Hello all,
I'm preparing for a new webinar on effective source usage and could use your help. Anna and I already have a nice set of best practices that we think will help you get more from your sources, but we would also like to hear about some of your successes and failures. Maybe you're doing something great that we haven't thought of. Or maybe you have a problem we can find a solution for.
Please don't be shy. I know many of you feel like you don't have anything to say about sources other than that what you are doing isn't working. Well, let us know what isn't working. Where is the chain breaking down? Is the box office not using sources accurately? Are you unable to get the reporting data you need? Do you have too many sources? Do you not have enough? Are your appeals not breaking things out the way you would like to see them? What is the result you want to see?
When it comes to successes, small and simple are just as worthy as large and complex. Have you been able to get your box office to improve source usage accuracy a little? Have you seen some success for sources you create for offers on the web? Have you come up with an appeal structure that you like? If you are doing something that you like, don't think it is too simple or obvious to share. For this conversation nothing is too simple or too obvious.
Thanks in advance for joining the discussion! It will be a big help for our webinar and the community in general.
-Kevin
Lat year, right after we built our season I sat down and had a meeting with our Box Office Manager and Marketing Director because our source tracking and reporting was not what we wanted. We would have low success on a postcard source, yet when our postcard hits we see a huge spike in sales that day. So we sat down and discussed what some of the issues may be.
ISSUE 1: What the Box Office was seeing. Our naming convention for sources was the same as lists and extractions. Unfortunately that meant the box office was seeing 0809 Kite Runner Po... 0809 Kite Runner Ema, 0809 Kite Runner News, etc. And they couldn't figure out what the different sources were and were not marking them. So we proposed a separate naming convention for sources. We believed that when a patron was asked how they heard about the show, the first word they would say is probably the type of media it was so that is why we chose the media form as the first word in our naming convention. (NEWSPAPER Mercury News, POSTCARD Ain't Misbehavin', EMAIL Sonia Flew) It also allows them to sort by description and easily find what they are looking for. We have had great responses from the Box Office staff as to how much easier it is to find sourcs adn know what they are. (Our small success)
ISSUE 2: The number of sources the Box Office saw and were expected to use. We had an ENORMOUS amount of sources (For marketing there was 100 general outside sources that were expected to be used all the time, plus all the specific inside sources for each show) And so we talked about how to limit the number of sources. We discussed how the box office was possibley over-whelmed by the amount of sources they had to sort through. We came up with three solutions. One, we became diligent about using accurate START and END dates on each source. Two, we made sure that proper security was in place so Box Office was not seeing development source codes. Three, reduce the number sources. Was it really important to track all these things if they weren't being marked correctly? But our still really wants to track ALL the different types of newspapers in the area so that we knew exactly which local newspaper patrons saw us in. Unfortunately we could not cut down on sources and we are still sitting at 100 general outside sources. Although it was discussed that we would be back where we started, this only spawned the idea that we should also track whether patron heard about us in a newspaper AD or a newspaper ARTICLE so now we have 2 sources for each newspaper in our area (about 7 newspapers, 14 sources plus an additional catch-all newspaper as other and newspaper article other) and we are still experiencing the same problem as before that the sources are not being used accurately. (our failure)
I would love for you to share our success and to also talk about what is too many sources, how that effects your box office staff and their efficiency at tracking, and of course if any one else has had this challenge/struggle and how they over came it. Thanks!
We found some success by creating prefixes that allow the box office to sort through sources easily. The prefixes we use are GEN for sources like radio or newspaper, SUB for subscription sources, TM for telemarketing orders and SO for any special offers. SO prefixes are followed immediately by the promo code making it easy for the box office to associate promos with the orders.
Thanks to the responses I’ve already received. They are exactly what I was hoping for! But I know there have to be more than two of you with stories to share about sources. I think I’ll take a tried and true page from the marketing handbook and offer a little incentive.
Anyone who shares a source story (including those who already responded) will be entered in a drawing for….a batch of homemade, from scratch brownies. As my wife and her coworkers (since mine live too far away to share with) can attest, I’m a pretty good baker. I make it all from scratch: cakes, cupcakes, frostings, cookies, breads, even marshmallows (easier than you think and a great way to impress people). This weekend I made a raspberry, cream cheese filled sweet bread braid that looked straight from a bakery. My first from scratch revelation though came as a teenager when I tried baking brownies from scratch. The rich, dense, powerfully chocolaty result turned me off flat and stale boxed brownies for life. Now I want to make a convert out of you.Due to the practicalities of shipping perishable food oversees, I’m going to have to limit the baked goods offer to US residents. I’ll be happy to share the recipe though. I’ll even make a T-Cast for you on how to make them if you’d like.So send in your source stories. If not for brownies, then to help your marketing compatriots get better at using sources and maybe help yourself with it too.Thanks,Kevin SheehanDocumentation and Baking Specialist
Online we track everything from emails to banners and google ads etc each of these have their own source codes which are embedded in the url and automatically tracked.
However, this was causing a problem with Box Office as they were seeing a lot of sources and not knowing which ones to select.
We have now taken the 'web' tracking sources and hidden them from Box Office by adding them to appeals with a control group, which allows us to maintain the fine level of reporting we can get from the web. The web appeals are setup such that we have seperate appeals for each booking period, one for priority mailings, one for booking period opening and one for normal email communications without offers for productions in that booking period. For offers we setup an appeal per production, this makes it a lot easier for us to communicate to our Box Office Setup team and for them to find which source goes with which offer. We have seperate appeals setup for our regular reminder and thankyou emails and the generic Google links and online advertising and an appeal setup for tracking more specific online campaigns.
For Box Office themselves we have gone back to using generic sources, but maintaining tracking of offers by using price types. This is not ideal and still a work in progress.
With the latest update allowing searching by promo code for the box office this may be reviewed and trialled to see if there are better ways of capturing the finer level of detail for our offline media.
Mark
PART I: Organization
In terms of sources, we have to manage two unrelated Seasons (technically more, but for simplicities’ sake, it’s our own presentations and then various rentals who may or may not have their own seasons) thus all of our ticketing really runs on two separate tracks. The phone room is shared and all of the secure web processes match, but when we think or talk about what we’re selling, it’s going to be either New Victory or Duke.
That being said, the sources run system-wide and we’ve revised our sources to accommodate the big picture first. During Tessitura Year 1, we attempted the opposite and then were unfortunately looking at reports that attributed New Victory sales to both “New York Times” and “New York Times – Rental” and so on. It was frustrating to look at because the reporting not only *looked* a bit careless to have something so clearly mismarked, but also because it no longer gave you real totals where there were supposed to be totals. But we definitely wanted to make it as straightforward as possible for the box office—not only because we like them and would prefer not to make them choose between almost identical sources, but because it’s a bit ridiculous to keep a patron on the phone longer simply because we have complicated naming conventions—so we streamlined everything as part of the next round of season building.
I now just approach Campaigns and Appeals as if they’re simply buckets to hold sources. I’m sure I’m accidently eliminating some of the intended usefulness, but we don’t records dollars from these tools, at least not in a way that finance is affected by this idea. (I should note that Development operates differently and Campaigns and Appeals have a more literal definition for them.) Campaign names make sense, but mostly exist (here; they do connect to Finance stuff) only because Appeals require an entry in that field. The Appeal bucket has a few seasonal ticketing appeals (internal, external, multi-show, corporate discounts, whatnot) and then some “All Seasons” appeals. The former have things like sales emails, show postcards, etc; the latter has the sources that we use every year and don’t need to rebuild. This last bit is still sort of in its beta phase, because there are some finance related implications with the dates attached to it, but we’re seeing how it goes and liking it so far.
The reports make a lot more sense now, we’ve drastically simplified what the box office has to deal with, and everyone seems happy to repeat this set-up for future seasons.
PART II: Reporting
There are two reports I run constantly: our Daily Wrap (custom) and Performance by Appeal. A lot of the organizational strategy of the campaign and appeal “buckets” comes directly from how I want this report to read, how I want things grouped together. However, my “source story” to share is how we’ve customized the latter ever so slightly and made it much more useful for me.
I’ve attached some paperwork here. Page 1 is one page of what I get from the out-of-the-box report. Page 2 is one example of what I can run using the custom version (same parameters as previous page, but filtered to a specific source). Page 3 is a second example (YTD sales from that same specific source, plus others through the same vendor).
The canned report gave me the information that I wanted, but often way too much of it. When analyzing campaign results, I only wanted to compare certain campaigns, not look at all activity within that date and production range. Plus, I needed to have a document that I could share with ad reps, either to officially report their sales commission or discuss how they had or hadn’t been successful for us. The custom version of the report adds two parameters, select Appeal and select Source. Both are clickable and sticky so I can run a report for whatever portion of the sales picture I need at that time.
I do archival snapshots (also known as PDFs!) per show and per season, so we have them on hand to compare when mapping out show budgets.
I can’t answer questions about the queries behind the report customization, but can try to field them on any of the other items above.
Jamie O'Brien Marketing Associate The New 42nd Street, Inc. 229 W. 42nd Street New York, NY 10036-7299 (646) 223-3000 www.newvictory.org
From: Tessitura Marketing Forum [mailto:forums-marketing@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Kevin Sheehan Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 3:54 PM To: Jamie O'Brien Subject: Re: [Tessitura Marketing Forum] Source Stories
Anyone who shares a source story (including those who already responded) will be entered in a drawing for….a batch of homemade, from scratch brownies. As my wife and her coworkers (since mine live too far away to share with) can attest, I’m a pretty good baker. I make it all from scratch: cakes, cupcakes, frostings, cookies, breads, even marshmallows (easier than you think and a great way to impress people). This weekend I made a raspberry, cream cheese filled sweet bread braid that looked straight from a bakery. My first from scratch revelation though came as a teenager when I tried baking brownies from scratch. The rich, dense, powerfully chocolaty result turned me off flat and stale boxed brownies for life. Now I want to make a convert out of you. Due to the practicalities of shipping perishable food oversees, I’m going to have to limit the baked goods offer to US residents. I’ll be happy to share the recipe though. I’ll even make a T-Cast for you on how to make them if you’d like. So send in your source stories. If not for brownies, then to help your marketing compatriots get better at using sources and maybe help yourself with it too. Thanks, Kevin Sheehan Documentation and Baking Specialist
From: Kevin Sheehan <bounce-kevinsheehan4372@tessituranetwork.com> Sent: 4/1/2010 10:28:59 AM
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Thanks to those who replied to this thread! I haven't forgotten about my brownie drawing. After putting the names in a hat the winner is...Laura Saldivar. I'll email you directly to work out the details. Thanks again to everyone for helping out with this topic.