This week I’m attending and speaking at the first Ticketing Technology Forum in London, a meeting of ticketing technology suppliers and venues. In future posts I’ll provide a more thorough overview, but I want to share information from a particularly interesting session presented by Julian Jenkins, Commercial Director at Cardiff City FC in the United Kingdom. For context, Julian is in charge of marketing and ticketing for this UK football team, which we’d call soccer.
His first point struck me as spot on: “Football clubs spend too much time on trying to control what they can’t — the game on the pitch [field] and not enough time on things they can — meaning the customer experience.” Seems like every theatre company or orchestra could say the same. (click to read more…)
January 2, 2013
Current Affairs
We often talk about the power of the arts to inspire and to help people see the world differently. For more than two decades playwright and social activist Eve Ensler has done this by combining theatre with social change, with her play Vagina Monologues (which I first saw in 1998), and with V-Day, a non-profit organization whose mission is to “end violence against women and girls,” often using theater as a means to raise awareness and support.
Susan Swan, managing director of V-Day, is inviting arts organizations to participate in the group’s latest effort, One Billion Rising, in February and she has asked me to share this letter with you.
An Invitation to participate in “One Billion Rising”
From Susan Swan, Managing Director of V-Day, and Kathleen Drohan, Arts Marketer
The arts have the power to change lives. We all believe that, and I think for most of us that’s a part of why we chose a career in arts administration. We work long hours for wages that are unlikely to put us into the 1%, but we do it willingly and with passion because we’ve seen the impact our organizations have on communities and individuals. I would even venture that each of our lives has been changed in some way by an encounter with art, and the efforts of even the smallest of our arts groups result in a net position for society as a whole. (click to read more…)
This post is written by Michelle Paul, Product Manager here at Patron Technology, and co-author of Breaking the Fifth Wall: Rethinking Arts Marketing for the 21st Century.
Last week at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference I moderated a session called “We ARE the New Audience: Empowering Next-Generation Marketers to Reach Next-Generation Patrons” with panelists Sarah Benvenuti (The Civilians), Robert Gore (TDF), Katherine Mooring (Arts & Science Council), and Kaysi Winham (Young Affiliates of the Mint Museum).
The goals of the session were twofold: first, to share some ideas about what the “next generation” of arts audiences looks like and what they want; and second, to explore how emerging leaders can be the driving force for reaching this new audience.
We had a great panel discussion with lots of participation and feedback from the session attendees. We talked about the problem of the “greying” audience and how to attract younger patrons; whether or not “millennial” is a useful demographic category for this discussion; and the importance of making room for emerging leaders to be heard.
After a week of contemplation (and after organizing a Storify of the great audience tweets during the panel), here are my main takeaways from the discussion: (click to read more…)
For those of us on the East Coast last week was dramatic in many ways. The stories of destruction and power outages are by now well told. So today I am sharing with you an email I received from my friend and colleague Charlie Hamlen who works for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, which was titled “a story of frustration and inspiration.” It certainly reminded me of why we’re all in this business, and I hope you find it equally moving.
– Gene
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In my relatively new role as VP for Artists & Programs at the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, I spent most of last Sunday-Monday-Tuesday arranging and re-arranging various scenarios which would allow us to perform our first Carnegie concert of the current season, scheduled for Thursday night after the storm. Could the conductor, Nicholas McGegan, get here from Florida? His original flight Sunday was canceled. His re-scheduled flight for Wednesday morning was canceled. While waiting to hear if he could find a way to get here for our first rehearsal Wednesday morning at 11:30, I polled lots of colleagues and conductors and managers to see who might be able to step in should he not make it. We had a good back-up plan, just in case. Then Nic managed to drive from Miami to Fort Lauderdale, take a flight to Atlanta, connect to Philadelphia and drive to New York, arriving Tuesday night around midnight. He showed up at 11:15 Wednesday morning in our rehearsal studio at the DiMenna Center, raring to go. (click to read more…)
October 15, 2012
Current Affairs
It’s been a month since I was at Dreamforce, the annual conference put on by our partner salesforce.com at the Moscone Center and all across downtown San Francisco. Before I get into details, I want to paint a picture to give you a sense of the magnitude of this event, and the incredible, even overwhelming, nature of it.
According to salesforce.com, 85,000 people were registered for the conference. The main product keynote events were held at the Moscone Center, where at least 10,000 people watched the event live and on more than a dozen enormous screens hanging from the ceiling. The conference started with a short performance by MC Hammer, and salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff delivered the main keynote speech.
The conference seemed to take over the entire city. With that many people attending one conference, nearly everyone within a 10-block radius was wearing the bright-colored bar-coded badges that gained you entrance to the conference and events. Supplementing the keynotes were more than 800 workshops over four days, led by salesforce.com staff and clients, each of which drew 50 to 300 people.
A sprawling trade-show floor featured hundreds of vendors, from Google to HP to dozens of Silicon Valley start-ups eager to show their wares. And topping it all off were keynote sessions about leadership and business, with speakers including Colin Powell, Jeff Immelt, Richard Branson, and even Tony Robbins, who had 10,000 people (including me) on their feet screaming for three hours. By any measure this was an amazing conference, and an outdoor performance by the Red Hot Chili Peppers topped off the event.
Beyond all the hoopla, a heaping amount of technology was on display and in discussion. The conference had many themes but perhaps not a single overarching message. That said, here are two key points that I think bear discussion. (click to read more…)
October 1, 2012
Current Affairs
One of the things new technology is offering today is a much better way to collaborate with your co-workers. On the face of it, you can chalk this up as yet another thing that makes business more efficient.
However, it’s a lot more than that. At the Dreamforce conference last week (sponsored by our technology partner, Salesforce.com), I heard the celebrity doctor Dean Ornish talk about just how important human connections are in business.
He said that the “need for intimacy” is more primal than the need for food or water. “Business is nothing more than human interaction – and things bring us together create meaning.” In another session, the IT director for the Center for American Progress said, “The office is not as important as the connections we make with our coworkers.”
And in a world in which more and more people are working remotely, collaborating, and meeting over Skype video calls, business is becoming an “internal social enterprise”– where the ways we connect with our friends and relatives in our daily lives are now the same as we use in business.
So as you consider the goals of new technology, add “social interaction,” “collaboration,” and “facilitating teamwork” to what you put on your list of requirements. Business was always social– but never more so than now.
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May 9, 2013 at 6:05 pm 
