I’ve recently developed an interest in the use of online in the political
sphere. Reading a number of books on the subject I was struck at the parallels
with cultural endeavours. Political parties aim to encourage votes; cultural
organisations solicit attendance and participation. Political parties operate
on a combination of government funding and donations (providing they secure
a minimum percentage of the vote, political candidates receive government support
for an election campaign); cultural organisations survive on government subsidy,
earnt income and fundraising.
Online and politics are relatively new bedfellows. Online political campaigning
is most visible in the United States , yet it really only became relevant in
the 2000 presidential campaign. Bill Clinton did have a web site in 1996 prior
to election (making him the first US President to do so), but it was barely
relevant to the campaign.
Fast forward a few years and the John Kerry campaign has just announced it
has raised $US180 million in the quest to elect Kerry. It’s a huge number – but
critically, $US56 million of it has been raised online, nearly a third of all
donations. And the majority of donations are small. “Contributions of $250
or less made up $100 million, a reflection of the growing importance of small
donors in the campaign finance world.” 1
Why is it that cultural organisations in Australia don’t solicit donations
online? Many are registered to accept tax deductible contributions. Many organisations
have their membership programs tucked away somewhere on their web site, although
I remain amazed at the number of major institutions who still have not enabled
online membership applications. A year ago I wrote a Click to Start column
entitled ‘Path To Fulfilment Littered With Obstacles’. 2 In
the article I went into detail about the link between online and philanthropy,
and quoted various research supporting the thesis that online should be an
essential fundraising tool for the arts. I then did a quick survey of major
arts institutions in Australia , looking at the most basic fundraising transaction – membership
joining.
Here’s the results from July 2003:
|
Institution |
Online Memberships |
|
Art Gallery of NSW |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Art Gallery of Western Australia |
No membership form, contact the organisation. |
|
Australian Centre for Moving Image |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Australian Film Institute |
Submit online form, not live credit card |
|
Australian Museum |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Melbourne Museum |
No membership form, contact the organisation. |
|
National Gallery of Australia |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
National Gallery of Victoria |
Live, online membership joining |
|
National Museum of Australia |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Queensland Art Gallery |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Queensland Museum |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
South Australian Museum |
No membership form, contact the organisation. |
|
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery |
No membership form, contact the organisation. |
|
Western Australian Museum |
No membership form, contact the organisation. |
And here are the results from July 2004:
|
Institution |
Online Memberships |
|
Art Gallery of NSW |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Art Gallery of Western Australia |
No membership form, contact the organisation. |
|
Australian Centre for Moving Image |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Australian Film Institute |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Australian Museum |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Melbourne Museum |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
National Gallery of Australia |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
National Gallery of Victoria |
Live, online membership joining |
|
National Museum of Australia |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
Queensland Art Gallery |
Live, online membership joining |
|
Queensland Museum |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
|
South Australian Museum |
Couldn’t find anything online |
|
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery |
No membership form, contact the organisation. |
|
Western Australian Museum |
Fill out a form, send it in offline. |
So, 12 months later, instead of one organisation letting your join online
with a credit card, there are…two! Even more telling are the hoops you jump
through to find out how to join. No one promotes it on their home page – despite
the fact this is just about the only activity the web site can actually earn
revenue from, other than a couple of institutions (like Queensland Art Gallery)
who have online shops. Then again, those with shops don’t do much to promote
their presence either. Their home pages are hardly covered with bright notices
saying ‘yes, you CAN buy something from us online’. In most cases membership,
donations and other forms of support are the best kept secrets online, usually
hidden away behind neutral menu titles like ‘About Us’, or ‘Join In’ or ‘Membership’.
A immensely practical book I’ve just finished reading is called ‘Winning Campaigns
Online – Strategies for Candidates and Causes’ 3.
The authors, Emilienne Ireland and Phil Tajitsu Nash, own a company in the
USA which specialises in working on online political campaigns, and their book
is chock full of straightforward, sensible advice, rendered in a simple, luddite-comprehensible
style.
 |
|
| What if one in every hundred visitors to your web site joined up, bought a ticket, made a donation? How would that help the finances? | |
|
|
They’ve come up with ‘Ten Secrets of Successful E-Campaigns’ for politicians,
a list of simple tactics for running an online political strategy:
Use the site to promote your whole campaign
What they mean is, make sure your web site promotes everything you do – it’s
an extension of your organisation and its activities, not just a brochure.
Your offline campaign must promote your site
Why is that many organisations still don’t have their web address on their
printed material? It’s just bizarre to me that an organisation, having spent
a bundle on its web site, shouldn’t promote the heck out of the site at every
opportunity. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing you cannot put your web
address on – business cards, letterhead, your building, your tickets, your
cars, your uniforms. You get the message.
Respond to emails within 48 hours
You probably think it the height of rudeness when someone doesn’t answer the
phone, or doesn’t reply to your letter. Why should this be any different online?
Email is now ubiquitous. I’m still amazed when I have conversations with arts
managers who seem to think email is an intrusion, an ‘extra’ load, something
to be dealt with when time permits. Get over it. Email is as integral to your
daily communication as phone, fax and mail. If someone emails you, answer then
promptly and helpfully.
Give people a reason to come back
Oh what bland web sites we weave. Half of them look like they were designed
by committees of bureaucrats – most likely a true observation in the case of
the large state institutions; the other half by a 14 year old underground electronic
game art designer with a degree in ‘cool’ – a pity ‘cool’ doesn’t encompass
basic forms of communication, like the written word. A good web site is open,
inviting, and has constantly changing content. A good web site doesn’t hide
its wares behind bland home pages and illogical and obtuse navigation.
Learn about your visitors
When was the last time you surveyed your web site visitors, or looked at your
web server logs? How many of you know what percentage of visitors (you know,
those big numbers you trumpeted to the board last month) are actually just
search engine spiders and not real people. How old are your site users? Where
do they live? Which pages on your web site are the most popular? Or least popular?
What? You don’t know? How would you feel if you didn’t know what was the most
popular of your physical building/exhibition/event/show activities?
Online donations: the “one percent” rule
“Candidates in Campaign 2000 found that, on average, one visitor in every
hundred makes a donation, and the average online donation is quite high compared
to direct mail.” 4 Gee. What if one
in every hundred visitors to your web site joined up, bought a ticket, made
a donation? How would that help the finances? Why are we so shy? I just did
a quick tour of the main state theatre companies’ web sites, to see how obvious
and easy they make it to buy a ticket – surely the most fundamental business
activity of a theatre company. But, after looking at these sites, you start
to wonder what they consider their most important business function:
- Sydney Theatre Company – ‘Subscribe
Now’ text link - Melbourne Theatre Company – boring
splash page, then a ‘Subscribe’ button - Sydney Dance Company – flashy
splash page, then a link at the bottom ‘Subscribe!’ - Queensland Theatre Company – small ‘Box
Office’ text link, and a faint ‘Book Online’ button - Perth Theatre Company – small ‘BOCS
Ticketing’ logo at the bottom – presumably inferring a link to buy tickets
The State Theatre Company of
South Australia gets my vote, hands down. There’s a great picture of
Rosalba Clemente, the artistic director, personally inviting you to ‘Join
us’, and front and centre is the latest production, and a link to ‘Bookings & More
Information’. I would have liked this to say ‘Buy a Ticket Now’, but you
do get that after clicking through to the event page.
As a comparison have a look at http://www.villagecinemas.com.au/ –
clear and simple promos for each of their major events, and a whopping big
yellow button top and centre marked ‘Buy Tickets’. No great big warm and fuzzies,
just a workmanlike approach focussed on extracting dollars. And it works – we
always book online for the cinema, to save standing in the queue with our two
children.
Make volunteering online easy and rewarding
If an arts organisation’s first priority is attendance, their next is very
often recruiting support from the public – through volunteers, friends, supporters
and the like. I’ve already discussed the issue of membership joining online
(or almost complete lack thereof). The same comments apply to volunteer recruiting.
All the major state institutions, art galleries and museums and the like, survive
because they don’t have to foot the labour bill represented by the input of
their volunteers. There is a fair variance in quality of information and services
provided online to volunteers and members – the Art Gallery Society of NSW
even runs online competitions for members. But yet again overall the web sites
fail miserably to promote and recruit those people who form the lifeblood.
Permission campaigning, not spamming
The Australian Financial Review today is quoting a survey by Permission Communications,
which has found 80% of 440 companies polled in Australia do not understand
the Spam Act. I’d be pretty worried if that extrapolated into 80% of Australian
arts organisations not understanding the Spam Act. If you don’t understand,
learn, fast. Email is the cheapest, most effective form of one on one promotion
at your disposal. The notion you don’t know, legally, what is allowed, is scary.
Viral campaigning: let your visitors help
The easiest way of achieving this is the simple ‘Send to a Friend’ button
on a web page. We do this on Arts Hub, and hundreds of pages off our site are
emailed around each month. It’s free promotion, of the best sort – one friend
telling another friend about something they’ve found online. Why is it then,
that, for example, the vast majority of theatre companies don’t have a button
to send information about an event to a friend? (kudos to Sydney Theatre Company
who have an Email a Friend link on each event page).
Don’t keep the genie in the bottle
In Winning Campaigns Online Ireland and Nash suggest finding a balance between
allowing unsupervised volunteers build and run a web site, and management micro-managing
the site to the extreme, cramping the style of those who actually know what
they are doing. The same applies to cultural organisations online. You wouldn’t
hire a plumber to design your subscription brochure, so why wouldn’t you hire
a web development professional to produce your web site? As with everything,
you get what you pay for. The problem is most arts organisations still seem
to regard their web site as an extension of their brochure – a static promotional
tool, reinforcing their traditional marketing channels.
Newsflash. Web sites can earn revenue. Mine earns lots of revenue – about
90% of our company’s total annual income. And we have decided we’re too old
fashioned in our online approach to sales and are about to do a big site update
to bring us into line with the leaders in our particular industry sector.
Therein lies the next, and final message for today. The little survey of arts
institutions earlier in this article highlights a complete and utter lack of
progress in online deployment by the major arts institutions. Oh, I’m sure
they’ve been doing lots of things like digitising collections for online and
so on, and that’s great, and right and proper. But in terms of the web site
as a revenue earner, they’re standing still.
If you REALLY want to know how to sell things online, go read about it. There’s
a plethora of material online – try one of my favourite sites Sherpa – http://www.marketingsherpa.com/ .
I just finished chewing my way through the 420 pages of proceedings from ContentBiz’s
4th Annual Subscriptions Summit, held in the USA a couple of months ago. You’ll
discover how the big boys sell stuff online – it’s thought-provoking and fascinating – mostly
because so many of their techniques are not difficult. It’s just they have
the budgets to test, research and play with a multitude of ideas. And small
players like us can then skim the cream and learn from the masters.
Campaigning online, whether running for office, recruiting members or selling
tickets, is an art form. It takes creativity, persistence, imagination – and,
most importantly, constant commitment, not just an annual review.
1. http://www.campaignline.com/webedition/page.cfm?navid=51&pageid=348
2. http://www.artshub.com.au/view/rd.asp?id=45197
3. ‘Winning
Campaigns Online – Strategies for Candidates and Causes’
David Eedle 