It is time to get your campaign in high gear and “sell out the house.” Have you set the goals for this year’s campaign? Are you creating different points of entry for potential subscribers? Do you have the volunteers it takes to have a successful campaign? A volunteer’s time is very valuable…make sure that you are using it effectively.
Assemble Your Army of Volunteers
- You should aim for a board member to volunteer ratio of 1 to 10
- The volunteers should be committed, effective and knowledgeable of your organization
- Set up teams and team captains to monitor progress throughout the campaign
- Make sure that the volunteers and board members are very informed about the artists in your series
- Recruit volunteers from many different organizations in the community: clubs, churches, private and public schools, colleges, business firms, etc.
Let us know how you find your volunteers…comment below.
Renewals vs. New Subscribers
The renewal process should be automatic. After all, these are the people that already know about you. Most of your time and energy should be focused on “new subscribers.”
Renewals=20% New Subscribers=80%
Renewals
- The earlier the better for securing renewals
- Streamline your renewal process
- Assign only a few volunteers to work on renewals
New Subscribers
- Reach out to people that haven’t hear about you
- Increase the diversity in your audience
- Does your current audience demographic reflect your community?
- Do you have audience members from a 50 mile radius?
Let us know how you find new subscribers…comment below.
Coverage Area
- Map a 50 mile radius around your town
- Recruit volunteers and/or board members from these newly identified areas
- Spread your campaign efforts throughout these newly defined areas
- Connect with businesses and the Chamber of Commerce in these areas
Campaign Timeline
- Set a six week time table
- Have your volunteers report daily or at least twice a week
- A shorter campaign timeline offers a sense of achievement quickly and keeps the volunteers focused
- Never stop selling, but offer “early bird specials” and incentives to buy early
Incentivize your Volunteers
There are many ways to incentivize your volunteers and make the campaign more effective. Give away prizes to top selling volunteers during your campaign. You can also have contests between different groups of volunteers. It is easy to obtain coupons and discounts from local restaurants and other businesses. Just speak with a manager and let them know what you are doing. They will be happy to help because it will bring them additional business.
We welcome your questions and comments regarding the campaign process. Please let us know what challenges your organization is having and/or challenges that your organization has overcome. We would like to share your thoughts and experiences in this forum.
13 Responses to “Campaign Tips – Let’s Get Started”
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We have raised our mailing list of subscribers and single ticket purchasers and from entries to our ticket giveaways at various expos. Last season we mailed out 1604 new season brochures. This season we have 2200. We participate in networking events with the local chambers and business associations with many positive results, and they get to know us. We advertize in the local media and use ticket giveaways on air. We have revamped our brochure for 2012 – 2013 and it really has an amazing look as it will be on a slicker card stock, giving a great gloss to the brochure. Best of all with all the new goodies for the brochure, we have cut the cost in half. That really has put us above last season. More money to work with. We are feeling more positive about this season, with the much better line up than last years, we feel we are going to soar.
We are in the process of upgrading our Lovery Valley Community Concerts website in Sunnyside, Wash., to attract new members and to get more public exposure.
We used some of Lou’s ideas at our last concert, Billy Dean, and had good response. Also, Steve Emahiser press releases helped! Looking forward to the Spanish Brass on the 28th!
Hi Everyone from Lewistown, Pa., Thanks to Live On Stage and our great rep., Mark Ross (and Ruth Gordon before him), our concert association is doing amazingly well. We anticipate terrific sales for our 2012/2013 season of 5 concerts. Thanks for being there for us and especially for bringing something new like LiveWire..
The Shoshone County (Idaho – in the north) Community Concert Association would love to get lots of new members. We are in an economically stressed area, and the recent closure of Lucky Friday mine (for about a year) took 200 direct jobs plus the support services those employees patronized. For many people in this area, purchasing concert tickets is a luxury, even though our membership fees are modest. What kind of web-page support can Live on Stage provide us?
We are beginning to make plans for our 2012-2013 campaign. The help and assistance from Live on Stage has been very helpful and very much appreciated by the Plainview Community Concerts Association.
Thanks Steve Emahiser and LOS for your continuing support. If your organization does not have a 2 tiered price structure….try it! It was our Best Idea Ever to make Sales and get $$$$ in on time. $35 by July 1, $40 after July 1, brought in approx 80% of our Sales by July 1.
Yes from Golden Belt Community Concert Assoc (Great Bend, KS) – Guy Penrod has generated a stir in in membership interest in our area, in fact last half of our season is GREAT.
Thanks to Steve and the LOS crew for opening this forum to share “best practice” ideas. The Cullman
Community Concert Association offers the ‘Early Bird Special’ and renews memberships at the final concert of the season. We give a 10% discount for subscription renewals at the final concert. We are getting about a 60 % subscription base renewal. This allows us to focus on those who have not renewed and on new subscribers.
Our membership demographics do not fit our community demographics, so we have been trying to find ways of reaching a younger audience. One way has been to offer a free Youth Outreach concert on school time to local schools the morning of our evening performance. Another approach has been to offer tickets to the Young Professionals Association of our local Chamber of Commerce to bring in a younger crowd. We also offer free tickets to local music teachers to encourage attendance of students of music.– None of this necessarily raises money (although the students could be “sponsored”) but is does raise awareness and serves as audience development.
We employ several tactics to encouage youth awareness and attendance:
1. For a piano concert, for example, we offer free admission for piano students, K-12, with a paid adult.
2. We traditionally offer at least one free student outreach per season, where students are bussed in.
3. Youth ticket price is only $5.
We have already geared up for our 64th consecutive programming season by recruiting several new spring membership drive volunteers, who are so enthusiastic they are already asking about the August showcase!
Our success since day one has been to have a surplus of drive volunteers, who each know people and potential members we don’t know. And, for the past three years, the Early Bird Special discount has brought remarkable and EARLY results. The board joins me in updates on your new LIVEWIRE feature.
This will be my first full membership drive here in Liberal, KS. Last year I took over as president right as the drive started. We are going to take some of the suggestions from this site and see if we can break some records. We have had four awesome concerts so far this season and have the Hebei Acrobats left to perform in April and which is causing a lot of buzz around the community too.