Audience Engagement
Audience Awareness
Audience Segmentation
Patron Journey
The key to ArtsRising’s strategy is customizing a Patron Journey for your organization. The Patron Journey is simply a plan that guides what actions you will take to influence your patrons’ involvement with your organization. By understanding what your goals are for your patrons, you’ll be better able to plan your communications because you’ll have a clear purpose for each messaging campaign. When your communication strategy is focused on using a Patron Journey, patrons will be carefully stewarded along the path from interest to engagement to loyalty.
Not all patrons behave the same way or are interested in the same aspects of your organization; that’s why ArtsRising believes that an important part of creating a Patron Journey is Audience Segmentation. When you customize your content for different audiences, you help your patrons to feel like individuals, instead of advertising targets. When your patrons feel like they matter, they are more likely to trust you and feel aligned with your mission. That translates to more engagement and better ROI!
We believe that in order to create a meaningful Patron Journey, you have to:
- describe the behavior of groups of patrons,
- set goals for their future behavior, and
- lay out concrete actions that you’ll take to encourage them to meet those goals.
This will facilitate the retention of those patrons and potentially increase their level of engagement. All of ArtsRosing’s Three Pillars work together to move your patrons along this journey.
Segments
There are many ways to theoretically group your patrons: age bracket, eye color, preferred concert type—the possibilities go on. To categorize the audience in a way that will actually be helpful, we have to think about behavior. In the ArtsRising framework, creating a Patron Journey involves categorizing patrons into groups based on similar behavior or demographics; we call these Audience Segments.
The Audience Segments are not necessarily steps that a patron moves through in order. They are simply groups of patrons, categorized based on behavior in order for us to serve them the most useful messaging. Therefore, a patron may belong to several segments, based on the different ways she is involved with your organization.
Why does this matter for my organization?
Are you sending out mass e-newsletters to your entire email list? Or are you perhaps sending different emails to different groups of people, but without a clear or updated system informing which people are in which groups? Do you send out event invitations or donation asks that go unanswered and fail to meet your goals? Do you have trouble retaining patrons over time? Audience Segmentation as part of a strategic Patron Journey could be the solution.
Segmentation helps us target certain communications toward the patrons who are most interested in those topics and most likely to participate in the calls-to-action (CTAs). Patrons who receive too many communications that they are not interested in are more likely to pull away from your organization, so defining Audience Segments helps us work towards concrete goals for each group of patrons to keep them engaged.
Learn more
In order to figure out what meaningful groups are appropriate for your patrons, download our free Activities & Audiences Worksheet to examine your organization’s activities and the people who are involved with each one.
Want to learn how the ArtsRising Three-Pillar Revenue Generation System handles Audience Segmentation? Stay tuned for “Patron Journey Part 2,” which will show you how ArtsRising groups segment in two ways: based on their behavior and your goals.
