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By Una Carmody, July 13, 2010

Have you always wondered how many people in Ireland attend plays, or opera or classical music? What age they are? Or what newspapers they read?

For the first time this information is being made available through Arts Audiences with the support of the Arts Council and Temple Bar Cultural Trust.

Click here to access the report Arts Attendance In Ireland

TGI contains a wealth of information about audiences for the arts. Section 2 of the report will be of particular interest to those involved in marketing, as it gives some demographic information about regional audiences for the arts, and their media consumption and behaviour.  We will be making a further release of information in August 2010 and are looking for your input about what you would find most useful. Marketing information by artform? More information about websites? Let us know by posting a comment below. 

Appendix 1 gives more information about TGI and how it it carried out in Ireland Appendix 1 TGI repor

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By James Kelly, June 29, 2010

Are you looking to find ways to measure a gallery audience?

Under Arts Audiences’ Build Your Audiences Scheme, The Butler Gallery received free marketing consultancy to undertake a extensive study in this area, and the findings have been of great benefit to the organisation. Under the guidance of Heather Maitland, Jean Tormey, Education Curator in the Butler Gallery, has compiled a report on the findings, to download this, as well as the following;

• The Galley’s action plan
• the research plan
• 3 questionnaires
• audience observation sheet

click on this link: Measuring a Gallery Audience – Butler Art Gallery report

All combined, this information provides a significant resource for similar organisations considering a similar study.

Some notes from Jean on the body of work;

“We wanted to get involved in the Build your Audience Project to devote some dedicated time and energy to finding out more about our audience, and to thinking about how we communicate with both our existing and potential audience. One of the major reasons for this is the Gallery’s long-term aim to relocate to a new facility within the next three years to better accommodate our collection, exhibition and education programme.

In our current location [Kilkenny Castle] we attract a significant, transient, international audience who visit us as part of their tour of the castle. Our move to the new venue means we cannot rely on this particular tourist audience to automatically attend the Gallery as is often the case at present.

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image courtesy of the Butler Gallery

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This project was an ambitious one that could not have been undertaken without our committed group of volunteers. In retrospect, we were somewhat over ambitious in the questions we asked at the outset. More time spent honing the ‘real issues’ would have been beneficial. However, a study of this kind has never before been undertaken by the Butler Gallery or any gallery in Ireland for that matter, and was an eye opener for the Gallery in many ways.

Through the street and castle surveys, we discovered that many more people than we realised knew where we were, and a lot of people had complementary and positive things to say about the Gallery. The Project confirmed our prediction that much of our audience are attending as a result of a visit to the Castle – half of our audience comes directly to see the Gallery.

Furthermore, there are not as many young people or family groups as we would expect visiting the Gallery – reflecting a trend that visitors with children (particularly under 5) are apprehensive about attending galleries and museums. Equally, the fact that people above 60 do not appear to be visiting as much as we thought. The results encourage us to develop pointed programmes for people within these age groups.

In terms of how people use the space and our mediation of exhibitions (types of interpretation etc.), we have come to the conclusion that each exhibition needs a range of messages and channels of communication and interpretation – so that we are viewing each exhibition as having a diverse potential audience, with each segment having different needs.

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By James Kelly, May 31, 2010

Are you looking to build your audiences by connecting with primary schools? Perhaps you are from an organisation which already works with primary schools, but are looking to ways to improve how you engage with this audience?

Under Arts Audiences’ Build Your Audiences Scheme,  The Ark and IMMA received free marketing consultancy to explore ways in which to improve their work in this area. Jeanine MacQuarrie has written a report on this, will be useful to you if you are looking to better engage with audiences in a primary school context.

To download this report, click on this link: Primary Schools Audience Development Project Report

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Mandscape, The Ark, A Cultural Centre for Children visual art programme
Photo credit: Paola Mezzaroma

This is the second report from Arts Audience’s Build Your Audience scheme. The first report, A Guide to Marketing Your Production on Tour, produced by Coisceim Dance Theatre with Heather Maitland, was published earlier this month.

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By James Kelly, May 18, 2010

Considering a new website? Want to optimise the outcome, and keep costs as low as possible? Two important words for you… ADVANCE PLANNING!

The more prepared you are in advance of talking with a web designer…

• the easier it will be for a web designer to give you an accurate quote;

• the easier it will be to decide which web designer can deliver on your requirements;

• the faster you will get through the process;

• and of course the cheaper it will be (if you approach a web designer with no preparation, you will need to develop the brief with the designer, which will cost more).

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios realise that a good website is a key element in engaging with audiences, and plan to redevelop their website. Under Arts Audiences’ New Media Mentoring Scheme, Aoife Flynn of asquared mentored Rayne Booth of TBG&S as she prepared a brief for the organisation’s new website.

Rayne’s report will be of great interest to anyone considering building a high quality website on a tight budget, and readers will no doubt find Aoife’s additional notes at the end of this report very informative.

If you are interested in discussing this work with those involved please visit the Arts Ireland group on LinkedIn – if you’re not already a member, it’s free to join (what’s this?  find out more here).

to download a pdf of this report, click on this link: Developing a brief for a website

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REPORT OF RAYNE BOOTH

Basic requirements

It’s clear that now, more than ever, a website is an important tool in building a relationship with the public. Increasingly people are using the internet as a research tool rather than, or in addition to, visiting galleries, and as such it is possible that TBG&S has a section of it’s public that may rarely, if ever, actually come in to the building.

So it is important for us to be able to provide visitors to our site with relevant, up to date information as well as other features such as blogs, newsfeeds, etc. Furthermore, social networking developments such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as other facilities such as blogging, have become an efficient and cost effective way to keep connected with your core audience (as well as to engage with new audiences), and I felt it was important that our website should reflect these developments.

The current TBG&S website was designed in 2005. The format of the site means every time we wish to update content, we must employ a webmaster. This is more costly and time consuming than is necessary, and I felt that a system which would allow staff to manage content would make more sense for TBG&S. As well as problems with content management, was felt that the website’s design could be more dynamic and up to date.

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image courtesy of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

The plan

In the first meeting with Aoife Flynn, I expanded upon my original proposal to the mentoring scheme, outlining the various other features that would be needed on the website. For example, an extensive archive section, a blog, a content management system, integrated to Facebook and twitter.

Aoife asked a variety of questions regarding TBG&S’s needs for the website and through these we established roughly what type of features we should think about including.

Aoife suggested that the website be linked in a simple manner to TBG&S accounts on Twitter and Facebook and, if budget was a concern, the site could be built on a wordpress.org template so that it could be easily updated by gallery staff.

Due to the fact that TBG&S are hoping to update our logo in future, Aoife suggested that the logo should not be included as an integral/central part of the design of the site, so that it could be easily replaced in the future should we decide on a redesign. As our current website does not have any analytical features built in, Aoife also suggested that we ensure that the new website is linked to Google analytics so that we can harness statistics regarding how frequently the site is accessed and by whom. Google Analytics is a free programme that can be added to any site via simple pasting of code.

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Preparing for the Brief – 4 stages

Aoife suggested several steps as to how I should go about writing a brief for a web designer:

• RESEARCH: Undertake a period of research, in which TBGS staff would each select a number of websites which we either liked or disliked, focusing on quality of design rather than quality of content.

• EVALUATION: Evaluate what elements on the current TBGS site work well and what additional elements may be required

• FIRST DRAFT: Once that internal research was completed I would then meet with Aoife to draft a brief which could subsequently be evaluated by TBGS management.

• FINAL DRAFT: Taking feedback from management on board, the brief would be finalised and Aoife would advise on how best to approach web designers.

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Research

To guide the internal research Aoife suggested that we focus on three factors:

• The look and feel of the website, ie, the colours, will it be contemporary or classical in style, will it be minimal or combine a lot of text and information on one page?

• When looking at other websites as a visitor, consider why they work, why they don’t work and use this to inform how we want our site to work for a visitor

• The back end. How will we use the website, what do we need in terms of archive, who will be able to update the website, how many users, what logos and links we need, how will the blog function and how many people will be updating it? How will we access statistical information, what is achievable within the budget, search engine optimisation

I began by asking TBG&S staff to each select 5-10 websites they liked or disliked. These did not necessarily have to be ‘arts’ websites. We then met internally and discussed the various elements of these websites that could work for TBG&S and which elements we were sure we did not want.

Example websites included;

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (http://www.imma.ie)
We found this site easy to navigate but a bit more ‘museumy’ in style than what we were looking for in our site. We like the Artist residency programme info which was well presented and clear with past, present and future artists – each have a page with image and info about their work

Smart Projectspace: http://www.smartprojectspace.net/
We really liked the use of a strong lead image on front page but would prefer a less complicated design.

Palais de Tokyo: http://www.palaisdetokyo.com
We liked simple the black on white text which dominates the design but felt it would be important for us to also include more images.

Whitechapel: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/
We really liked the format of large image on front page with minimal text, then going into another front page with more text and options.

Through looking at other websites we then established that we really wanted the look and feel of our website to;

• have a clean, simple feel,

• use strong images sourced through the TBG&S programme,

• and focus on images more so than text.

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image courtesy TBG&S

Evaluation

What we like about our current site is that it presents important information about the programme for the visitor on the first page. We like the immediacy of having an image on the front page as we feel that presenting artists work should be the most important aspect of the site.

In relation to our back end needs we then determined that some of the following should be included in the draft designers brief:

• The website should have an easy to use content management system so that staff can update the website themselves.
• Items like logos and images should be easily changeable by staff.
• The website should allow for multiple users to update.
• Website should have excellent search engine optimisation
• Some sections will be updated more regularly than others-eg, exhibitions and events will be updated regularly whereas studio artists will be updated with less frequency.
• Blog: This could be linked to a wordpress or similar blog page and not built in to the site as it is less costly
• Current Studio artists should be able to update their own pages, and only their individual page. They should be given a password for this.
• Current/upcoming events should automatically be archived by the system once the closing date has passed

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First Draft

During the staff meeting we discussed the layout of the website. How we would like pages to connect with each other. We decided that the front page of the website should have a large, striking image from the gallery programme, which would change every six weeks or so. Users would click on this image to access further options and to get into the website.

We identified three sections for the website; gallery, studios and Info. Both the gallery and studios sections would have an archive section where users can access information on past and future exhibitions, and current studio artists can update and maintain their own pages as a ‘mini website’. I drafted a diagram of how these three sections could link into each other and added details such as how many images we would expect per exhibition/artist.

I sent this draft document to Aoife and we arranged a second meeting to discuss and finalise the draft. At this meeting, we went into further details regarding how the website would function and Aoife suggested some changes to the structure of the brief to make it clear for the designer. This included giving more details on the exact needs of the back end (outlined above) and flagging which aspects of the design were set, and which were open to discussion. We also looked at some suggestions for web designers and discussed how TBG&S could make better use of our facebook page to promote our activities.

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image courtesy TBG&S

Final Draft

The final contact with Aoife was done through email. I emailed her the updated brief and she made some suggested changes to the language and layout. Following this, we confirmed a final brief that we were both happy with. At present we are experiencing some changes with regard to funding & budgetary structures at TBG&S, and I am now awaiting approval from the board to go ahead with the new website. I hope to begin speaking with web designers in the coming weeks. We now have the brief in place so that the process can begin quickly when funding becomes available.

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Learnings

The mentoring process was extremely helpful in providing me with the tools and language to be able to provide a web designer with a clear brief, and in doing this, save time and money for TBG&S. I now understand what information a designer needs in order to fulfill a brief. The process also helped us to establish exactly what we needed and wanted from the website, and to focus on what formats would work best for us. I now feel that I have a document that I can send to several designers and be confident that they will be able to understand our needs.

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Note from Aoife Flynn

There can be a lot of confusion around the costs of websites, which prices seeming to vary wildly for what appears to be the same “thing”- a functioning web site. Often this can arise from the perception within an organisation that they lack the specific knowledge around web design and thus plan to ask the web designer what they need.

This is a little like not knowing what you like to eat, and then expecting a chef to cook you something you will like. You don’t have to be a chef to know what flavours you enjoy, and if you do tell a chef the sorts of things you love to eat you will be sure they’ll cook a magnificent meal specifically to your taste. Web design is not so dissimilar.

As a user of the web you, and others within your organisation, know what you do and don’t like as a visitor to other websites. You know how you want your organisation to be perceived online, you know about your brand, and you know what information you want to prioritise for your visitor. If you can gather all this knowledge through internal conversations you will get a much clearer picture of what you want your site to feel like for other visitors.

So, now that you know what tastes you like, you are significantly more likely to get the website you actually want. By going through this process you’ve now determined the front end; i.e. the visitor experience of your site.

If you have a statistics programme on your site (it comes free with many webhost accounts) this is a good opportunity to check how visitors are using your current site- what pages are most popular, where are they spending the most time, how do they find your site? This information can inform the layout of your new site.

The next step is to discuss what you want the website to do for you internally- how often will it be updated, and by whom? Take into consideration time constraints and the tech ability of your staff. How many sections need to be updated? Do different people need different levels of access? Start with your ideal, you can always work back if the final budget doesn’t allow it. Once you lay this out you will have determined the back end.

This information, when gathered together into a design brief, will give any prospective designer the material they need to develop an accurate quote, and to determine whether they are the best fit for your project. The more accurate the quote from the beginning, the less likely it is to inflate during the process due to unforeseen design needs. Additionally, not all designers are the best fit, some will not be able to deliver what you need, and others will be too complex. A clear brief will allow them to opt to quote for your project.

A couple of other things to consider. There are a lot of free programmes available now, such as wordpress.org (which is different to the free wordpress.com blog platform), which incorporate a content management system. If your design needs are reasonably straightforward you can opt for a designer that knows how to manipulate these templates to suit your needs, which may provide a cheaper alternative.

Social media networks like facebook and twitter are prevalent now, but may not continue to be so popular in the future, think about where bebo and myspace are now. If your budget is limited it’s best to simply provide links from your homepage to your facebook page/twitter page rather than integrating it throughout the site. Similarly with blogs, I would suggest setting up a blog as a separate page or section on your site that is easy to remove if you find that you are not posting it regularly, or it is not working well for you.

Once you have your brief together you should gather a list of 4 or 5 designers whose work you like and send it to all of them, asking them to specify a quote and a timeline. If you have a fixed budget you can specify this, and determine what they can deliver for that amount, but if it is the first time you are tendering work in this area it might be more useful to leave the quotation open ended to give you a better idea of the range of prices in the market.

To gather a list it is useful to note that many websites will list their designer at the footer, or you can contact the company behind a website you like and they will give you contact details. Ideally you should shortlist the quotes to a list of three and then interview/meet these designers. It’s important that you can establish a personal relationship with the successful candidate, and that you feel confident they have understood your brand and your needs, and can work with you on the project to deliver the best site your budget will allow.

The final step in a redesign process is to install an analytical programme on your site (Google Analytics is very comprehensive and is free) so you can monitor how people are using your site. Are they accessing information the way you thought they would? What pages are most popular, how long are they spending on the site? How are the finding your site? If you monitor this on an ongoing basis you can adjust your site to better meet their needs.

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About Temple Bar Gallery and Studios

Temple Bar Gallery and Studios is a publicly funded visual arts organisation located in Dublin City Centre. TBG&S was established by artists in 1983 in response to the increasing demands for affordable studio spaces in Dublin city centre. In the mid-nineties a new gallery and studio complex was custom designed for the company by leading Irish architects McCullough / Mulvin and today the building that houses TBG&S integrates a gallery with on-street access, an atrium space and 30 artists’ studios. The use of these studios reflects the broad-ranging developments in contemporary practice as artists working with photography, video, sound, sculpture, print and painting all currently occupy spaces at TBG&S. The ground floor gallery space hosts a wide ranging programme of Irish and international art, including the work of both established and emerging artists working in a variety of media.

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By James Kelly, April 21, 2010

Launched by Arts Audiences in November 2009, the New Media Mentoring Scheme matches individuals with expertise in digital media, with individuals in arts organisations seeking mentoring for specific projects in the area of new media marketing.

Following an open submission process, individuals from eight organisations were selected for mentoring. On completion of this process, these individuals are required to produce case studies, to be published on this website, in order to share learning achieved with the wider arts community.

Under this scheme, Aoife Flynn of asquared mentored Marcella Bannon, Director of Droichead Arts Centre over the past 3 months. What follows below is Marcella’s report on this.

If you are interested in discussing this work with Marcella and Aoife, please visit the Arts Ireland group on LinkedIn – if you’re not already a member, it’s free to join.

to download a pdf of this report, click on this link: Marcella Bannon Mentoring Scheme Report

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Report:  Marcella Bannon, Director, Droichead Arts Centre

Our requirement in brief:

We felt we had all the right elements in place to build an increasingly rich relationship with our audience online, however we realised that in order to do so, we would need an overall plan as to how to draw all of these element together into a successful strategy.

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Our starting point when we met the mentor:

Droichead Arts Centre had upgraded its website in September 2009, and we were in the process of moving into a more “on-line” strategy in terms of advertising and marketing. The new website has links to our facebook and twitter, and includes a bright area homepage, with a flash moving screen and an online booking service. The site was designed specifically to highlight areas of our programme we specialise in i.e. Youth Theatre, Visual Arts, Community Outreach and the Film Club.

We knew we needed to market our organisation to a greater extent online, in order to stay relevant and to reach a new audience of a younger demographic. In addition to this, significant funding cuts necessitated a review of our overall marketing strategy, placing e-marketing a priority, as we were no longer in the position to afford seasonal programmes.

We found e-marketing attractive as a sales and marketing tool, as it involved low outlays in terms of cost and staff maintenance.  We had a presence on Facebook and Twitter along with our own “blogging” space on the homepage of droichead.com. In addition, we were producing a bi-monthly constant contact e-guide being circulated to 3,000 people, and we were sending regular webtexts to a catchment of 900 people.

However, we were not optimising our time and energy in using this media, as we were maintaining facebook, twitter and web text hap-hazardly, as an ‘extra add on’ instead of integrating as a key tool in the overall marketing strategy of the centre.
In this mentoring process, Aoife Flynn helped us to evaluate each of the individual strands of activity in our online campaign, and in so doing, helped us to come up with plans for an overall strategy as how to best move forward.

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Oliver! at the Droichead Arts Centre

Developing A Sales Led Strategy

Aoife helped us to put together an overall digital strategy, designed specifically for Droichead Arts Centre. This strategy is sales led, although this would not be the case for all organisations.

With tighter funding, our reliance on digital media will grow, and it is imperative that we can change the habits of our audience, encouraging them to seek information online, book online and give feedback online. Such changes do not happen overnight, and it will take a number of months to realise this.

We are now reviewing ways to evaluate, on a weekly basis, the sales impact of campaigns through our digital media and linking it directly to our box office. This involves planning around the following;

• Analytics – each digital package has an analytical facility which can measure the success  the usage of the application including Facebook, WordPress Blog, Constant Contacts and Google, we are looking at ways of measuring the successes.
• Setting up direct code on Databox to link in with offers on Facebook and E-guides. We are also exploring a newsletter facility offered by Databox [Droichead's Box Office system] as an alternative to Constant Contacts, as it would feed directly to our sales system.
• The track-ability of digital marketing is very significant – it is possible to set up special offers on facebook pages with their own specific url so you can track how many people accessed an offer on facebook.  You can also get stats from facebook on fans locations.
• The re-training of staff. Droichead Arts Centre hosts a CE employment scheme with staff changing annually. It is vital for us to develop strict training plans within our strategy and procedures to encourage the audience to seek information about our service digitally. This needs to happen at the first point of call through our box office and on all printed marketing material. Training also needs to be given to all Marketing staff and managers on how digital reports should be delivered always relating back to Sales.

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Facebook & Twitter

We can see that Twitter can be a powerful tool in engaging with the public. However, when we considered the various factors, we decided that at this point it would not be worthwhile utilising this facility.

It takes staff resources & management time to plan and sustain a successful campaign, and we don’t feel that there is a sufficient cohort of our audience on Twitter to make this worthwhile, so we decided to focus our resources into Facebook.  However, the facility exists if our situation changes.
With regard to Facebook, before meeting Aoife, Droichead Arts Centre already had a group profile and a personal profile. The personal profile was required to maintain the group page, and to feed into the daily newsfeeds. Aoife recommended it was better practice to set up a business page.  [Arts Audiences note: for further info on the advantages of a facebook page over a facebook group or facebook personal profile, read this article by Aoife Flynn].

So in March, Droichead made the change over to the page. Now, people are no longer our friend on facebook, instead they are fans. This is attractive to people, as it protects their privacy, as we can’t see their private data, nor can we email them (so no junk mail).  Now, to receive our news, our fans must subscribe to our news feeds. Another advantage of a facebook page is that  members of the public can access a facebook page without actually having a facebook account, which broadens access.

When we set up, we encouraged all our group members to transfer over, and we now have just under 600 fans and rising. We update this daily with news snippets,  and the page has definitely increased interaction, with some posts opening up a lot of discussion, which we are very happy to see.

We’ve also linked our wordpress blog to feed directly into our facebook page, which reduces duplication of work load.  This means that people who are more comfortable with facebook may read our blog entries, whereas they mightn’t visit the site of the blog itself.

We are currently experimenting with different campaigns but it’s difficult to assess the outcomes against sales just yet.

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Digital Loop – website, blog

Arising from this process, Droichead Arts Centre realised the importance of creating a digital loop between all the digital media we use.

Rather than have all of the various applications bringing the public in a variety of directions, now, as part of our sales led strategy, all digital media feeds back to the website and specifically to the booking facility.  Similarly, from our website, the customer should  be able to easily access facebook, our blog, e-guides and staff email.

Our wordpress blog is integrated with facebook and the website. One person is responsible for updating the blog twice weekly however all staff, artists, and youth theatre facilitators are requested to relay news to this person. The blog will contain interviews, behind the scenes information, information on outreach projects and conversations. This is targeted towards people who want to know a little bit more in an informal environment.

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Exhibition in the Droichead Arts Centre Gallery Space

Constant contact E-guide

Constant Contact is a software application which tracks the success of email campaigns. Having spoken with Aoife we found that what we thought was a ‘low’ opening rate for our e-guide was in fact above average.

We weren’t particularly happy with our opening rate, but in conversation with Aoife, we found our opening rate of is actually above average – our last mail out had an opening rate of 35% – sometimes it’s higher or lower, depending on the events. Average opening rates vary sector by sector, but generally are around 20%.

We agreed our aims in this respect are to;

• create a more accessible, sales driven e-guide.
• Increase the number of members opening the e-guide by introducing incentives like competitions.
• increase the traffic on the website with the introduction of more hyperlinks to the website.

When evaluating the e-guide, we realised that its layout was a concern, as we found that every computer hosted a different programme with individual spam filter preferences. With so many embedded images, our e-guide was being viewed differently on each computer e.g. often images needed to be right clicked on to open or they wouldn’t appear at all. This was leaving the e-guide untidy and busy to the viewer and we had no control on this.

To rectify this problem we did the following;

• listed our up incoming events to the top of the page linking directly to more information on our website.
• removed all images except for the banner.
• detailed offers on the side panel of the e-guide again hyper linking back to the website.
• introduced competitions and special offers at the bottom. Due to the change in spending trends in Drogheda we decided to offer special offers if people booked events 2-3 weeks before events.

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Conclusion

We realised though this mentoring that digital marketing strategies are, by their very nature, constantly evolving with the technology and platforms available. This document is a first step to gathering our thoughts on how digital marketing can work for us, but we recognise that any strategy is an organic document that will need constant updating.

It is still early days yet to measure the success of the changes we have made. For one thing, it will take time to incorporate the strategy in totality due to limitation on staffing and the need for ongoing training.

However, we feel we have taken very positive steps towards using the various different aspects of new media to move towards a system which makes the most of our limited resources in our goal of bringing an increasing amount of our business through the website.

Finally to say, we found the mentoring process extremely helpful, and are very grateful to Aoife Flynn for giving her time voluntarily for this mentoring. Her broad understanding of the arts and in-depth knowledge of the new digital marketing technology, coupled with her familiarity with the resource restraints on arts organisations ensured the targets/ tasks she set were achievable, and the advise she offered was relevant, timely and highly valuable.

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Some quick DIY tips

Website:
Ensure your have a booking online facility on your homepage. Ensure your Facebook link, twitter and blog are clearly linked on your homepage.

Facebook
Set up a business page. Not a group page or people page. Use a bright image and a description which describes your organisation best. Update 2-3 times weekly. Don’t always push events – people see through this. Instead, update on activities in the venue. Set up a vanity URL i.e. www.facebook.com/droichead

Blog
Set up a wordpress blog. It’s simple and easy to use, plus it free. Nominate one person in you staff to update it twice weekly. Look at other organisation blogs to get a sense of the kind of language you need to use.

Constant Contacts
Review how it’s appearing in patron’s inbox. Keep it simple and have direct link to you website and booking online facility. Introduce Special offers and competitions to entice more user/higher rate of opening.

Digital Loop
Ensure each digital media feeds into each other. A simple example is this; all Droichead Arts Centre staff is now updating their email signatures to include links to our website, facebook, blog and e-guide sign up.

Staffing
Droichead Arts Centre does not have a professional Marketing Manager. If your organisation is the same, identify someone who is it savvy and interested or/and identify a work place student who can focus on this area for you. Training is important to ensure all staff are clear on the kind of language used in each medium and can evaluate its effectiveness. I believe this training needs to be integrated to management, marketing staff and box office sales staff.

The wider arts community
We all face similar challenges in the arts these days. It is important to look at what other organisations are doing to keep up with current trends and technology.

Evaluation
There is always the danger that the sales generated from these strategies are not worth the time and money spent pursuing them. As such, it is  important to put in place clear evaluation procedures to assess the level of resource input against the sales, for each different element of the digital marketing strategy. Introduce analytical reports as part of the marketing report in your operations/staff meeting.

A word from Arts Audiences
Are you interested in discussing this further?
If you are interested in asking Marcella or Aoife about aspect of this mentoring, please join us in the Arts Ireland group in LinkedIn. If you’re not already signed up for LinkedIn, it can be done in 5 minutes. If you are already on LinkedIn, but not part of the group, enter “Arts Ireland” in the search box and you’ll find us!