The Bias That’s Bruising Patron Loyalty

Photo by Howard Lake

Update: If you missed Jill Robinson's session at TCG about the Bias, we are reprising it as a free webinar at the end of July. If you're interested, please e-mail info@trgarts.com to be invited.

Findings coming out of loyalty analyses are beginning to expose a bias in the arts industry. Many arts managers are convinced that patrons are either:
•    philanthropists seeking to sustain the arts
•    or consumers seeking to experience the art form. 

This “either-or” mindset is dead wrong, according to TRG Arts study. 

Yet, industry leaders continually provide incentives to keep the bias alive in the structure of their organizations’ budgets—divvying up revenue expectations between major gifts, membership/individual giving, marketing/ticket sales. In the end, patrons are not appropriately valued for their support in total.  And, as we’ve recently noted, devalued patrons don’t stick around.

It doesn’t have to be this way. At recent industry conferences, we’ve seen a small corps of patron loyalty action leaders begin to model a new way for arts organizations to treat patrons like people, instead of departmental property—and on the way, build sustaining patronage.

Loyalty is “Both-And”

Over the past decade, our firm has examined hundreds of thousands of patron behavior records looking for loyalty patterns within organizations.  Study reveals distinct hierarchal groupings of patrons that we call Advocates, Buyers, and Tryers^TM. 

It’s true: Some patrons only donate and other patrons only buy tickets.  This is hardly surprising given the way we cultivate support and promote ticket sales on separate—sometimes competing— operational tracks.  However, our research also shows huge transactional diversity among individual patrons.

3 Principles for Increasing Patron Loyalty

Patron Loyalty Week continues through March 24th. We’re engaging in dialogue about developing longer, stronger patron relationships on the blog, at industry conferences, and on Twitter at #LoyaltyWeek

We love loyal patrons. Why? Simply put, they make money for arts organizations, and they make arts managers’ jobs easier. Patron loyalty means developing stronger, longer relationships with your audience. It's all about finding new buyers, converting them into frequent buyers, subscriber/members, donors and, ultimately, lifelong patrons.

Making those conversions has far-reaching implications for arts organizations. TRG research shows that the more loyal a patron is, the greater their lifetime value will be to an arts organization. 

But how does that translate into your day-to-day tasks? We all know that marketing and fundraising are about patron relationships, but that reality gets lost when managers are trying make revenue goals week after week. We forget that a loyalty strategy works like a booster shot for marketing and development efforts. It means less work to promote a production or exhibit, or garner donors for development campaigns.

Here are 3 simple principles to help arts managers integrate loyalty into everyday tasks:

1. Loyalty is everyone’s job.  Leadership must be engaged and lead the kind of transformational change required to really orient around the patron.  Marketing and development departments each have major responsibility for loyalty. And so does everyone else in the organization – from the folks who plan the campaigns to the person who sells the ticket.  

The Patron Experience and the New Customer Service

By virtue of the way technology has changed our world, people have come to expect an ever more personalized customer experience. Retailers like Amazon and Netflix use sophisticated technology to recommend more products, remembering buying history and order information, and tailoring the experience to each customer’s preferences. Customers now expect products and the customer service surrounding those products to fulfill their specific needs.

What about the arts? In the arts, the experience is the product. The words we use to describe our product, our art, and the action of coming to the theatre or exhibit hall often include “experience”. It’s a critical part of our vernacular. Smart arts managers know that the arts experience starts from the time a patron picks up the phone or goes online to order a ticket and ends when he/she arrives home after the event. TRG’s decades of client experience and patron behavior research shows that patron loyalty is a process that grows with accumulated experiences with the organization.

Customer service supports loyalty development at every step of the way. TRG’s counsel on patron-centric management and customer service is built around the concept of patron loyalty. Think of patron loyalty as a ladder. Patrons start at the bottom rung as a “tryer” when they have their first interaction or transaction with the organization. Patrons who come back again as a repeat buyer, multi-buyer, subscriber or member-based frequent attendee are what we call “buyers”. With good customer care, an organization can retain buyers and cultivate them into an ongoing, engaged investor—an “advocate.”

A patron’s experience, then, is a set of related interactions that, together, determine future buying and donating behavior. Viewing customer service the way a patron sees the experience is the very definition of patron-centric customer service. The experience arts patrons have unfolds in a variety of ways--the marketing materials they see advertising an event, the interactions they have with box office staff or online ticketing, the ease or difficulty of parking, the way they pick up tickets at the venue, the manner in which they are seated by the ushers, and, of course, the artistic experience.