Audience Engagement Audience Awareness Audience Segmentation

Patron Journey 4: Actions to achieve segment goals

Abby Carlson | September 10, 2025

In this Patron Journey series, we’ve been discussing how to use the ArtsRising system to build a Patron Journey: a breakdown of goals for different sections of your audience. The three steps are:

Describe your patrons’ behavior,
Set goals for those patrons, and
Lay out specific actions that you will take to encourage the patrons to reach those goals.

We’ve gone over why to segment your audience, shared our audience segmentation framework, and talked about the perfect goals for each segment.

In this article, we’ll look at how to turn these goals into tangible actions you can take as part of your marketing and communication plan, using one segment within one stage of the patron journey as an example.

Discovery Stage: A0 “Prospective Attenders” Segment

The overall goal for Audience Segments in the Discovery stage is “Draw patron interest to inspire a basic level of engagement.” We are going to look more closely at segment A0 “Prospective Attenders.” These are patrons who are saved in your database but who have never attended an event before, so their goal is “Sign up for one event.” Let’s see how we can get these patrons to achieve this goal and attend their very first event.

Share your activities

To meet the goals for patrons at the Discovery Stage, we want to demonstrate that your organization is worth learning more about—worth attending a concert, signing up for a class, donating to, or otherwise engaging with. One piece of that means showing off what you do and what makes you unique: your programs, your activities, your mission. We can encourage A0 patrons to sign up for an event for the first time by drawing their interest towards your organization’s offerings and the mission behind them.

Sharing information about events is one of the most common topics for marketing emails, social media posts, and pages on your website. You are probably doing this already!

Build initial trust

Another aspect of drawing a potential patron’s interest is trust. Can they trust that your activities will provide them with the results they’re looking for: artistic excellence, emotional connection, satisfaction, an enjoyable time? Can they trust that your experience will run smoothly for them?

For the A0 segment, building trust looks like showing patrons what to expect and then delivering on that promise.

First, think about what you hope attendees will get out of your event, and provide some demonstration of that. This could be in the form of photos showing patrons enjoying themselves at one of your previous events, or perhaps testimonials from attendees sharing what the event meant to them. Someone who has never been to one of your events before is going to appreciate proof that other people enjoyed it.

Next, the customer service angle. Tell patrons what they need to know, recognizing that new patrons might not understand what to do. This includes before, during, and after the ticket purchase process. Help them get assistance by providing FAQs or a person to contact if they have questions. It’s much easier to keep a patron than acquire a brand new one, but if someone has an unwelcoming experience at the beginning, they won’t want to return. You can help welcome your new patrons by making sure they have all the information they need and by ensuring that their experience runs smoothly with no errors.

Lower barriers to entry

Everyone has so many demands upon their time. If your organization wants someone to become involved with your organization for the very first time, that requires a significant behavior change from the person. Make it easy for them to say yes!

For the A0 segment, think about the potential barriers that might be stopping them from signing up for an event. There are tons of possibilities, but a common one is cost. One way to lower this barrier is to run a promotional campaign specifically for new patrons. Sometimes, the offer of a discount is all you need to get someone in the door for the first time.

Let’s summarize what we’ve discussed into a brief list, including examples of concrete actions you can take.

A0 Prospective Attenders

Goal: Sign up for one event
How: Show and tell what event attendance will get them; demonstrate that it’s easy to get involved; demonstrate organization trustworthiness
Example actions:
- When making event-related social media posts, include photos of your patrons enjoying themselves
- Create an easy-to-find page on your website dedicated to what to expect at an event, in order to demystify the experience for first-timers
- Send a targeted email campaign offering discount for first-time attendance
- Ensure the ticket purchase process is smooth, including clear instructions and where to go for help
- Write event ticket confirmation emails with a newcomer’s perspective in mind
- Set up an automatic personalized pre-concert email to welcome first-timers to your community
- Send online survey to solicit guest testimonials after events

How can I use this at my organization?

While we’ve only worked through one segment, you can see there is a lot of thinking to be done if we extend this to all the stages and segments in the Patron Journey. If you want your Patron Journey to be helpful, it needs to give you a plan. Go through this same exercise for all the other segments: look at the goals you’ve set, and think about both what direction to go in to reach that goal and what concrete actions you can take to meet it. Thinking about it like this will help you understand that these goals are truly achievable! With some planning and effort, you can improve your patron engagement and retention, leading to increased revenue potential.

Get help turning goals into actions

ArtsRising can help you think through all the segment goals and suggest action ideas. For personalized assistance, set up a virtual training session with our team.

Think that this is all great theory, but it will be too much work for you to plan on your own? Let us do it for you! Consider a full-service marketing contract, where we work with you to apply the ArtsRising framework to your organization, and then we carry out all the details and communications with our staff—leaving you more time to focus on the core work of advancing your mission.

Book a free call to discuss your options

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