony has a thoughtful and strategic plan for you, and this post examines two of the groups we have deemed essential for retention. Some of these tactics are things other orchestras are doing. Some are not, and even at the nation’s largest performing arts organizations, rarely are the marketing and development departments working together and taking all of these steps.

Definition: People who are brand new to the organization, or who have not attended in four or more years.

How do we find/track them: new and different ad formats (digital, mobile, remarketing); direct mail via list trades with other organizations; earned media. After each concert, we run a list of new ticket buyers from our database to determine patron history.

This group is in many ways the most work and even the most critical in that we as arts organizations have a limited window of time to capitalize on a new person’s first interaction with us, and if we miss the boat, the consequence is that we can miss out on thousands of dollars of revenue over the life of that patron. Each new attendee receives a postcard as soon as possible after they attend for the first time thanking them for joining us plus inviting them to return again with a discount offer valid for their choice of the next two concerts. It’s worth mentioning that this postcard is designed using the color scheme of the marketing materials for the concert they just attended, thus reinforcing the experience they just had with us. Also, there’s no picture of the music director because new people don’t necessarily know or care much about who the person is waving the baton (not to worry, we focus on developing this later); this postcard is all about coming back at a discount. We have these postcards pre-printed and ready to go for each concert, so as soon as we have the final ticket buyer list, we can send these cards out right away.

A week later, this group gets an email with the same information and discount code, making it easy to click, click, click and get their next ticket. We also include a deadline on the discount (on the printed postcard and reiterated on the follow-up email), because the response rate is always higher when there’s a deadline creating a sense of urgency. And creating a sense of urgency to return is exactly what we want: research shows that the lifetime value of a patron who returns to an arts organization within one year of their first attendance skyrockets compared to when the organization can’t secure that return visit. With this group of people, we are taking every step we can think of to get that return visit.

Examples of first time buyer postcards, color coordinated to match the marketing for the concert they just attended. The message is always “Thank you for coming! We love you and we want you back again soon!”

A few more notes on this group: after this initial follow-up, these patrons are added to our regular email and mailing lists for future ticket solicitations. They are NOT, however, added to any fundraising solicitations or even season ticket solicitations. No subscription offers, no donation appeals, no telefunding. The only next step we desire for this group of people is for them to come back again to another concert, and that’s the only thing we offer them…again and again with open arms. This is very different that most other arts organizations.

Definition: People who have attended more than one concert in the same 12 months, and preferably within the same season.

How do we find/track them: This group is found from our database; we pull this list after every concert.

Once someone has attended a second time in the same season, this person becomes the most promising lead for a new season subscriber; therefore, we want to do everything we can to show this patron how awesome and wonderful it is to come to the California Symphony again and again. After each concert when we pull the list of first time buyers, we next pull the list of multi-buyers. Within one week of their second attendance in the same season (or year), this group receives a snail-mailed thank you communication, which this time isn’t just a postcard, but a card inside an envelope (a little more fancy) that says we’ve noticed they’ve joined us a few times recently, and we want to thank them with a voucher for a free glass of wine on their next visit. By the way, this voucher has a clearly printed expiration date for the end of the season, again creating a deadline and sense of urgency. This group is flagged in our database as a multi-buyer and goes right onto the list for season ticket solicitations going forward. For people who become multi-buyers at the end of the season (i.e. their second attendance with us is at the end of the concert season), we still send their voucher with an expiration date for the upcoming season, and then over the summer they are included in our season ticket mailings.

Examples of Multi-buyer thank you cards, designed to incorporate the musicians and maestro. The message is always “The Symphony keeps getting better; let us enhance your experience and help you form a habit of coming here.”

Note that this piece does now include Music Director Donato Cabrera and the orchestra. By the time someone has come twice in the same year, we want them to start getting to know the artists that make the music happen. Not that we didn’t want that to happen before per se, but the mental shift one makes after coming for the first time (“crossed that off my bucket list”) to coming a second time (“this is an activity I enjoy enough to repeat”) warrants the distinction in how we try to market to each group.

This past spring when we were in our renewal period for current season ticket holders, we tried a little experiment where we mailed our multi-buyers from the past two years a season brochure and subscription information at the same time as all our existing subscribers: We allowed them to subscribe to the number of concerts of their choice and pay up front for their desired seating section, and we took notes on all their seating preferences (not too close to the front, outside aisle would be ideal, in the balcony is fine but only the first three rows, etc.) so that when the renewal deadline for existing subscribers hit, these multi-buyers who had chosen to subscribe were first in line for us to assign their seat. This resulted in getting season ticket materials in front of these top prospects earlier than if we had waited until after the renewal period was over (a typical timeline for many arts organizations), as well as providing them priority to be at the top of the queue. AND, whenever any of these patrons asked why they couldn’t be assigned a seat yet, it gave us an opportunity to explain to them that one of the benefits of being a renewing season ticket holder is that you’ll have first right of refusal on keeping your seats next year, so by becoming a season ticket holder now, you’ll be ahead of the pack and guaranteed your same seats this time a year from now. Most people really liked that we were so protective of subscribers’ seats and wouldn’t give anyone else’s seat away until after the deadline, and we made a lot of money this way, converting more patrons to season ticket holders earlier than normal.

Lastly, if you’re reading all this and thinking, “what’s the point in all this?” or if you work for an orchestra with limited resources (newsflash: we all have limited resources, so you’re not alone), then follow this exercise to see why this matters to us: Let’s say for each concert, we have 120 first time buyer households (this is about right for the California Symphony), and we know our return rate for first time buyers is 18% (some are responding to the discount card they received, and some are purchasing at full price since we look at people who have returned within a full 12 month period). That means 21 households from any given concert return in the same year. We send those people drink vouchers and a little over 10% of that group becomes season subscribers (2–3 households) at about $1000 each. That means we’ve generated $2,000-$3,000 in just one year from patrons at ONE concert off an original cost of $330 (that’s $150 for the first timer postcard + $75 for the multi-buyer card + $105 beverage vouchers redeemed per concert). Multiply that times the number of concerts in the season, and we’re generating thousands of dollars in incremental revenue from these efforts and seeing an ROI of up to 800%. And that’s just in one year. That’s not even scratching the surface of the lifetime value of these patrons.

This is a look at just two segments of our audience, and we hope you can see how the California Symphony has dramatically changed the way we think about these important groups over the last two years. For us, the call is not to “get new audiences;” it’s about how we can be laser focused on getting those newcomers to return again. We have plans like those described above for every audience member, including groups we didn’t talk about here like first time subscribers, renewing subscribers, first time donors, renewing donors, special event attendees, and the less fun segments of lapsed donors, subscribers and ticket buyers. Some of this we’ll share in future posts (update: like this one), as we have tons more data, tons more stories, and tons more ideas that we’re working on now as we’re looking to the future. The theme through it all is that we’re an orchestra doing a lot of things differently than we used to. We’re changing the narrative, and it’s working. More to come.

Originally published by Aubrey Bergauer / California Symphony at medium.com on July 30, 2016.