The Big List – Broadening community participation.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working as the business development intern for the Bruised Orange Theatre Company (BOTC). BOTC is fairly small itinerant group, who at the same time is a fully formed nonprofit.

My role as the BDI, is to try and figure out the different marketing and development opportunities that are available to BOTC, and make them work. Right now that means house managing their recent show Determination: The Reboot, and later on, corralling the actual 'grunt work' interns for the summer.

BOTC is looking to grow and expand, and to that end, they’ve taken advantage of numerous League of Chicago Theatre programs ranging from free and subsidized marketing to mentorship with other theaters. Recently, BOTC was invited to be part of a large-scale mailing list exchange and database called ‘The Big List’.

TRG Arts and The Big List

TRG Arts is a 15 year old arts consulting firm working in 8 markets through the United States. Although focusing on large cities such as Dallas and Chicago, they also take on smaller markets, and even whole states. Their combined database covers 50 million patron transactions to determine patron behavior.

Data for TRG’s databases comes from voluntary submission by individual theatres. In Chicago, TRG partnered with The League, and requested all the patron, member, and Board information from all member theatres. Members uploaded the information and were recently able to access their lists, and the data that list provides.

The Data

The benefit from providing all this information to TRG is fairly impressive. TRG matches the last name and address of every individual on the list, and obtains all pertinent information about them through Axiom. This enables the theatre to map their own list by economics, ethnicity, location, etc… TRG also provides large-scale analyses of the entire theatre community for use in advocacy.

The largest benefit of this data for the theatres, is the ability to compare and exchange mailing lists. Once the data is uploaded, from board members to single ticket purchasers, to subscribers, the theatre has the option to suppress individual lists. This prevents other theatres from requesting the information, but keeps the data available for the theatre for research purposes. The remaining lists are then available for exchange.

The Mailing Exchange

This part is brilliant. It’s based on a web-based shopping portal. Members can select lists by theatre, by location, by size, and request those lists from other members in a single stroke. For example:

BOTC wants to start their summer program They want to put together a direct-mail campaign to most the northside of Chicago, as far south as Belmont. They set up a campaign profile, with contact information, deadlines, and the purpose of the marketing campaign.

BOTC can then select the geography they want to affect. This can be anything from ‘X’ radius from the theatre, X range of Zip Codes or SCF’s, or individual codes. This filter will affect your existing mailing lists, and the ones you want to pull from.

The next step is that you shop from the available lists from all the theatres in the group. First selected is the theatres you want to work with. After selecting, BOTC then goes to a ‘purchase’ screen where individual lists are selected, which will have the size of the lists, and number of duplicates. After selecting all the lists you want to use, a single button click sends approval requests to all the theatres selected. If the theatre approves, BOTC now has access to a merged and cleaned mailing list available for the marketing campaign.

Paid services

All the above listed services are free. However, this same list can be divided up by demographics (income, age, ethnicity). This filtering costs ranging from $1.25 per thousand to up to $17.50 per thousand. A minimum order is $25, handled through credit card or invoice. To take the BOTC example again:

BOTC’s target market has always been the young, post-college crowd. Not a terrible amount of money, but consistent. For their production, they want to cater to an expanded version of that market, pulling mailing lists from similar theatres. They can attach filters to their list request of an age range of 18-35, and an income range of 15-40K. The two ranges would cost roughly $10 per thousand names. They assemble a list request that covers 3,000 names, pay $30, and when all the list requests are approved, BOTC has a large mail-merge that targets their special demographic for $30.

Additional data

BOTC can compare their lists to the lists of other theatres in the group. This aids in choosing which lists to use. If, for example, the lists of BOTC and Live Bait theatre were over 75% similar, they might not be the best people to request lists from.

Goal

TRG noted that in their research, a single axiom stood out: ‘The more they come, the more they come’. Patrons have an 85% return rate to theatre, and that’s not limited to a single company. The sharing of this information increases theatre attendance and participation across the board. Even for groups who are miserly with their lists, the option to control access and the opportunity for free analytics is definitely an incentive. The goal is to get more people exposed to theatre, and this exchange has the possibility to do so.

Personal

This is an amazing thing to be part of on the 'ground floor' for this community. Although the system is relatively simple to use, the variety of features and the huge amount of customization that's involved means that anyone who already has a specialty in this kind of exchange is going to be useful in markets that TRG has penetrated.

Notes for the Project

THis is the kind of tool I'm talking about for theatre development. As Chicago is just implementing this tool, I'm going to have to ask TRG for contact info for outside theatres to see how this works, and how the users feel about it.

Coming Soon
-Annotated Sources
-Mission Statement
-Notes on my first experiences as house manager