Patron Journey 2: Organizing Audience Segments

Audience Segmentation as part of a Patron Journey can help focus your communication and marketing strategy by aligning your messaging with your patrons’ behavior. The first step to this is determining what portions of the audience should be grouped together.

When customizing a Patron Journey for your organization, there are three main steps:

1. Describe the patrons’ behavior

2. Set goals for those patrons

3. Lay out specific actions that we will take to encourage the patrons to reach those goals

So to create a meaningful Patron Journey, we have to think about the behavior and the goal we have for each individual group of patrons, or segment. To facilitate this type of thinking, ArtsRising organizes our Audience Segments in two ways: by stage (grouping similar goals) and by series (grouping similar behavior).

Stages

ArtsRising believes that the Patron Journey is made up of several broad stages. We organize the Audience Segments into these stage groupings based on similar goals for those patrons. ArtsRising has delineated three default stages, and we believe that these are applicable to most organizations:

1. Discovery Stage: segments of patrons whom we are encouraging to get involved at the most basic level

2. Engagement Stage: segments of patrons whom we want to inspire to get more consistently involved

3. Loyalty Stage: segments of patrons who are regularly and dependably involved

And although it’s not exactly part of the Patron Journey, we also encourage organizations to maintain a list of Archived Patrons: segments of patrons whom we are no longer trying to get involved. Sometimes, patrons explicitly tell us they are not interested in a certain type of involvement. That’s okay! By respecting their wishes and ceasing to contact them with certain messaging, you can increase these patrons’ trust in your organization, potentially leading to improved involvement in other areas.

Series

At each stage, ArtsRising has a default set of Audience Segments that we believe are likely present in nonprofit arts organizations. These segments are grouped into three series that categorize types of activity your patrons may be involved with:

A. Attendance Series: segments describing patrons’ event attendance

D. Donation Series: segments describing patrons’ monetary donations

S. Service Series: segments describing patrons’ donations of time and talent

A patron will belong to only one segment from each series.

How many segments are there in each series? According to the ArtsRising framework, there are logically six segments in each activity series, and they are numbered/lettered according to your patrons’ level of activity:

You can easily figure out what kind of behavior is described in one of our Audience Segments based on its series label:

A0 = Attendance series, level 0 activity = Patrons who have attended zero events

D1 = Donation series, level 1 activity = Patrons who donated once

SX = Service series, archived activity = Patrons who served in the past but no longer desire to serve, or patrons who have explicitly said they are not interested in providing their time or talent

How does this apply to my organization?

The exact organization of these segments across the stages of the Patron Journey is up to you; that’s part of what makes Patron Journey customized just for you. Which activity series are relevant in your situation? Are there perhaps multiple Attendance Series, based on different types of events that serve different populations? Which types of activity are most likely to come first in your circumstances—and therefore would be most suited to the Discovery Stage? For the best results, you will have to think strategically about the organization of your stages.

Here’s an example of how ArtsRising organized the Audience Segments into stages for a client:

Get help creating your own Patron Journey

Learning how to separate your patrons into segments requires some strategic thinking, and sometimes, you don’t even know how to begin. ArtsRising can help!

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