Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places Part II

This is the 2nd part of our discussion of membership and audience development, adapted from a talk originally given by Doug Simpson at ANDPVA, the Association for Native Development in the Performing and Visual Arts.

In Part 1 of this 2 part series, Doug made the case that the key to attracting and retaining new members is emotion. We continue the discussion below with frequently seen errors that prevent organizations from developing their audiences.

Mistake #1: Thinking that the audience you've got is the audience you want.

Virtually every client we've had begins every marketing and fund raising discussion by telling us about their audience or donor base. This makes sense to the extent that it informs them about who has responded to what has been offered in the past in terms of programming and promotions. However most of them are desperate for higher attendance and membership support, so it is illogical to allow the existing audience profile to determine who to target next. We have to at least think about how to broaden the support base or we're condemned to forever beating the same bushes to flush out a few more prospects or to suck a few more dollars out of the ones already in hand. The arts need constant growth and renewal of our audiences and members in order to flourish.

EXAMPLE: Years ago, the Toronto Zoo wanted to expand its visitor and membership base. Geographically, the Zoo is situated on the far eastern border of amalgamated Toronto, the biggest market in Canada. Logically, they would be targeting the city's huge population with all of their membership promotions. However their marketing and development people showed us data "proving" that the bedroom communities northeast of the city were much better hunting grounds than the city itself. Ajax, Pickering, Whitby, and north Scarborough were where they found most of their members, whereas the big city residents to the southwest simply weren't responsive to what the Zoo was offering.

Our analysis was different. The Zoo had done well in the bedroom communities - so well, in fact, that there was very little potential to achieve more. Membership was suffering from the law of diminishing returns. The harder the Zoo worked to attract new members from nearby communities, the less net support they received. In fact, we found that most of those valued members were young families who were using membership to benefit from discounted admissions. It took only a few visits for a family of four to wipe out the value (for the Zoo) of their annual membership. In effect, the people of Toronto were subsidizing the Zoo for people from other municipalities, both through an $8 million operating grant, and through this discounting of members. So we began looking at the barriers to Zoo membership for city residents. The answer seemed obvious. In our opinion, it was transit. City residents couldn't get to the Zoo often enough to get value out of their memberships. At the time of the study, the average household in Ajax, Pickering, or Whitby had between two and three cars in the driveway. The average resident of the old City of Toronto had slightly less than one car. Without a frequent, direct transit link, young families couldn't realistically make it to the Zoo. Imagine taking toddlers somewhere that requires a round trip of three hours with awkward transfers along the way.
Like all of us, the Zoo needed more visitors and more members to balance off its dependency on direct City funding. It also had good reason to find ways of serving the taxpayer better. But the targeting of its promotions was skewed by false assumptions about the motivation of its existing audience. The people of Ajax, Pickering, and Whitby don't go to the Zoo more often because they love animals more than the people of Toronto; they go because it's easier and cheaper. But it's obviously wiser to promote aggressively amongst the millions who actually "own" the Zoo, than to rely on an audience development strategy that targets the audience already being served, or perhaps over served. Let's rethink who we want as our supporters, and then we can think more clearly about how well we're connecting with them.

EXAMPLE (another one): In World War II, the British carefully recorded the damage to returning planes so that they could be modified where they were most likely to be hit. However the reinforced planes didn't have a much better survival rate than the unmodified planes. It wasn't until they realized that the really significant damage was suffered, not by the planes that returned, but the planes that didn't. By reinforcing where the returning planes hadn't been hit, they were able to reduce the number of downed planes.
It's easy to gather data about what's already in our grasp, but this data tells us very little about what's beyond our grasp. In audience development terms, this means that we must not assume that our future audience will be the same as our current audience, especially when the current audience and membership is insufficient to our needs.

Mistake #2: Scaling up in order to overcome meagre results.

Some organizations chickens before they hatch. Many organizations buy big mailing lists or engage big mailing houses to get more prospects into the hopper. The thinking is that the percentage of interested responses might be low, but that's all right if the number of solicitations is high. You've heard this kind of rationale before, "If only one out of two hundred thousand people send in $20, we just need to mail 18 million letters to make budget." But it's not really a numbers game. The really important thing is what you do with the prospects you discover. Most broad based direct mail campaigns don't make any money in their first year. It is only the incremental gains made in addition to annual renewals of memberships and subscriptions that make this kind of campaigning worth continuing, and some organizations, especially specialized or narrow interest groups never make any significant money at it. Once they get beyond their immediate circle of supporters, they never find that second ring of interested prospects, despite doing everything right. Keeping in mind that it's quite expensive to do the big mail campaign, and expensive to follow up on any prospects that emerge, the real gains are often made through fine grained follow up.

EXAMPLE: Let me tell you a happy story that illustrates the point that broad based initiatives can be more valuable as prospecting techniques than as methods of bringing in money fast. We were working on some member research for Amnesty International, which had just received a $1,000 cheque in response to one of its regular member renewal mailing. A lady in Calgary had responded to a small request with a big gift. The staff at Amnesty remarked on this to their development consultant, saying that they would pull this person from their next mailing so she wouldn't be irritated by further requests for a while.

The consultant took the opposite view. If she gave $1,000 when $100 would do, then she's signalling strong support for what Amnesty is doing. He wanted to meet her and learn more about her interest in the organization, so he called, flew to Calgary, and had coffee with her. He returned with a $30,000 cheque.

There's no point in paying a high price for more prospects than you can give your attention to. Don't cast your net so widely that you can't haul it into the boat. You really can't buy your way into enough new relationships to fix a declining or stagnant support base. Strong relationships will lead to higher levels of support from your current membership and better renewal or retention rates. Unless you have lots of money and mass appeal, you might want to have a hard look at existing relationships and build a narrower, better qualified group of prospects.

Mistake #3: Ignoring the practical details that inhibit your prospects.

It's already hard enough to bring new people into your audience and membership, so why ignore the practical realities that make it an even harder sell. In the case of the Toronto Zoo, we talked about how transit was an impediment for many city residents, but there are non-physical impediments as well. Sometimes the people you think you're attracting simply aren't getting the message. Either it's not reaching them or they aren't understanding it.

EXAMPLE: The Canadian Aboriginal Festival at the Rogers Centre (formerly the SkyDome), held annually in Toronto. When the Festival approached us in 1998, they were baffled by the Toronto market. They had been pretty successful with Aboriginals in the Golden Horseshoe and northern states, but their non-Aboriginal audience in Toronto simply never developed. They felt that they had enough media support to make a breakthrough, but the breakthrough never came. They needed to figure out why or they needed to stop trying to mount the Festival in a costly 50,000 seat venue.

We identified young, urban, non-Aboriginal families as a good test segment and conducted focus groups in a daycare, while at the same time running a telephone survey on a similar household profile. The answer was clear: the Festival's message wasn't making it through Toronto's pre-Christmas media and marketing clutter, and those that got the message weren't clear that it was intended for them. The style of the Festival's advertising gave them the impression that the Festival was only for Aboriginal people and that they might not be welcome, and as a result, they were discouraged from taking their children to it.

Although marketing and fund raising might be a science, there are often simple things that can be fixed to produce better results overall. Note that in this case, as with the Zoo, the only way to get this answer was to collect some information - surveys, focus groups and research if you've got the time and expertise to do it. If not, just talking to people can help an organization to understand what they're thinking.

Mistake #4: Misunderstanding what membership means.

Membership means different things to different people even within a single organization. Some want to feel like they're making a difference, whereas others want recognition and privileges or benefits, and still others enjoy the sense of belonging that comes from their affinity to the organization and its other members. The same is true of audiences, some of whom are supporting the organization by buying whole subscriptions and others who are simply trying to secure good seats or save money. Naturally we would like to have philanthropically motivated members and an audience that supports the artistic direction, but we can't afford to ignore the rest.
One marketing or fundraising approach won't work for all. So you have to understand what needs to be done to create the kinds of relationships you want.

EXAMPLE: The Canadian Opera Company was suffering an erosion of its subscription base during the late 90s, which was scary when they were dreaming of building a multi-million dollar opera house. Instead of people buying the six show season as a package, they were buying little three-packs, or cherry-picking through the season, packing the familiar shows and leaving the hall empty whenever the Artistic Director pushed the boundaries a bit. Theories emerged about education, immigration, alternate opera delivery media, performing arts industry cycles… But when we gathered carefully segmented focus groups of members and subscribers and put a series of straightforward questions to them, here is the picture that emerged: the COC had created a sophisticated audience for opera where it hadn't existed before in Toronto. Over decades, that audience had developed a variety of relationships to the COC, some not really very supportive. Some related most strongly to opera as an art form, and would go to see it anywhere, any time. Some related primarily to the COC as a company and felt that they were supporting its artistic growth and the culture of the city. Some related only to the repertoire. They had six favourite operas that they wanted to see again and again, and if they bought mini-subscriptions at all any more, it was only to keep their favourite seat locations. Perhaps the most surprising of all, the opera discovered that members thought that they were keeping the company alive and paying for the new opera house with their $75 annual membership fees.

The opera needed to fix its membership program in a hurry. It's extremely complicated in their case, but in a nutshell, we made sure that they linked their subscriptions to the artistic direction and to their capital campaign. The company started leaning harder on (now departed) Artistic Director Richard Bradshaw as a marketing brand, they started using the guarantee of seat locations and privileges to encourage larger donations, and they began rationalizing the benefits of membership relative to the cost, especially for affluent seniors who got discounted tickets and great membership privileges. The result was a return to full subscriptions and stronger financial contributions from members.

Get real about what your members think about membership or subscription. Why do they bother? You need to know, not only to make more sales, but also to reshape your membership offerings to improve member satisfaction and higher contributions. Don't assume that they see the same value in the transaction that you do. Ask them.


Mistake #5: Competing for share instead of growing the market...

You know who has an audience or a membership that overlap your own. You can work in isolation to develop membership and marketing plans that protect your share and possibly increase it, but you can't achieve a breakthrough with a strategy like this, and you probably don't want to vanquish your rivals in any case.

EXAMPLE: We were approached by the World Heritage Project to help raise $18.1 million USD to create a digital archive of artistic photographs and documentaries about all the world heritage sites. What we discovered was that this initiative closely paralleled a number of others, and that its unique features weren't really differentiating enough to power a competitive fund raising effort.

Another interesting case is the partnership of the Opera and the Ballet in the new Four Seasons Centre. In the past, they were working different parts of the same field, overlapping to some extent, but avoiding each other for the most part. This changed when they committed to living together in a facility. I spoke to the opera's corporate fund raising director after he was directed to have dinner with his counterpart from the Ballet. But instead of sharing strategies or prospects, he said it was the quietest dinner he'd ever been to. Suddenly they had been thrust together, the distance they'd maintained was gone, and they were faced with a choice between competing or cooperating in the effort to find support. Like many of our clients, they found themselves working hard to make space in a crowded market.

It is common for non-profit organizations, in the arts or other fields, to find themselves being overtaken by new entrants. Over time other organizations start to offer related services or programs, and gradually a constellation of rival organizations find themselves soliciting the same pool of membership and audience prospects. The choices are tough but simple. Either work harder to distance yourself from the field, or work closely with others in the field to look for new support beyond the existing pool of prospects and supporters. That means recognizing that your member is not only your member, but is legitimately attached in some ways to your rivals or allies. You have no option but to change what you offer and how you offer it to complement what else is available to them, or to withdraw and distance yourself as much as possible in the way you promote your organization to your current and prospective members.

You and your members and patrons are not alone. When you design what you offer and how you offer it, you need to recognize that there is a triangle of relationships at work between the member/patron, your organization, and your rivals or allies.