Hi everyone. Dan here. It's almost the end of the fiscal year and many of us are wrapping up performance seasons, launching big fundraising pushes, and keeping a close eye on whether we'll hit our goals. And at the center of all that? Marketing and development. These teams are working toward the same big picture goals, bringing in revenue, deepening relationships, and moving organizational missions forward.
But too often they end up operating in silos: on separate timelines, using different tools, and talking to the same audiences in totally different ways. And when that happens, no one's work is as effective as it could be. So we wondered, what happens when you intentionally start breaking down these silos? When teams don't just share goals, but also share plans,
data and ownership of the full audience journey? In today's episode, I'll sit down with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company's Director of Marketing, Jeanna Vella, and Director of Development, Sara Clark. During the pandemic, Jeanna and Sara's department started working more closely out of necessity, but what began as a response to crisis turned into a lasting shift in how they collaborate.
That collaboration continues to fuel results across ticket sales and fundraising, and it's something they actively nurture day in, day out. Together, we'll talk about why silos between marketing and development are so common, the unique strengths each department brings to the table, and how to tackle common challenges like miscommunication and competing priorities.
If you've ever felt like marketing and development are running parallel races instead of just moving forward together, then this episode offers a ton of inspiration for what's possible. Let's dive in, shall we? Jeanna and Sara, welcome to CI to Eye. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you so much. So we're going to talk about the relationship between development and marketing, but before we get started, you're both kind of Shakespeare nerds. What's your most controversial Shakespeare opinion?
Well, I think mine is that I'm actually not a Shakespeare nerd. That's the controversial add. I was a music person and now I've worked at Shakespeare companies for 17 years, so I think it has gotten in there a little bit. So I don't know. That might be my controversy is that I think you don't have to be a Shakespeare nerd to market Shakespeare effectively and very well. I love it.
Oh, I don't know if I have a controversial Shakespeare opinion. I mean, I've been doing this almost 20 years now with the company, and so I think I am in general less precious about it than I was when I kind of first came out, I was like, no, it must be this and text must be that. And you can never change a single thing, even though this word has fallen into complete obsolescence and means a very different thing now. And so yeah, I think I just am more relaxed about it than I used to be.
Amazing. Love it. Mine is that it's fine to say Macbeth. Ah, that is a hot take. I'm not that crazy. But I don't out of respect for people who do care about that. Let's start by setting the stage. What did the pandemic look like for Cincinnati Shakespeare Company? How did it impact your operations and revenue? Sure. So I'm sure everybody listening has their version of this story,
but this is ours. So here in the state of Ohio, the governor put forward the ban on mass gatherings over a hundred on March 12th, 2020. And effectively that shuttered our doors where we were. We had just announced about a week prior, a brand new season, and sold what Jeanna? $200,000 in advanced subscriptions to it? Something like that? We had ordered all of the posters, they had all of the dates on them. We pre-printed all the materials. That was the first time I'd ever done that.
Every show was cast. We were ahead of the game. We were so excited, so ready. We were two weeks into a five-week run of Kate Hamill's adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which at the time was set to break all of our single ticket records. Every data point that we had said that this was going to be the bestselling show in the company's history. And we were four days into rehearsing a much anticipated production of Hamlet when it all came down.
And in the end we ended up staying closed for 579 days. The theater was dark and we had to make some hard decisions really, really fast. So on March 12th, we probably had 60 or 70 odd people on the payroll. That was two dozen full-time staff, plus part-timers, plus actors, designers, front of house, bartenders, everybody that it takes to make a theater run. All of those contractors were let go on day one and two weeks later, 10 full-time staff followed.
So we went from about 70 people to 12 and just kind of buckled down and tried to make it through the next 600 days. Well, and I think the thing to add too is Sara, you had taken on the role of Director of Development... ...About 12 weeks before that. Yeah. Right before that. That's right. It wasn't like we were all preparing for 600 days of closure, either. It was like, what will the next week, what will the next two weeks [be]? And that's what made a lot of the decisions so difficult as well.
Well, exactly. We kept doing season announcements and yeah, there was no way to know, but had they said, okay, you're going to be closed for two years, we would've done things totally differently. Yeah, it was the unknown. That was one of the hardest parts about it.
Yeah, we had also just passed a board approved budget and business plan a couple of months prior, and so we were moving forward with that and the announcement of the new season and we ended up having to redo that twice over in four different versions. We essentially took that business plan and made a plan A, B, C, and D for the entire business based on when we could reopen the theater, which was the biggest unknown. And were there any key turning points as you began to reopen?
Was there a break point of now we're open, or was it gradual? It was gradual in the sense that we knew we needed to start rehiring people, getting things back in. Basically we turned the cog off and we needed to start the gears again. So that was a little bit gradual. But besides all of the logistical things, if you remember, we had to check vaccination records and status and masking. Besides all of those operational nightmares and challenges, we just had to figure out who are we welcoming back?
Because I think we can all look at ourselves and say, there's probably things that are different about us now post-pandemic just as people, and the types of things that we do for fun or the types of things that we do outside of our homes. So the audience was just going to be very different and look very different. And so that was the big thing to say, who are we welcoming? What do they need now? And that was a whole different group of people, even if it was the same bodies coming in,
the things that they needed had changed. So relearning that, listening to that new audience. And I would say some of that work definitely still continues to this day, as we're learning the habits and things that people expect about their experience out is different now. The numbers from your last three seasons are really impressive, especially compared to what many other organizations have experienced. What do you think made that rebound possible?
So I think we had as good a footing going into a great global crisis as we probably could have had. We're not a particularly old organization and we're not a particularly large one. So just for context, we're in our 31st season. There's a lot of organizations in the city who are 50 or upwards of hundred-year-old arts organizations, and we're just kind of under a 4 million budget here in Cincinnati, Ohio. So kind of middle of the line.
We didn't have the big multi tens of million dollars endowment invested that a lot of older and more storied organizations could lean on. That's the whole point of that is to be able to lean on it in crisis. But what we had done is in the lead up to being able to execute the capital campaign and the building of our new building, which happened about three years prior to 2020, is we had done a lot of advanced work to make sure that our financial controls were really, really strong.
That sort of the understanding and ownership of the business, not just at the top and at the board level, but throughout the leadership and the staff was really strong. And we'd strategically built up some cash reserves and some facility funds. So we were in a good enough position. And that combined with making hard decisions really fast, having to let go of a lot of people, essentially kind of insulated us up until we were able to really maximize those
relief opportunities. That started to come once we were three, six months, a year into this. And then we really capitalized on the time that we had without doing shows. We were in these kind of zoom rooms and thought, well, if we had all this time, what is something that we could work on together?
And that was really where kind of what we call our staff innovation took place when we really started to rebuild the development side of our ticketing database and really integrate those teams because our team went down to one in marketing, two in development. So the three of us joined forces and thought, well, let's just lean into this. What do you need? What do I need? What can we do together? How can we capitalize on this time?
And we set off on taking time -- in this case, the big one was our database. Really getting development up to snuff with that with our marketing was a huge investment of time and we had the time to do it. So we tried to capitalize on that. Yeah, I think that's one of the most striking, exciting parts of your story is the way that marketing and development are working together, and that's not always the norm.
Was there just an aha moment of, hang on, we should all be working together a lot closer going forward, not just for this database? Well, yeah. I think we realized looking specifically when you're stripping it all away and you don't have shows, it's the same people. Trying to think about folks as patrons or donors, it just didn't make any sense. If you think about it, we had ticket buyers that had now become donors because they said, please take our tickets back or we're not going to come.
And I don't necessarily think patrons were thinking, oh wait, I'm taking my ticket buyer hat off and putting on my donor. That's not how people feel about their experience. So why were we operating as if those were very separate groups of people or those groups had different needs? They really didn't. They were really combined. It's just not as linear as people want to think it is. Sometimes it is.
Sometimes someone will actually go from first time attendee, maybe they didn't even buy a ticket, maybe their friend brought them and then they buy a single ticket and then they subscribe and then they make a small donation and then they make a major donation and then they write us into their will. That's kind of the standard progression that we learn.
And I'm sure there are people that are like that, but in our joint experience, most people come in somewhere else or they surprise you, they'll start as a hundred dollars donor and then all of a sudden they're a hundred thousand dollars donor because they had a moment, they wanted to make an investment, it was right time, right place.
Or they might have come in as a donor because they believed in something we were doing outside of the building, like our education programs or free Shakespeare in the park, and they've never even seen a show here. And so the win on them is to get them to come to a show, to make them a first-time buyer. So I think that myth and that sort of passing through, because if you're structuring your plan that way, that means that one department's not even looking at people until a certain
point. Development shouldn't come in and say, okay, I just want to see people that have been here a bunch of times, only subscribers. I mean, that's one group, but you're missing out on everyone and it's a little intimidating, but it could be anyone in the world. Anybody could enter that path at any point. But keeping in mind that it's not linear, I think it's sort of freeing because there's all kinds of different strategies that you can do and you don't have to focus on the first one.
You can focus on all of them in different ways. And now I think the important caveat there is, that doesn't mean that all communications go to all people because all people can enter at any time, right? No, it's the opposite because I think we acknowledge that people can enter into that continuum at any point. Jeanna and I are jointly really strategic about who we're talking to, about what, when. So we absolutely segment and target communications within the base.
We just don't kind of fall in a silo of you're on this side of this linear spectrum and I'm on this side of it. What is your team really good at and how does those strengths compliment the other team?
Something that I think marketing professionals are amazing at is really understanding voice of the customer, understanding that while we are a charitable organization, while we have a mission and we do mission-driven work, we're also a business and we need to not make a lot of assumptions about what our folks need and want. We need to actually ask them and put the work into listening there.
I think marketing teams are really great at infrastructure, working within systems and creating operating systems and standard procedures that just help us only have to make a hard decision once and then we sort of know how things can operate. Jeanna in particular, and marketing folks I hope in general, are also data geeks. They understand the power of making a data informed decision and the strength of sharing that with more than just their department and how
that can really empower all of us. And then just branding, creating a cohesive identity so that no matter what sort of external communication you're doing, everybody is speaking with the same voice. And what I've learned from development professionals and Sara in particular is the value of small moves. So often I'll hear these stories about someone that they've stewarded for years that hasn't donated for -- again, in marketing, I'd be like, great,
we need to move on. We have a show that's closing. So that value of those small moves, the long game, and really thinking, well, how can I bring that same kind of strategy to marketing that works in development. And storytelling! Marketing, we often get very short amounts of characters to tell a story. Development sometimes gets a little bit longer in those grants or those long conversations, essentially building a story with a donor.
How is development taking the time to build that story and really bring people into it to find their own place inside that story? And development has a curiosity. They always want to learn a little more about wait, what are they doing down in the scene shop? Because that might be something that I could find a sponsorship for or funder might be interested in that. Or actually now that I'm down here, I see that you have a need, maybe I could find some money for that.
So slowing down sometimes in marketing, putting that development mindset on could really help us see ways that we weren't thinking about before, just looking at something through a different lens. So I think by finding those, we kind of call 'em our superpowers in each other, only benefited both of us to see those things. And it feels like there's a lot of overlap in terms of listening. It was just like how you listen data versus story and how they can really ate each other there.
So let's talk about what collaboration actually looks like in practice at Cincy Shakes. How do you stay in sync? Are there any specific tools, routines, communication practices that have helped your team stay aligned? Definitely the Spektrix was the big piece because that was one of our biggest challenges, was just data integration issues. So getting us together using the system the same way was huge for us.
So we have active Spektrix users from both of our teams, but you can set up reports that just basically get emailed out to the whole team. So we have people that don't even touch the system, but in the morning they might get a report that we've talked about and decided that helps them see where we are in sales or where we are on donations. We've got a great one that says major donors that are attending this weekend. The box office should know that. The production team should know.
Everyone should know those things. And that was a marketing tool that we're using for development, and that goal that they're trying to reach by making sure we're covering all the donors at all the levels. Yeah, I mean even just taking that basic idea, I create a slide deck, a 15 slide deck for the box office staff every year that it's like these are the names and the faces of the 15 people that if they walk through that door, you need to know who they are.
That just comes from that kind of general ethos of, we all share a responsibility for this. We're all fundraisers, we're all marketers, we're all performers, we're all responsible for the people's experience that come into our space. And then look, I know nobody wants another meeting on their schedule, but there are two that we have put in place that we think are actually incredibly valuable and productive to being able to get these two departments
synced up. One of them is, we start the week like 11:00 AM on Monday, and Jeanna and I both meet with our producing artistic director who is the executive director of the organization. And I think it's incredibly valuable. I mean between Jeanna and I, we essentially manage all of the company's revenue.
So Jeanna manages all of the earn side, I manage all of the contributed side, and as opposed to us having one-on-ones with our artistic director and then having to play telephone and translate and nobody really knows what everybody else is doing, we just do it together.
And it's a way of both allowing us to be aware of and just develop some sort of basic empathy and understanding for what this other part of the business is going through at a particular moment, but also to be able to offer a really valuable outside perspective and go, well, I understand that maybe this is the best practice over here, but have you thought about this? This is maybe how I would approach that particular thing.
And I think we have found that to be really, really practical and valuable. And then the other thing we've set up is a Dev Comms meeting. So we kind of made up this department called Development Communication, Dev Comms, and it's all the members of the development team and all the members of the marketing team. Weekly meeting, we close the door, it's just us.
We get to really look at everything we're doing, look through every line and product that we have coming up, and don't tell any of my other meetings, but this is my favorite meeting because I think we get the most accomplished. That's usually an hour of our week that really does set us up for the next week. I am definitely one of those people that's like, not another meeting, please can't this be an email. But those are two that have been very successful for us.
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in this endeavor? So I think a lot of challenges that marketing and development teams face, it's really just sort of a misalignment of priorities and timelines and it gives you the sense that your goals are in conflict with each other, even though that's not actually true. So we alluded a little bit earlier to this idea of marketing is really good at the immediate game, the thing in front of them, and that makes sense.
Their timelines are shorter and tighter than ours. The show is going to open and it's going to close and you can't market it once it's already closed. So we have to have an understanding of that, whereas as Jeanna said, development can be a much longer process and it's a series of moves over weeks or months or years to get to the ultimate goal that you're trying to achieve.
And there's a natural tension there. And that's just something that I think when you acknowledge it and you have empathy and understanding for how those two things need to sync up together, you can start to be practical about it.
So that might look like something as simple as making sure that if your two departments are doing basically all of the external communications with your people, you want to make sure that they're synced up, that you're not cannibalizing each other, that you're not overloading your people or going too much time without talking
to a certain group. It really is just having the conversation and going, we have the same big goal, but we currently have different short-term ones, so how do these two things link together? And then what is the tactics and the steps that get us to the ultimate achievement? And once you have gone through one season at least, you start to realize where are my busiest times? Where's my tension points?
So for marketers or for me in particular, the season announcement's always our busiest time because it's setting up a lot of things for that coming season. So it's good for development to know that, because it wouldn't be a great time to come to us with a new idea. They might get stressed, that kind of reaction from the team, and they might look and go, well see, I tried to work with marketing but they shut me down. It's like, were we thinking about the timelines and things they were doing?
Because people aren't always so good at communicating that. They just feel overwhelmed and it's just a feeling that you think is going to last forever. What I always like to say to my team is, keep hard days in perspective. It's not always this level of pressure all the time, but being able to know when each other's hard days are just makes collaboration more effective. And then you can swing in and say, Hey, I have time. This is a lighter time for me. What can I do to help you out?
We've been doing that just now. We're sort of both involved in a show we've got on the stage. Sara's directing it, I'm playing in the orchestra, and we have a big fundraiser we have coming up, so we were just sort of swinging between each other. What can I do to cover you here? How could we work this out? Yeah, it feels very deep. It feels like a culture. It's a change in mindset towards collaboration.
How did you build that buy-in with leadership? With the box office? Like, all levels of the organization? I think a lot of it started with -- in the years just prior to the launch of our capital campaign, we really had some cleaning house to do in terms of our own operations. So I mean there was a time 10, 15 years ago when I first got into development, I did it by writing grants.
I was a grant writer first and I used to have to meet monthly with the board treasurer to look at when this $5,000 was expected to come in because it impacted cashflow. That's not us anymore. And how we got from that to where we are now is really spreading ownership and accountability of the business throughout the leadership. So when we get a budget or a business plan rolled out, it's not the first time we've seen it. We built it.
The leadership's responsibility is to kind of set strategy and vision and the overall slate and then it goes out to Jeanna and to me and to our production manager and to the head of our education department and anybody who's kind of owning that portion, be it revenue or expense or a combination of the two, and the subject matter expertise then builds that from the ground up. We say, this is what we think we can raise, this is what we think we can sell,
this is what we think we can spend. And then it's a conversation, it's a practice. So that sense of transparency and accountability is built into the ethos of the company. And then I think we've just managed to take it sort of a step further with our specific teams. And I think really what makes that work is the transparency piece and that does start top down. So we're very open about if we're having a financial challenge.
I mean, especially in the pandemic, it was a lot of, here's the numbers, here's where we are, we want everyone to see. There is no benefit to hiding that or obscuring that from the team. And it's funny, we have this board in the kitchen where we have our sales goal and then where we are to meet that goal and the amount of people that are blown away that we would
publicly put that information out there. It is surprising to me like, well, I want everyone to see where we're at and where we're struggling. Sometimes it's not good news. Sometimes it is a show that's struggling and we have to manage that to say, well, here's the things that we're doing and here's what's happening. But by being transparent about it, everyone's on the same page and then we can rely on our team and they can be accountable to help build those goals.
Nothing is sort of obscured from everyone. Everyone knows what's going on. Yeah, it sounds very refreshing when you made that move. It must have felt almost like a relief to have all that transparency. Oh yeah. I'll never forget, at one point, I got a budget rollout and I looked at it and I went, I can't apply for this grant that you say is going to bring in $20,000 this year. They're on an every-other-year cycle. And it's just one small example of what happens.
And it doesn't mean that leadership is bad or uninformed, it's they're not the subject matter expert in your part of the business. You are. So part of your job is managing up, down, and sideways, and then all of us put this thing together. I hear from other marketers sometimes that they sort of get the goals and they bring so much anxiety, and I can see that. We would never do that. No magical thinking.
I understand that you needed to make this much to make your budget, to make your expenses work, but we can't get there and it does no one any good to hope that we could. So let's look back and build this budget together. Realistically, where are some places that we can push and where are some places that we can
pull back on expenses? Not to say we don't have stretch goals, we're always trying to reach for more, but by using the data, we can make really good guesses on where we think we're going to be and we need to do that, basically look at the expenses and if it doesn't match up, then we go back to figuring that out. You went through a website redesign, right? Yes. Yeah, just recently with Hotfoot. Great. How was that process in terms of your two departments and what you need from the website?
We do a lot of work with website redesigns and we're constantly trying to get people to talk. Tell people what you need from the website and also what the website needs to do from a patron slash donor point of view as well, rather than our department's point of view. How was that process? Well, it definitely started with, we know we needed a new website, which has sort of become a thing that you need to be looking at every three
years if not more. And as I've been with the company for about 16 seasons, this was my fourth website redesign and every time we do a new one, I loved it. And then towards the end, I hated it every single time, so we need to change this. So I've been talking about needing a new one, and Sara actually -- her team was able to find a funder to support that new work because again, that's a sort of new capital expense. The cost to do websites now has grown so much.
And again, development's a long game. It was a funder who was actually, I think the last capital gift in the capital campaign, but they only do gifts every three years. And they gave me a call and said, Hey, it's been three years since your last one, what do you got? And I said, well, I have a website among some other things. But that was definitely a big part of it.
And so I led the project, but in collaboration with development to say, okay, what tools, I know exactly how I think that the ticket path should go for our patrons, so I'm going to bring some of that knowledge, that frictionless experience and make my suggestions to development about how could we make your path even better, and making sure those two things were integrated so they were done at the same
time. When we were looking back at basically -- we sort of built out that site map, that was a great opportunity to go, okay, wait a second. We had this sort of fun structure with what if we break that down and simplify this, whatever. So we sort of use the same sort of questions and debates that we were having with ourselves in marketing in development to say, how could we improve this?
And I think it led to even more clarity on how we could think about our annual events, individual, monthly, however we were thinking about it, that can become reflected on the website and then I could work with our web developers to make things more clickable and fun and kind of gamification of some things. Yeah, I think that process too was a great example. It really highlights what we were talking about before, which is not everybody chooses to interact with the organization for the first
time in the same way. So if you're designing a website and you're going, everybody's first interaction is they're going to buy a single ticket, then that's the lens you're going to design a website on. Whereas if you acknowledge that there are probably a few ways, maybe somebody came to a gala as a guest and now they want to go buy a ticket or maybe somebody saw that we take these donor trips and now they want to see what we do on our main stage. So it's making those accessible and honestly,
it was fun. I mean I remember pulling Jeanna into my office and I had -- it was like A Beautiful Mind. I had post-it notes and the path of here are the pages and here's how they lead and can this link to that? And it was really lovely being able to think about that and to have a thought partner in it to create what we created. I could look back and go, okay, what you're saying is this, right?
The two of us can have that shorthand, having worked together for a long time or kind of pushing back and questioning, well, what if it was this or what if we tried it this way? I think that kind of comes to my ethos that I shared at Boot Camp too, which is: stop being so precious about your kingdoms and your own things that you're working on and really let someone else in.
Because when they're looking at something, when you're breaking it down -- because you think about websites, it's like, well, we should probably have a corporate foundation page and an individual giving page and it's like, well, wait a minute, let's break that down. Why would a foundation come to the site? What would they be doing on there? Whatever.
So it was just a chance to kind of break things down and really stop being precious about how we'd always done it and think about different ways of doing it. And it makes for a more coherent website. Sometimes I look at websites and it feels like there are three different websites written in completely different ways. It's just so -- Because they probably were.
Because they probably were. Exactly. So when you have this collaboration, I think one of the things you said here was you said, don't be so precious. I love that message as well of collaboration because it requires a dropping of ego and it requires a little bit of vulnerability as well. Oh yeah. I mean I think when you establish that, right, it actually allows you to make braver and riskier decisions because you're able to put a suggestion or an idea into the room without going, oh god,
Jeanna's going to hate this. You know what? I'm just not going to say it. Or vice versa. It's like, I don't think that's a good idea. I feel like I need to say something and here's why. And being able to create that culture of we are all on the same team, we're all talking to the same people, we're all trying to deliver on the same mission. And if those things are true and we have sort of a base understanding of empathy and enjoyment of each other, then great.
That's a place from which we can actually push and disagree and have conflict and it can still be okay and hopefully result in a better product on the other side. Yeah, I think to have that creativity, you need a basis of psychological safety in your workplace because creativity does not happen without, and ideas aren't shared without a base level of I'm safe here, I can say a bad idea and it'd be okay. Yeah, absolutely. And I know that's probably the number one barrier.
A lot of people maybe listening right now say, I don't feel that with my development department or my team. And what we would always suggest to folks is just do something tomorrow. What's the one step you can make? Can you send an email congratulating them on something they did? Can you go to that fundraiser that you're not really involved in but just to see how it goes? Or can they come to your talk back that you're doing after a show and just show
up? Take a step forward? Because I truly believe people, especially people in this business, we all want to have fun. We all have a sense of humor about it. We all care very much about what we're doing. So how can you tap into that on each other's teams and what's the first thing you can do to build that bridge? What are some other examples of this in practice?
So one that comes to mind, just thinking about our season announcement, we do an online auction as one of our three major special events in the year, and this is something that I started, it was the first year we were still kind of all remote in the pandemic, so we've only been doing it I think now we've completed four of them, and the first two were at different times in the year.
I was kind of trying to find the perfect time in the calendar. It's like, oh, when is there not a whole lot going on? Or when can I maybe capitalize on holiday giving?
So we tried a few things and then last year it was actually Jeanna's suggestion, recognizing what is unique and special about the way we do an auction is we're really good at building these kind of unique packages that combine something donated, maybe a special experience from a community partner or a neighborhood group, and then pairing it to a show we're going to do on our main stage that maybe is
thematically linked. And so it kind of comes with CSC tickets, it gets them in the door, it gets us more invested with that person who's not thinking of themself as a donor yet, and then also kind of works with the community. And Jeanna came forward and is like, why don't we actually do it with the season announcement? Because the problem with doing it later is one, you're missing out on a third or half the shows you can be able to create
packages around. And two, a whole bunch of people have already bought tickets when we did that first big push. So it's not as compelling to go, you get six of this and that, blah, blah, blah, blah. We tried it for the first time last year, it went well, but I was like, oh, I'm not quite sure if this is it, but I want to give it one more.
And then we took the learnings from that and did it again this year, knowing more and the overall balance of things and packages and numbers and operations and it worked beautifully. It's really a nice solid event. And then again, going back to those operations and those protocols, this is something that now I can take and pretty much run without too much stress on Jeanna's team who is in their most intense time of year.
Yeah, I remember when I suggested, I was like, I'm going to regret suggesting this because this is not the time to add a thing. But I really, because again, I see the benefit of this auction happening during this busy time. We're getting so much PR and people are really looking at what we're doing with the season, and I love now that they have two call to actions. They can subscribe and or they can participate in the auction. So leaning into that was like, all right, I'm seeing this.
I know had it gone the other way and development had come and had maybe not bought any rapport with us yet and say we want to do our auction with season announcement, marketing would panic. Bad timing. Forget about it. But by kind of coming to the natural conclusion together, it just made the most sense to do it that way. And then we just strategized from there, how can we work ahead? How can we make sure as our small team, we see it coming? It wasn't a surprise.
We knew we could work up onto it and we were able to execute it that way and I think it's the right place for that particular fundraising a bit. Yeah, I like that you went back to it after a year as well and kind took those learnings. Sometimes good ideas like that, especially with collaboration where there's maybe a little bit of friction just because of natural different silos, sometimes it requires giving it enough go and doubling down on the idea a little bit.
Well, and Sara was just talking about that about, one thing she's learned from me is just try it. Yeah. Sara's so smart and so very detailed on the work that she does, but sometimes I'm like, let's just try it. If it's not great -- what is that, 'good is the enemy of great'? It's like, well, great is the enemy of good. Yeah. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Sometimes we've just got to put something in place and then we have something to
react to. One of the things I tell my team is you can't edit nothing. So when I'm thinking about a proposal or a letter or a grant, just get something out there and then you've got something you can tweak with. And I have to kind of apply that mindset to some of these bigger projects. And the other one too was, we have an annual gala. A lot of people do. It's called The Revel, and usually it's sort of 'Revel in Romance' or 'Revel and Rollick' or something.
It sort of is themed every year, and it actually started looking very traditionally like a fundraising event. It was not even in our building, it was in a fancy ballroom somewhere and we were always trying to program it. We'd have to kind of come up with performers or we got kids in there to do stuff. Thinking about again, any standard fundraising event. And in the pandemic was the first time that, again, that Dev Comms team, we thought, okay, so we're creating a show for this event.
Do you know what we have a lot of? Shows. We already have a lot of those. Why don't we stop making a new show and use the shows that we have. So the first one we did was with our park tour, because it could be outdoors. This is like 2021. Things are sort of reopening. We did a picnic-style, our free Shakespeare in the Park Midsummer performed, and people sat at little tables and watched. And then the next year we moved it indoors to the theater along with the show.
If Sara, you want to talk about a little bit how that event has transformed now? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what I love about it, I'm not a big fan of event fundraising in general because it's such a high cost to raise a dollar and it can be so burdensome, especially on small teams. It takes up a lot of time and capacity for what is often sort of a one-off experience with a person, which is antithetical to how I think about philanthropy and stewardship and all
of those things. So if we were going to design an event, I want it to be something that one, I can actually show off what we're doing so I have a better chance of retaining and stewarding that first experience into a more long-term investment. And then I also want something that feels like us that doesn't feel like every other person's fundraising event.
And knowing that I can lean on Jeanna and recognize that we can use the same company that created all of the beautiful brand created for the shows, they're also going to create it for the event and it can exist as its own thing and also feel tied to it and it feels like us and it's just a really, really nice -- I hate this word, but I'm going to say it -- synergy. Everybody's got the same goal, right? Yeah. I always think with these donors, they have a million fancy meals.
They're not here for another fancy meal. They're here because they like Shakespeare -- Event chicken. Nobody needs another rubber chicken dinner. Right? It's like, I want to throw a party people actually want to come to because it feels like us. And it's a tricky audience, a gala audience. Because it's often people -- I've got people in my gala who've been here for 30 years and people who are walking in my door for the first time. That's a tough audience to program for.
And so being able to rely on this joint team to kind of help us walk that line I think has been really, really productive and effective. And we've actually had people tell us, you guys do these events really well. Like, will you come do ours? And we're like, absolutely not. That sounds exhausting. And we certainly have people that are like, this isn't my event. I'm not into this. That's absolutely true. And that's okay, but it's ours.
It's truly a CSC event and the people that love us and know that really enjoy this one. So even Sara who doesn't necessarily love big events, I think this one's found a little way into her heart here a little bit. It has. Why do you think the silos between marketing and development are so common in arts and cultural organizations? So we just figured this out. We did.
Oh, good. Okay. Well, because we were talking about it and Jeanna's like, well, I mean sometimes we're literally physically siloed when you just don't interact with people. You've got this wing of the building, especially in big organizations, big shops, and I said it's like, yeah, that's true. But then that's kind of also true for any team. It's like that's why there can be tension between admin and production or
between the production and the cast or whatever. Just speaking as a theater, I think with marketing and development in particular in the arts, it has to do with the sort of shared business model that we are basically 50-50 earned revenue -- so ticket sales, subscriptions, education, concessions, merch -- to contributed -- so individual giving, sponsorships, grants, government funds, things like that. And there is a natural tension there.
It's not like if I were to go work development at another nonprofit agency, I'm probably 90% of the revenue. If Jeanna were to go and do marketing for P&G, her responsibility is to the shareholders. It's just to sell the product and here it's both. We have to be the business, we have to earn your dollar. And also we are a mission-driven organization with a 501(C)3 and a charitable purpose.
And so I think in between those two things, that is sort of the underlying tension that these two departments can feel like they have conflicting goals when actually they've got the same one. And that is very unique to arts and culture. We were sitting here like, what other industry has this problem?
And I'm sure somebody can think of more, but very clearly arts and culture is definitely one of them that has this competing imperative, which is sort of ill-advised as a business model and can make things tough. But that kind of feeds into that idea of how do you measure success? It can't always just be ticket sales. We think about three lenses. There's sales, there's donations, and then there's mission. And we can say something's successful if it was positive on two of those.
So maybe some play we did didn't necessarily sell a lot of tickets or had lower sales goals, but it really hit our mission and it really excited funders; that would be a success. And maybe we're doing a show, some silly something at Christmas, some fun farce. Is it really pushing our mission along? A little bit. Who doesn't love to laugh.
But it's more for ticket sales, and that's okay. You have this mix of things, but if you try to do things that hit all three all the time -- and you can, but if you try to do that every time, that's just -- that path to badness lies. So it'll be really tough to do. Yeah, I love the idea of remembering the mission as something that ties everything together as well. Though I think it was a couple of Boot Camps ago, we were focused mostly on the why, remembering why you exist in the pandemic.
We've been in this sort of survival thing for two or three years at that point and were -- I think a lot of organizations were forgetting that, hey, we have a mission, we have a 'why do we exist'? And once we refocus our efforts towards that why, then we actually function a lot better as an organization because we have purpose, we have a drive forwards, and we communicate that a lot better when we double down on that. And that's actually true in business too.
That's Simon Sinek and 'The Power of Why' and 'The Infinite Game.' It's like even for-profit companies do better when they're actually trying to reach for that vision and the purpose isn't to win, it's to perpetuate the game to make everybody better. Yeah. Another thing we looked at in the previous Boot Camp that we did was hospitality and understanding everyone's journey from the moment they first interact with your organization to the moment they leave and after, going forwards.
And it seems like you have a 360 view of the entire organization and that journey. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. That has become more and more important since the pandemic. As people broke the habit of going out and seeing shows or going out and doing something outside of their home, getting them back into that habit, you have to promise them a good experience, a comfortable experience.
They want to know that if they're taking their time and their money, that it will be a good time and that could be challenging if you're not communicating what people can expect about a show, if you're not learning about blind spots that maybe you don't see about some space in your building or the seating being uncomfortable or I couldn't find the bathroom, all of those things, if somebody can't do those things, no matter how amazing your performance is,
they will have left feeling like they had a bad experience. And so all of us on marketing and development are responsible for that experience. Somebody might have even -- again, it's from the second that they might see an ad and decide, I might be interested in that. Let me go to the website. That's when it begins. How easy was it for them to find the ticket? How easy was it for them to know where to go? All those things have become vital now.
I think another big thing that contributes, too, is -- and this is true in marketing and development -- the second engagement is always harder than the first. So the second gift is harder to get than the first gift. Getting somebody to buy a second ticket is harder than getting them to engage the first time and being able to put that focus and accountability around someone's holistic experience I think helps reinforce that idea.
It can't just be enough that they enjoyed the show, right? It's not enough. It's got to be more than that. One thing that I got from development -- so that report that says what donors are coming that weekend -- so one thing Sara does is she will take note cards and write a little note to some donors or maybe she knows something about somebody that's coming back after an illness or something.
She'll write a personal note and give it to the front of house and they set them on the seats for those people when they come into their seat. So sort of stealing that idea. When someone's a first timer now, they get a special note from us that says, we see that you're a first timer. Thank you so much for trying us out for the first time. There has been a $20 credit applied to your account. You don't need to do anything. You don't need a code.
Next time you buy tickets with us, there'll be $20 off. Please come back. And that's been working really well for us. Again, it's that kind of psychology of, I have now $20 burning a hole in my pocket, I want to use it. But that came from the sort of small moves from development. Again, it's like that might apply to 30 people in a night. It's sort of a lot of effort for a small group of people, but getting somebody to come back a second time is so important. It's huge. It's huge.
It's worth that time and effort to do something like that that we've taken from and something we're inspired from development. And some of the hardest parts we have is, sometimes -- so one thing we do that we didn't realize was so unique was audience surveys. So not sending audience surveys. A lot of people do that,
but how often do you read them? We print them out, every single one, and we sit down at a meeting at the end of every show with the whole team -- development, marketing, production, the artistic team. Sometimes actors and directors from the show are in the room. And we read every single comment. And it can be tough, anonymous comments. Sometimes people just say what they're thinking and have different feelings about it.
But always from those conversations we leave with something that helped us understand what people were thinking about our show or our experience or our just general, what's it like to walk in our doors? Those comments range from 'I couldn't find parking' to 'I would've done something different with the vocal projection of this actor.' It could range from all things.
So looking at those comments is so valuable and making sure everybody is in them together and reading them all at once, we glean so much from that. And I think it helps create sort of an overall culture of constant self-assessment. If we can be accused of anything as an organization, it's that we have to remember to celebrate our wins sometimes. So we've had to kind of build things in to be like, Hey, high five, go team.
Yay. Yes, we did this. Good job. We are very much kind of, okay, what's next? What's next? And that is good, that's healthy, it keeps us on a high standard of excellence, but you kind of build up that skin and everybody goes through it and we're constantly, even when something was a wild success, it's doing that postmortem and going, great, what worked? Tell me what was successful and what we want to repeat again. And then what can we make even 10% better the next time we do this?
It's a muscle because it's hard. Those negative comments ring so much more in your head. But really trying to look at that objectively and also see all the hundreds of really positive ones or things people said, it can be hard. And I can see how if pitching that and sitting in a room with an artistic leader, you know how they can get emotional or they're very passionate about the work that they do. I mean that's why they're the leader, but it's just so important.
We like to say we do these shows for people, which sounds so obvious, but sometimes we forget that people are coming in and seeing the show. Did they have a good time? It's the question we want to know. And it's fascinating to me the number of people that really can't answer that necessarily for every show they do. Yeah. So that's such a hard balance to celebrate the win,
but also listen as well to lighter things. I remember -- I do a lot of improv, and the first time was I was in Edinburgh doing that, I remember all my reviews, but I think about the worst ones the most. Yeah, of course you do. We got called the antimatter of improv once and I was like... Wow. That took a little bit of celebration. I like that. We've occasionally been accused of marring things with comedy, so I appreciate that. So the antimatter of improv, I like it.
People are so mad. 'I don't want to be laughing at this!'. Oh dear. I love what you said about the entire experience as well. We recently talked with the head of guest experiences from the Detroit Zoo and they made the point of, nobody's going to enjoy the exhibits if they don't know where the bathroom is. And that kind of stuff of what you're saying of that guest experience, hospitality and accessibility as well is just incredibly important I think in organizations these days.
That's right, and that's something Sara and I are really good at is really thinking about when someone comes in, do they know where to go? Can they be comfortable here? That's important to me. That's something I always really do when I'm attending things. I think it's fascinating the number of theaters that don't have photos and information on their physical seats available for people if they want to learn about what it is that I'll be sitting in for three hours. Fascinating to me.
So we have our seat plan on there, we have information on there. Again, it's not for everyone. It's for that small percentage of people that that's important information and an important barrier. Where are the wheelchair accessible seats? Is there a ramp? Do I have to do stairs to get to certain places? We try to make all that information available so somebody doesn't come in and have a bad night because they didn't have the information they needed in
advance. That's terrible. Somebody's come to the door. I want them to be able to come in and have a nice time. And I think that goes into the people too, the staff, the attitude. It is, like Jeanna said, you're giving us two of your most precious resources, your money and your time, and we don't take that for granted.
You'll have something -- you'll hear me say all the time if I'm at a donor event or a sponsor event or honestly just walking through the lobby of the theater before the show and in conversation with someone is, I'm so glad you're here. And I say it a lot but I mean it every time. I don't take for granted what it took for you to walk through that door tonight. And it matters to me that you're there. And I think that kind of goes throughout the staff looking at those comments.
We get a lot of really, really positive things about our front of house. And you might just be a volunteer usher, you might be a contracted bartender or whatever it is, but that sense of 'you matter when you come through the door, it doesn't matter who you are.'. And the comments we get that are like, 'Your team made it so easy to exchange tickets. Thank you so much.' I'm like, what are we doing to people at other buildings to let them pick a new...? They're so traumatized.
They're so traumatized. Everyone listening, please help put better energy out there. Why are we making this hard for folks to just have flexibility in their schedule? We don't want to be considered like airlines when you buy a ticket and that's it, and you're screwed if you don't want to go or you can't go or something.
But the important piece that the loop that's closed is our artistic director sees that, he knows that's the thing that we're doing, and he can thank the front of house next time he sees them. And it means a lot to those people to continue developing and doing a good job because they know everyone really does appreciate the work that they're putting
forward. But that does start with Sara and I, because my policy is always, if someone has entered this building to see a show, they need to see the show. So if their tickets aren't where they said they'd be or there's some problem, whatever, let 'em in. We'll sort it out. Just taking down the barriers of that. Stop making things so complicated. Don't be so precious. Yeah. Jeanna, what do you wish more fundraisers understood about marketing strategy?
Well, I kind of want to flip it and talk a little bit about what I now understand about fundraising strategy that I've been able to use in marketing. The biggest piece of that is that it's okay to slow down and do the next right thing if maybe it doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to get a ticket
sale tomorrow. That could be the biggest thing is, how can I take time to actually develop the audience, learn about what it is that they're looking for, listen to them and get them to be a new ticket buyer? And the value of storytelling. The long game. So being able to tell a longer story, get people to join us, why we might be doing a show.
Help them understand if maybe the show that they're seeing isn't necessarily their favorite thing, but they might understand why we've done it for mission reasons. They might understand why we did it because we got support from the community. All of those things I think I've really learned from fundraising strategy has helped me in marketing. Awesome. And Sara, on the flip side, what have you learned from marketing? I think it really is the value of the voice of the customer.
I think what philanthropists are good at is kind of that small connection, that conversation, that anecdotal piece of data, and that can be really valuable, but it's not the strongest decision-making tool. I think what marketing really understands is that you can't make the best decisions based on assumptions that aren't based in good data, or at least as good as you can.
And so it might be something as simple as if you're trying to reinvent what a fundraising event looks like, it's like, well, I can kind of go off of my gut or my personal experience and those things are valuable, but Jeanna can also help me put a survey together and I can actually ask my people some of these questions. I can actually get better information that's going to help me make better decisions for my department and for the organization at large.
If another organization is listening and feeling stuck in their silos, where can they start? Small. I mean, we've referenced it before, but a lot of this work I think has to do with letting go of ego, releasing your hold on your petty kingdom, your little corner where if you've planted your flag, allow yourself to be curious, to be vulnerable and to go first. So it's easy to go, oh yeah, that'd be great, but I want the other person to be vulnerable first.
To make the offer first. It's like, nah, whoever's listening, you go first. Take a small step. You're the one you've been waiting for. Aww. I think I saw that on a poster or something. You know, I can't take total credit. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yes. Getting curious and stop being precious about things and be authentic because I think it is the personal connection. Be humans together. That's how you do any of this.
It's harder to be crappy about your coworker when they were at your house for dinner last week or when you guys can just go downstairs once a week to the bar and celebrate a small win or empathize around something that is hard that you're going through. I mean, it's very obvious. Sara and I are friends. We've worked together for a very long time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we don't argue or we don't clash about
things. But because we've sort of built this rapport, she knows I only want the best for the department and I only am feeling what's the best for mine. So all the passion that's coming from maybe a potential debate is all driving towards that. So let's hold on that and say, well, how could we make this better? And that can make those harder conversations easier. But if you don't have that rapport with somebody, then the conversation is just an argument and you're not getting anywhere
necessarily. But anybody that's doing this work in arts and culture, they have to be passionate about the thing that they're doing. I think that the people we work with in our company and people that I meet every day in arts and culture are some of the most fascinating, lovely, authentic folks. And that's one of the reasons why I choose to stay in this industry and not necessarily move to a corporate industry personally. So know that.
Know that about the people that have chosen to do this career. They're lovely, passionate folks somewhere, even if they might be entrenched over decades of being stressed and working late. They care about the thing that you care about too. So that's really where you can start. Yeah, there's a reason we're all here. Right, exactly. If you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leadership teams, staff and boards of thousands of arts organizations, what would it be?
So some of it is kind of what we've referenced before. I think this starts at the top and it starts with executives releasing a little bit of hold and trusting their people. If you want to build a culture of trust at your organization where there is trust between teams, that's got to come from you as well. And so it's those -- that transparency, that accountability, that vulnerability.
That's the ability to say 'I don't know' or 'I'm not sure, I need help.' I think when that goes both and all ways across an organization, that only strengthens all of us. That helps everybody kind of be their best selves and do their best work. And we like to say that we like to be managed up. So we have my one-on-ones with my reports, they begin that meeting and they bring the things that they want my take on that they need to update me on. My reports know I don't like to be surprised,
so that's a great time to bring me information. Let me know good or bad news. It's only going to help us if we all know what's going on. Manage up, allow yourself to be managed versus knowing that when you walk in the room, everything you're saying is going to go down on the people that you're saying it to. Try and flip it. What would they start with in a meeting with you if they had the opportunity to do so? And that can be kind of scary, I think, to let go of that a little bit.
But I think by allowing that, you're going to just learn more things than you could ever have done yourself. There's a fun adage in development talking about making an ask of a donor, and it's: if you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money. And I think that the equivalent here -- it really is. It's not always about having the answer or kind of dictating the plan or whatever. Not that -- so much leadership comes from that kind of servant leadership model.
It's that ability to really want to understand and trust that there are good ideas all around you. And as long as everybody's on the same boat and is rowing in the same direction, you're going to succeed. This conversation's been absolutely delightful. So thank you so much, Jeanna and Sara for joining us here today. Thank you so much for having us. This is really fun. We like talking about what we do.
And I'd love to hear -- so after I spoke at Boot Camp, one of the best parts was hearing from people that had seen the presentation on social media or LinkedIn or email. So I really would encourage folks to reach out to us. I love to hear what other people sort of think about these things and some of the strategies that they're doing at their own organizations as well. What a great conversation. Well, before we go, it's time for another round of CI-lebrity Sightings where we spotlight CI
clients making headlines. First up, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra received a generous $5 million gift to support its family and educational programming. According to The Violin Channel, the donation will expand on the symphony's outreach initiatives and help introduce more young people to the power of music. Big applause for investing in the next generation of music lovers! Next, WLWT News shared that the Cincinnati Art Museum is planning a major expansion of the Art Climb.
That's the museum's nine-story outdoor staircase surrounded by public art and lush landscaping. The updates will focus on accessibility, adding paths designed for visitors using wheelchairs or pushing strollers. What a meaningful step forward in creating a truly welcoming experience for all. Finally, TODAY.com caught up with Bobby Barnett, Artistic Director Emeritus of Atlanta Ballet, who just turned 100 -- yes, 100 -- and still has his dancing shoes on.
Bobby shared his three secrets to a long happy life, and our personal favorite? 'Doing what you love with who you love.' Happy birthday, Bobby, and thank you for the inspiration. We hope these stories leave you smiling and remind you of the impact this field can have when we lead with heart, purpose, and creativity. Got a story that deserves a shout out? Well, tag us on social and let us know. Thank you for listening to CI to Eye.
This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen McConarty and myself, Dan Titmuss. Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are CI to Eye's designers and video editors and all work together to create CI's digital content. Our music is by whoisuzo. If you enjoyed today's episode, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover CI to Eye and
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