Digital Marketing
FOR CANADIAN ARTISTS
& CULTURAL ORGANIZATIONS
eBook
By: Liesl Barrell
Co-Founder & CEO
Third Wunder
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Introduction........................................................................................................................... 1
Part 1: Strategy................................................................................................................. 2
Research.................................................................................................................. 4
Industry & Digital Market Research...................................................................... 6
Competitor Analysis........................................................................................... 11
Benchmarks & Inspiration.................................................................................. 13
Audit
................................................................................................................ 15
Creating Personas............................................................................................. 20
Conclusion........................................................................................................ 22
Planning................................................................................................................ 23
Objectives & Challenges.................................................................................... 23
Community Mapping......................................................................................... 25
Brand Identity, Tone and Manner....................................................................... 26
Digital Ecosystem.............................................................................................. 28
Governance and Management.......................................................................... 32
Management Tools............................................................................................ 33
Measurement.................................................................................................... 37
Conclusion........................................................................................................ 42
Part 2: Execution............................................................................................................ 43
Channels & Examples.......................................................................................... 44
Website............................................................................................................. 44
Landing Pages.................................................................................................. 48
Email Marketing................................................................................................. 53
Facebook.......................................................................................................... 54
Twitter............................................................................................................... 57
LinkedIn............................................................................................................. 61
Instagram.......................................................................................................... 63
YouTube............................................................................................................ 66
Influencer Engagement...................................................................................... 68
Food for Thought............................................................................................... 70
References........................................................................................................................... 71
Culture Days would like to extend its gratitude to Liesl Barrell, CEO and Co-Founder of Third Wunder
for her generous collaboration and by sharing her expertise with the Canadian arts and cultural sector.
Culture Days would also like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage and The J.W. McConnell
Family Foundation for their support.
©Culture Days 2015
INTRODUCTION
According to Culture 3.0: Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies on the Cultural Sector in
Canada by the Cultural Human Resources Council (2011) a greater understanding of digital
business and marketing skills are critical for the arts, culture and non-profit sector to thrive.
However many organizations are struggling to adapt to a constantly shifting online landscape,
with ongoing training, resourcing demands and thought leadership being among the greatest
challenges to take full advantage of digital opportunities.
This ebook builds on the Culture Days Digital Marketing Webinars [link to webinar recording
permalinks] to help Canadian nonprofits develop digital marketing strategies and launch effective
campaigns. How you use it will depend greatly on the nature of your organization and activities,
as well as the relative maturity of your community and databases.
Those just starting out will be more focused on building and growing channels, while those
with established online properties will have more data to work with to determine concrete goals.
Those with bigger budgets and more resources will be able to scale larger campaigns and silo
tasks to different roles, those with smaller budgets will need to be especially attentive to
return-on-investment and will have fewer team members wearing many hats.
When done well, digital marketing is not simply a vehicle for promotion, but an extension of your
mission and programming—a way to further your reach into conversations around your and
others’ contributions to the arts and cultural areas you serve and to galvanize your fans to act
as advocates for your work.
Great arts and culture marketers not only achieve their goals, they’re creating new spaces and
avenues to showcase amazing work and ideas, bringing donors, sponsors, ticket-buyers, artists,
and thought leaders together in a vital and vibrant greater community.
1
PART 1
STRATEGY
2
STRATEGY
The 2013 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report revealed that less than a third of nonprofit
marketers had written and approved marketing plans for 2013:
In order to achieve marketing goals and compare year-on-year growth and insights, it is
imperative to develop a strategic vision that provides a roadmap for all digital marketing initiatives,
as well as new ideas for test campaigns.
“I HAVE ALWAYS FOUND THAT
U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower once
PLANS ARE USELESS, BUT
said, “I have always found that plans are
PLANNING IS INDISPENSABLE.”
useless, but planning is indispensable.” While
the temptation is to jump straight into tactics, organizations that invest the energy in developing
an overarching strategy will reap the rewards of high-level planning. The purpose of developing
and maintaining a strategy is not to rigidly define each tactic, but to develop a big picture
3
STRATEGY
understanding of your goals, positioning, constituents, and what you aim to achieve for the year.
That way as opportunities come up (whether it’s a new platform, partnership or idea) you can
evaluate their priority according to your roadmap and adjust as needed.
Working on a strategy is your opportunity to brainstorm, think laterally and ultimately define
what pieces should be part of your marketing puzzle, as well as what it should look like when
completed. Whereas execution is where you focus on delivering each piece at the right time in
the right place to put that puzzle together.
Research
Every successful digital marketing strategy starts with understanding the landscape, your target
audience and the industry you specialize in. For example, if you run a dance company, you’ll want
to see what others are doing online in your market (and beyond) as well as look at your dancers,
donors, sponsors, show attendees and fans to glean insights into how they connect with you,
your projects, and with related interests (other live performance types, photography,
movement/exercise).
This kind of research helps contextualize your marketing efforts by establishing the situation,
showcasing opportunities to take advantage of and identifying threats to mitigate. Industry & Digital Market Research
Understanding your industry realities within Canada is key to developing a strategy. Sources
will either be very specific to your area, where they’ll vary greatly depending on whether your
organization is based around heritage, live performance, film, music, galleries; or they may broadly
encompass arts and cultural organizations at large, where the findings are generally relatable
across disciplines. Building a list of resources that publish statistics and case studies both around
your domain and for arts and culture in general will help you keep your strategy updated regularly.
4
PRO-TIP
Online research often involves showing examples and statistics
from various websites and sources within your documentation.
Screengrabbing or screenshotting tools make this a lot easier by giving
you browser extensions or mobile phone shortcuts that capture the
screen, or the entire page at once. Many allow you to make annotations
directly before you save the image.
If you like a campaign or a website, be sure to screengrab it while
you still can—many organizations update their websites and assets
frequently so it’s best to save images as soon as you take interest
in the initiative. These images can then be added to documents or
presentations as needed down the line.
TOOL
Fireshot is a popular free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox,
Internet Explorer and more. STRATEGY
This may include:
■■ Trade magazines, periodicals and academic journals
(online and/or in print)
■■ Specific umbrella organizations (e.g. if you’re part of a literary organization, the Professional
Writers’ Association of Canada)
■■ Blogs and podcasts by related organizations
■■ Reports by governmental or general cultural organizations
(e.g. the Blackbaud Index on giving in Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, the Cultural
Human Resources Council, Imagine Canada and so on).
When delving into market research look for insights relating to your domain and how users
relate to it, this can be specific to your brand (e.g. the Canadian Opera Company), more
broadly connected to what you do (Opera searches in Canada), or related to other comparable
institutions (e.g. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra).
Some useful tools and resources for understanding the digital market:
■■ Google Trends & Topsy
Google Trends is great for mapping search interest over time, peak headlines, geographic
interest (filter to the report by “Canada” to see more local results), related searches and more.
These insights can be used to get a general sense of the trends (e.g. in the inset graph comparing
Canadian searches for both the Canadian Opera Company and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra
we can see search interest has generally trended downwards for the last ten years for both
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STRATEGY
organizations), plan content for better SEO, uncover partnership opportunities or discover
associations you may not have been aware of prior.
Similarly, Topsy helps analyze the content shared on Twitter relating to a specific area with useful
insights, analytics and basic sentiment analysis.
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STRATEGY
■■ Google Keyword Planner
This tool was developed to help advertisers plan search ad campaigns but is also useful for
content and SEO, as well as to see what the public searches for around your area of expertise.
In the example below, we see what a gallery specializing in Native Canadian Art would find if
they looked up related keyword ideas in order of most popular. Looking at search terms through
tools like this and Google Trends are key, because you want your organization to be highly visible
in searches that relate to what you do. Seeing that “inuit art” is a related term might help craft
content around that (e.g. blog posts or dedicated pages) to capitalize on that traffic organically
(or through paid search ads if desired).
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STRATEGY
■■ Hashtagify.me
Useful for hashtag research and seeing what tags are most commonly correlated with others in
tweets about your area of expertise (e.g. we can see that sometimes the hashtag #iheartculture is
used with #CultureDays) to help discover new content, conversations, influencers and avenues to
explore in your research.
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STRATEGY
■■ SocialBakers
SocialBakers produces monthly reports on industries (e.g. media, fashion, ecommerce) and
countries for top social media activity. Even though these reports typically showcase large-scale
consumer brands, they can be very useful to gauge to pulse of an overall community. In March
2015 for example, the average number of posts on Facebook for the Top 20 brands in Canada
was 21, whereas the average number of tweets in the month was 111, suggesting a 5:1 ratio of
posts on the two platforms may work well for Canadian community managers if that benchmark
makes sense for them.
■■ Trend Watching & Forecasting
One of the most powerful aspects of the market research phase is taking the time to look into
forecasts and trend reports. These are typically written from a business standpoint as interesting
directions consumers are taking as opportunities for for-profit companies, however they can be
extremely valuable for non-profits when you mix this kind of research with ideation.
For example, a marketer at a dance company may see that autonomous self-filming drones
are part of a greater “Instant Skills” trend observed by TrendWatching for 2015. This marketer
may decide to pre-order the Lily camera to shoot a specially orchestrated campaign video for
the 2016 season that involves the company dancing in spectacular Canadian outdoor scenes
with the drone flying and filming automatically overhead in the kind of long aerial tracking shot
previously reserved for filmers who could afford helicopter shots. As a unique application of
emerging technology chances are this marketer could capitalize on the stunt if they planned good
PR and influencer outreach to distribute the piece on social media. The drone technology may
then be incorporated in other marketing material, or even onstage as the company experiments
with a new way to capture their art.
Other interesting sources of Trend Reports and industry research are JWT Intelligence, eMarketer,
Faith Popcorn, SmartInsights, PSFK, and generally searching SlideShare for interesting
presentations on digital marketing trends and forecasting.
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STRATEGY
Competitor Analysis
Understanding what similar arts and culture organizations are doing in spaces close to home will
also help hone your own strategy. Effective competitor research is not about treating other similar
organizations as a threat, but learning from their wins and mistakes in order to solidify your own
approach. Pick three to five other organizations that are comparable to your own and go through
their digital properties systematically to analyze each ecosystem and see how they use their
different channels.
Think of the following questions as you go through each one:
■■ Review their website and content: how is it structured? How do they identify their
different audiences and communicate to them? What features do they have (online
purchase, downloads, videos, etc.) and how do they contribute to the experience?
What do you feel is missing that you could bring to your own site?
■■ Sign up to their newsletter(s): do they have multiple lists, and if so, how are they
segmented? What kind of content do they send in the newsletters and how often?
■■ Go over all their social media properties: how are they using each platform? What kind
of content gets the most engagement (likes, shares, retweets, comments) and how does
their content differ for each channel? What is their following like: are there many fans,
or notable influencers you can see engaging with them? What could they do better?
■■ Other noteworthy activities: Are they throwing events, using search marketing, taking
surveys, providing apps or other tools?
Take notes on the state of their digital marketing as a whole and where you think their strengths
and weaknesses are. Once you’ve reviewed all the competitors, identify major gaps across their
combined weaknesses as potential opportunities for your own marketing initiatives (e.g. none of
the competitors are using video or YouTube), and their combined strengths as areas you’ll need
to develop or keep an eye on. Check in on your competitor list every quarter and update your
overall analysis at least annually to keep tabs on their activities and campaigns.
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TOOL
If you’re a larger organization that depends on staying ahead of the
curve it may be worth investing in costlier solutions to keep tabs
automatically on what’s going on. Competitor tracking products like
RivalIQ (note that they do have non-profit pricing if you inquire), UnMetric,
or social monitoring tools like Radian6, Crimson Hexagon or ViralHeat
(and many others) are options that help with long-term listening and
competitor comparative analysis.
PRO-TIP
Don’t have a big budget for the fancy solutions above? Never fear!
Not only are there monitoring tools for all budgets, many solutions offer
Free Trial periods that are long enough (usually 14 days to a month)
to grab the data you need for your research phase if you don’t require
ongoing access.
Even if they don’t advertize a trial many solutions will give you one
or extend an existing trial period if you’re evaluating their tool against
others to find one that works for you, so ask them. To boot, many offer
free lower-end tools like RivalIQ’s gratis Meta Description Comparative
Report for SEO comparisons with other organizations.
STRATEGY
Benchmarks & Inspiration
Benchmarks are similar to competitors except they don’t operate in the same market or are less
linear comparisons that inspire you. If your art gallery specializes in Native Canadian artwork,
for example, you may find a similar gallery
showcasing aboriginal art in Australia in an
FINDING GREAT BENCHMARKS IS
interesting way online that gives you lots of
A CASE OF FIGURING OUT WHAT
ideas as to where you can take your own.
Likewise, you may be inspired by a
seemingly unrelated brand altogether, like
maybe you love the way the US Navy
goes all the way back, from 1800 onwards,
to tell their story using Facebook timeline
INSPIRES YOU, WHAT YOU WANT
TO BE KNOWN FOR IN YOUR
MARKETING, AND LOOKING FOR
THOSE WHO ARE ALREADY DOING
IT WELL IN OTHER AREAS.
and historical images.
It is important to note that inspiration is not the same as imitation, the idea is to see how others
are innovating and apply your own ideas and concepts to different tactics. And remember:
great ideas are scalable, you may not have the budget to produce something at the level as one
of your benchmarks, but there are usually ways to execute amazing work on a shoestring budget.
YouTube artists do it all the time...
Some great places to look for inspiration:
■■ Searching for case studies related to what you’re trying to find on Google or Slideshare
(e.g. searching for “Twitter contest case study”).
■■ Looking at marketing awards websites for finalists and semi-finalists. For example,
searching for “museum” in Facebook’s Awards brings up this amazing case study of how
Paris’ Musée de la Grande Guerre du Pays de Meaux increased foot traffic by 45% by
creating an entire Facebook profile for a 29 year-old man living through the First World War.
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STRATEGY
Many marketing awards show videos or case studies with results which can be invaluable for
benchmarking (like the Cannes Lions), and they often maintain archives of previous winners
(like the Webbies) and have special categories for non-profits and arts/culture projects (like the
Boomerangs in Quebec).
■■ Browsing and searching general marketing and advertising websites that celebrate
creativity like:
º The Inspiration Room, where you’ll find these beautiful Steppenwolf Theatre posters.
º Ads of the World, where you’ll find the awesome Canadian Film Fest 2015 Anatomy
of a Cliche video.
º AdWeek, where you can read about how Pitch Perfect 2 used oft-neglected
emerging social channels like Instagram, Snapchat and Tumblr to build awareness
in young viewers and fans.
º Creativity, where you’ll find this video of Matilda the Musical produced to take
“When I Grow Up” out of the theatre and onto NYC streets or this video of how cars
were dirtied up in a dusty car wash to promote Mad Max: Fury Road with some
experiential marketing in Toronto.
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STRATEGY
Benchmarks are also great to help brainstorm new campaign ideas and use as references you
can share with your team, writers, designers or agency partners.
The Academy of Cliché, Canada Film Fest: Ads of The World
Audit
If you’re only just starting out and haven’t launched any online properties, you’ll need to skip this
step and come back to it six months to a year after you’ve been operating online.
Now that you have a solid grasp of the online market, your space, competitors and great ideas
from benchmarks, it’s time to look close to home and audit your own existing channels to find
out what you can improve and how much you know about your community. If you update your
strategy annually the audit also serves as a great piece to circle back on to see how far you’ve
come in a year.
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STRATEGY
The most important thing to remember when examining your data and analytics is to stay curious
and open to identifying anomalies and patterns that can help you see why things worked, why
they didn’t and why your visitors are behaving in certain ways. If you let the data “speak” to you,
you can uncover all sorts of useful avenues to optimize and hone your strategy moving forward.
What data and insights you can gather will depend greatly on your existing tools and particular
setup, but here are some areas to explore to get a deeper understanding of your own ecosystem:
■■ Google Analytics
What pages are visitors looking at on your site? What’s the bounce rate (the percentage
of people leaving after hitting pages on your site)? What search terms are referring traffic
and to which pages? How much traffic are you getting overall per month, and how much
from certain channels like social media? Are there other websites sending you consistent
referral traffic? Is most of your traffic coming from an expected geographical area?
How much time are people spending on your website? Is there a pattern to your search
traffic (some sites see a regular downturn every weekend, some peak in recreational times)
and does it follow the nature of your activities (e.g. a monthly spike in traffic around a
regular monthly event you hold)?
Answering these questions (and more!) will help you get both a qualitative and quantitative
understanding of what you’re doing well and where there may be issues with your website
content (for example, if you notice high bounce rates and lots of traffic coming from
another continent, they may be searching for a similar organization in their area and leaving
when they realize their mistake).
Do a deep dive into analytics to see what’s happening every month, and run reports for
the past year and since the launch of your site to get a sense of lifetime traffic and overall
trends (e.g. is your traffic increasing/decreasing overall, or remaining steady?) You may not
be able to answer all the questions, and you may leave with some assumptions to test,
but you will have a better sense of what is and isn’t working on your current website.
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STRATEGY
■■ Email and other databases
If you have segmented email lists in your email marketing platform (e.g. Donors,
Subscribers, Artists, Partners, Sponsors) or use other kinds of systems (CRM,
Ticketing POS, etc.) now is a great time to review them for insights and see if you
need to do any housecleaning.
Are there people who haven’t opened an email or purchased a ticket for a show in a while?
Are there people in your community who are frequently referring you other patrons by word
of mouth? What kind of patterns do you notice in your most loyal members/subscribers in
terms of demographics or common interests? What is the difference between those who
have only one touchpoint with you and those who come back regularly? If you can start
seeing patterns you can identify earlier what qualities and experiences make a first-timer
more likely to come back and use that insight to better target those with higher likelihood
of loyalty.
■■ Twitter Analytics
Look back over the year comparing each
month’s snapshot on Twitter Analytics.
This helps you see which activities led to the
most mentions and engagement, who are
your most notable followers and what were
your peak engagements, as well as when you
gained the most followers. This can help you
plan to ramp up Twitter activity during periods
or events where you know it works better for
you based on your review of the past year (or
more) of activity.
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STRATEGY
■■ Facebook Insights (Go to your
Facebook Page and click on
“Insights” in the top menu.The
revamped Facebook Insights has
a lot of useful information to help
you plan your strategy. It’s easy
to forget but in the top right of
most reports you can customize
the reporting period. For most
strategic insights, looking at the last year will help you see patterns in behaviour and
help you forecast growth. In the example graph, we see a community that’s comfortably
growing at 30% over the course of the year and appears to continue on-trend, so it would
be a reasonable goal for the following year to increase fans by 30% or more.
In addition to seeing reach and
engagement metrics that will
help you see which posts are
performing best, you can also
look into your demographics
by clicking on “People.” Above
is an example of a community
page for a women’s organization
with some mark-ups to show
how looking at the data can help
inform strategic decisions and
find ideas to test.
Your page data will tell a different story from the example, it’s important to examine the
unique makeup of your community and see how it’s shaping to find ways to better connect
with them.
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STRATEGY
■■ imply Measured Free Reports
S
Simply Measured provides enterprise-level solutions for larger companies to track social
activity and generate comparative reports, but they also offer some really useful and
detailed free reports that can shed much light on your social properties when planning your
strategy. Most of them examine the last two weeks of activity but can still be very insightful,
especially with top tags, comments and commentators, engagement as percentage of
followers, and time of day reports that help you see the best days and times to post for
each network based on engagement.
Handier still, you can download the information to Excel or export to PowerPoint, so if you
like their detailed format you can generate new reports every two weeks and keep them
on file easily. As it stands they offer various reports for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine,
Google+ and Google analytics that offer rich visualizations of key information to help you
make informed choices about how you manage your communities.
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In general in your audit, you should be looking for clues as to:
■■ What content works on what platforms.
■■ When your users are most active on various channels.
■■ What you can improve moving forward.
■■ What would be achievable goals for growth in traffic, community engagement and
size for the upcoming year.
Creating Personas
If you’re only just starting out and haven’t launched any online properties, you’ll need to skip this
step and come back about a year after you’ve been operating online.
Personas can be a powerful marketing tool as they help put a name, face, voice and specific
needs to core members of your community.
There are many ways to approach developing personas, but in general the more you can base
them on actual data (from your audit in the previous section) and interviews the better, though
there’s almost always one or two assumptions you may weed out over time as you follow your
audience.
By using insights to segment your
audience into key groups you want to
focus on and identifying commonalities for
certain types of persona, you can base
many of your strategies on “speaking”
to these members of your audience.
IBM was so invested in their personas
their team would celebrate persona
birthdays every year!
PRO TIP
FOR MORE DETAILS ON HOW TO
DEVELOP YOUR OWN PERSONAS,
CONSULT BUFFER’S EXCELLENT
BEGINNER’S GUIDE ON THE TOPIC
Most organizations will be able to identify 3 - 8 different personas who repeat in various
incarnations throughout their ecosystem. This may break down into a couple of donor personas,
a few subscriber/member personas, hardcore fan personas, and so on.
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STRATEGY
It can take a while to brainstorm and solidify your personas, but remember they are an evolving
tool and as you learn more about your community your personas will evolve, too. You may even
add new ones or remove those you don’t want to focus marketing efforts on.
To help you develop personas, here’s an example of a template you can use for each core group:
And here’s a fictional example of a persona for a made-up gallery to help illustrate how each one
you develop serves as a kind of “baseball card” with vital information about a key demographic.
It’s easier to think about “speaking” to Stella when writing a Facebook post intended for her
representative audience than to think of some amorphous group or segment.
It also helps in campaign planning to isolate which personas you’ll be targeting for each push.
You may target “Stella” and two other personas for one campaign, and two completely different
personas (e.g. donor types) for another.
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Conclusion
Whatever combination of techniques you employ from this guide, at the end of your research
phase, you should feel confident that you’ve documented and assembled enough information
to enter the planning phase.
You want to paint both a broad picture of the landscape (artistic, cultural, technological, marketing)
you’re operating in and a detailed portrait of your specific circumstances (your community,
their needs, your challenges, areas you can optimize, high-value opportunities to explore).
Collecting and collating your thoughts into a cohesive research document is an excellent way
to parse all the information into a unified action plan to roll-out throughout the year.
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STRATEGY
Planning
Once you have your research under your belt, it’s time to put together your digital marketing plan.
Every organization has different resources, audiences, budgets and needs, so there’s never any
“one size fits all” formula, however, we will walk you through the key components to consider and
account for in your planning.
This step is especially important if you have a team, as it helps develop the visuals and processes
you need to keep everyone aligned to your vision and clarify their roles in delivering on it.
OBJECTIVES & CHALLENGES
Creating Objectives
When creating your marketing plan, setting high-level prioritized objectives will help focus your
efforts around initiatives that will best serve your greater needs.
The 2015 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report surveyed over 1,500 non-profits and
asked them what their most important communications objectives were for 2015. These were
the answers (the percentages indicate how many respondents included the respective objective
in their top 3):
1. Engaging Our Community (57%)
2. Retaining Current Donors (53%)
3. General Brand Awareness (51%)
4. Acquiring New Donors (50%)
5. Thought Leadership (33%)
According to the report, “Acquiring new donors has
dropped out of first place as a primary communications
goal, with retaining current donors surging ahead from
4th place [in 2014] to 2nd [in 2015], and engaging our
community moving from 2nd place [in 2014] into 1st
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STRATEGY
place [in 2015].” A similar survey by eMarketer identified slightly different statistics (from 201314, bearing in mind the report above is more recent), but still shows that brand awareness,
engagement, and retention/loyalty are in the top three, if in a slightly different order, so across the
board these objectives appear to be crucial for Non-profit marketers.
Your organization may have different goals, including but not limited to:
■■ Increasing ticket sales
■■ Retaining subscriptions
■■ Securing corporate sponsorships
■■ Acquiring grants
■■ Attracting top-tier artists
Once you’ve listed out your marketing objectives for the year, focus on the three most important
and rank them by priority so that the most important one remains top-of-mind.
Recognizing Challenges
Think about the biggest operational challenges in the way of you achieving each of those goals.
Focus on internal challenges (like budget, timeline, resources, outdated technology) rather than
external factors (e.g. the economy) in order to focus on elements that are within your control.
Associate a major challenge to each objective. For example, if your primary goal is to engage
your community, your biggest challenge may be resources. This means your marketing plan will
have to account for how you can achieve that objective despite its related challenge. Perhaps you
propose sharing employees with another team, automating certain activities, investing in timesaving tools, or scaling back on unnecessary/ineffective tactics…
In addition to helping your team rally around your three key objectives, showing them you are
aware of the obstacles in front of you can go a long way towards positioning your plan as
realistically achievable and get all your stakeholders to buy into your vision.
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STRATEGY
Community Mapping
Take the time to visualize your audience and the way different groups in your community connect
and cross over. Venn Diagrams and logic are great for this exercise. It helps to better understand
how members of your community grow into different areas over time.
In the example below we’ve mapped out the community for a fictional theatre to show how
members of this hypothetical community intersect. For example, in this community some of the
artists are simply involved as talent, some are single-ticket purchasers, some are subscribers,
some buy group tickets for classes they teach, and so on.
The final map may seem as though it would be evident before you even start, but visualizing
your community and thinking logically about where all the core constituents should be placed in
relation to one another can actually be quite complex and yield surprising shifts in thinking.
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STRATEGY
Especially when paired with developing personas, this exercise will help you better segment and
create more meaningful experiences that account for overlap across different areas.
Brand Identity, Tone and Manner
Defining your brand identity will help establish consistency across all your campaigns and regular
communications. This ranges from the kinds of visuals you use across your assets to the copy in
every blog post, email, tweet.
It’s crucial for you and your team to have a strong handle on your brand personality. The identity
you define needs to suit your
organization, so often a good
place to start is asking what
qualities you value in the work
you produce and the talent you
hire. Would you think of your
voice as more authoritative or
inclusive? Institutional or bleeding
edge? Would you think of your
org’s type of humour as dad
puns or absurd zany madcap? Is your direction more sophisticated or casual? Serious or silly?
Energetic or calm? How are the different sides of your personality expressed in images or video?
Montreal-based Improv troupe Uncalled For does an excellent job at consistently expressing their
particular brand of indie absurdist humour in all their copy and visuals. Here are three of their
email subject lines:
■■ Uncalled For makes an honest woman out of improv
■■ For everything super yes time, Uncalled For!
■■ 10 Days, 6 Shows, 1 Evil Purpose
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PRO-TIP
There are many guides specifically created to help define brand identity
with tools and templates,we recommend the following articles to get
you going:
■■ Finding Your Brand’s Voice: How to Shape a Tone of Voice
by Harriet Cummings.
■■ How to Find Your Social Media Marketing Voice: The Best
Examples, Questions and Guides by Kevan Lee.
STRATEGY
When you’ve defined a brand voice it’s easier to
become comfortable with it and task out to others
with a simple brief to help them understand how
to produce content that is consistent with your
overall output. Think of it as your organization’s
overarching sense of style, it makes it easier for
different team members to adopt the voice when
they understand the character behind it,
it becomes something they can “put on” as one
plays a role onstage.
Digital Ecosystem
One of the biggest digital marketing questions
we’ve received from arts and culture organizations
is, “which platforms should we be on?”
Once again, there are no hard and fast rules about
which channels will work for everyone, it really
depends on your community and your strategy,
however there are certain trends in the non-profit
community that would indicate some channels are
generally performing better than others and are
more widely adopted.
eMarketer profiled non-profits to rank the
importance of various channels, which may help
guide you in identifying your own priorities (see left).
Similarly, the 2015 Nonprofit Communications
Trends Report reveals trends in the top three social
platforms preferred by non-profits over the last three years. From this we can tell that Facebook
is used almost universally, and that the networks showing the most growth in traction are Twitter
(at nearly 80% listing it as among their top three), YouTube (at close to 50%), LinkedIn (at just over
30%), and Instagram (up to 20% listing it among their top 3, growing in importance by 900% in
just two years).
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The most important thing to remember is that joining
a new social media site as an organization is a big
commitment. It’s hard to abandon a platform if
you’ve built even a small following, so unless you are
willing to invest the time and resources to nurture a
new presence it may be best to hold off until you can
fully commit to it.
During planning, mapping out your existing
ecosystem, the role of each channel, how they work
together and which (if any) new tools or channels you
want to add to the mix. Bear in mind that generally
introducing a new channel, whether it’s podcasting
or Snapchat or Pinterest or email marketing, takes
significant time to plan and master so generally
phasing in new channels by launching each one
slowly over time allows you to plan for them better
than launching a bunch at
the same time.
Some research that may help you distinguish your
purpose on Facebook versus Twitter is a survey on
how Canadians use these two networks. eMarketer
released a study showing that:
“On Twitter, users in Canada were most likely to say
they shared content in order to endorse it, at 79% of
respondents. That number dwarfed any reason to
share via Facebook. Voicing your opinion (58%) and
spreading important news (53%) rounded out the top
three reasons behind Twitter sharing.
On Facebook, spreading important news and voicing
your opinion about it were the top two reasons to
share, though somewhat less compelling than they
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were on Twitter. The No. 3 reason to share via facebook, providing followers with content that
might interest them, garnered 47% of respondents—close to the 46% who did this via Twitter.
But relatively few people on Facebook were interested in posting content to endorse it—fewer
than a third did so. Meanwhile, 41% posted to Facebook just to add content to their feed, while a
mere 5% of Twitter users did the same.
These findings support that if you want people to share content on Facebook, making it
“newsworthy” and “shareable” (of interest to your audience’s friends) is an important way to angle
your posts. Similarly, people may be more amenable to share general content or specific calls-toaction (e.g. fundraising drives) from you on Twitter.
When you’ve mapped out your ecosystem and the purpose for each channel, it makes it easier
to visualize and track how you acquire new leads and convert them into visitors, members, ticket
purchasers, and so on.
Some even go as far as to map out the tools they use behind the scenes and the pathways for
leads versus current members within the digital ecosystem. This can be extremely valuable for
larger teams where understanding all the tools and channels you’re using can get confusing when
multiple people are managing them.
An example of an
ecosystem map that
includes functions, tools and
channels, as well as a user
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STRATEGY
Once you’ve built a map that you’re happy with, you can use it as a tool to plot out campaigns
and show which properties will be the primary locations for promotional activity, which will be
used to support the campaign, and which won’t be leveraged for the initiative.
If you develop a Facebook contest, what channels make sense to promote it? You may choose to
announce it in an email newsletter, tweet about it regularly, as well as launch and post reminders
on Facebook, but perhaps you decide it doesn’t meet the criteria of what you use LinkedIn to do
if you focus on a different audience and purpose on that channel. This is just an example, but it
goes to show that not all initiatives should be promoted everywhere, nor should they be framed in
the same way across channels.
Governance and Management
No matter how big or small your team is, you’ll want to make sure you clearly define roles,
responsibilities, and approval processes. This is especially true for social media as that often
touches many areas across the organization.
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Here is an example where a three-person marketing team connects with the PR team regarding
social media activities and breaks down tasks based on social media (for the Community
Manager) versus web and campaign channels ( for the Marketing Manager).
If everyone is clear on their roles it makes it much easier to ensure operations and campaigns run
smoothly as team members understand what areas they “own” and who they need to collaborate
with for different projects or to meet different needs.
Management Tools
The tools you use to manage your ecosystem will change depending on what platforms you’re
using, your budget, your needs, your growth, and your strategy. That being said, arts and culture
marketers will definitely need a mix of the following solutions, and luckily there are options at all
price points with all sorts of features.
Evaluating Tools
When evaluating any new tool it can be really overwhelming as there are now hundreds, if not
thousands, of options in each category. Always build out a list of your “need-to-have” features
and “nice-to-have” features (creating a checklist in Excel works well for this) and be sure to
forecast your needs at least 1 - 2 years down the road to make sure it’ll grow well with you.
Do your research to compare a minimum of 3-5 solutions in the same category against each
other to help ensure you pick the right option for you. If you won’t be using the tool day-to-day,
always make sure whoever will be most actively using the solution gets to demo and weigh in
on the options so you factor their experience into your evaluation.
If your team is ever in a position where the tool or platform no longer appears to serve your needs,
or where it actually takes more time than using native platforms or spreadsheets, it is likely time
to re-evaluate your options and possibly invest in another solution. In those cases, be sure to
consider data migration or re-population into your evaluation criteria so you understand what the
process will be when you switch over and can plan for it accordingly.
Content Management System (CMS)
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This is what powers your website, and helps team members make website content updates
on their own, like publishing blog posts or events. Generally speaking, unless there is a very
good reason not to, it is usually best to stick with well-supported and documented open source
systems as opposed to custom or proprietary ones built by specific vendors. This helps ensure
that if you ever need to work with a new developer they’ll be more likely to be familiar with the
framework and that it can be routinely serviced with security updates.
Popular CMS options for arts & culture marketers:
■■ WordPress (Note: the self-hosted .org version, not WordPress.com. WordPress powers
~25% of the websites online, more than any other single CMS on the market.)
■■ Drupal
■■ Joomla
Analytics
Make sure you set up analytics to track your website, and use the same tracking code if you ever
relaunch or revamp to keep your historical data and compare the performance of your old site to
your new site. This helps you track and understand what visitors do on your site and how they’re
getting there.
Popular Analytics tools for arts & culture marketers:
Google Analytics (there are other options like Adobe Analytics, but they are only used
under very specific circumstances).
Email Marketing System (EMS)
Selecting a great email platform will help you build segmented lists and run campaigns that are
compliant with Canadian Anti-SPAM laws. Email marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach
your base and still often converts better than social media for certain actions.
Popular EMS options for arts & culture marketers:
■■ MailChimp
■■ MailPoet (if your site is built on WordPress)
■■ CakeMail
Social Media Management System (SMMS)
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PRO-TIP
There are many other social tools that may help you run your
communities. Listening tools (like Topsy or ViralHeat) or content
marketing tools (like CoSchedule is AMAZING if your site is built
on WordPress and you produce a lot of content) can also make
your life easier, whether or not your pair them with an SMMS.
STRATEGY
Managing all your social media can get cumbersome using just the native platforms
(e.g. Facebook itself) so there are many tools to help make running them more effective,
efficient and help you standardize your reporting and implement workflows like pre-scheduling
tweets or approvals.
Popular SMMS options for arts & culture marketers:
■■ Buffer
■■ Hootsuite
■■ Sprout Social
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
For larger arts organizations with complex communities, it may be worth investing in CRM
or marketing automation tools. These are more often used on the sales or fundraising side of
things (e.g. to manage relationships with group ticket buyers like school teachers or keep track
of corporate sponsor opportunities and when deals are closed) but can also help the marketing
team manage key relationships as well.
Popular CRM options for arts & culture marketers:
■■ Luminate
■■ CiviCRM
■■ Nation Builder
■■ Insightly
Landing Page Builders
If you’re launching campaigns, landing pages are essential to help convert your targets and
achieve your goals: whether it’s for fundraising, ticket purchases, downloading school guides,
or email newsletter sign-ups, landing pages are a key part of any marketer’s toolbox.
Popular Landing Page Builders for arts & culture marketers:
■■ Inbound Now (if your site runs on WordPress)
■■ Unbounce
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Crowdfunding
More and more arts and culture organizations are looking to crowdfunding to help launch projects.
Any crowdfunding campaign needs to be
“HALF THE MONEY I SPEND ON
heavily supported by the marketing team,
and when done right can actually help with
ADVERTISING IS WASTED; THE
TROUBLE IS I DON’T KNOW WHICH goals beyond fundraising, such as building
awareness and acquiring new members
HALF.” JOHN WANAMAKER
in your greater community. Don’t forget to
export your list and add them to your regular email marketing system in a segmented list when
the campaign is over!
Popular Crowdfunding options for arts & culture marketers:
■■ Indiegogo
■■ Kickstarter
And many more…
There are plenty of other digital tools for specific needs you may have (contest apps, learning
management systems, project management, etc.), so if you’re thinking of trying something new
just do a little research and evaluate which one is best suited to your situation.
Measurement
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is how measurable all your efforts are.
Never before in the history of marketing has insight been this accessible at any level or budget.
If you aren’t regularly reporting on a recurring basis (monthly, quarterly) and doing post-campaign
analyses, you’re missing out on opportunities to greatly improve your efforts each time, or to
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course-correct if your campaign isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped.
Below is a simplified version of a traditional “funnel” where we look at the three key areas of
marketing (building awareness, fostering engagement and generating conversions).
The purpose of reporting and measuring is not simply to generate the reports and numbers
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themselves, but to glean actionable insights that help you learn and optimize with each execution.
But You Can’t Measure EVERYTHING
It’s easy to just throw all the numbers we can at a report every month, but the real trick is
determining which metrics are meaningful both quantitatively (e.g. number of followers) and
qualitatively (e.g. engagement percentage), and specifically reporting on those. All other
observations in analytics can be noted as insights, but by isolating core metrics it’ll help you
streamline the process and find a way to scale your reporting to the size of your team and your
needs. As your team grows you can work on richer dashboards with visualizations and detailed
breakdowns, but it’s better to run streamlined reports on a regular basis than none at all.
By correlating goals to the three key objectives we set earlier in our strategy, you can then
associate metrics you want to track that meaningfully measure how close you are to attaining
those goals and fulfilling your objectives. Below is a general example for a fictional theatre
company of the metrics they’d want to track, categorized by their goals and tactics.
Different organizations will track different metrics according to their model, but organizing
metrics according to your objectives is a good way to document the impact you’ve had over
the year across those core objectives, to share with board members, in grant applications,
and with other stakeholders.
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In addition to associating your objectives to metrics, the format in which you prefer reports to be
produced (Excel visualizations or a simple scorecard in PowerPoint) and their frequency (monthly
or quarterly) is something you should define in your strategy. Producing a template that follows
your objective-defined structure will help you or your team produce regular meaningful reports
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PRO-TIP
Before you share a link in an email campaign, on social, in your email
signature or anywhere else online, add some UTM parameters using
Google’s URL Builder so you can better track the efficacy of each
medium and campaign. Over time you’ll be able to see deeper insights
into how people get to your site, what they do, and which channels are
performing the best for you.
Here’s a handy introductory guide to using UTM tracking for non-profit
digital marketing success by Media Cause to get you started!
STRATEGY
that can clearly communicate if you’re on track to hit your goals.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve completed your research and created your marketing plan, it’s time to move into
execution mode. It bears repeating that your strategy needs to be a living document that you can
adjust over time as you see how your campaigns perform and as you track your progress.
STILL STRUGGLING?
If you need additional resources to complete your strategy, we recommend checking out Simply
Measured’s free resources, guides and strategy kits to help you get through the planning phase.
Remember, you can always adjust and optimize over time. Part 2: Execution
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EXECUTION
EXECUTION
In this section we’ll go through key channels we identified in the Research phase, highlighting some
examples of best practices with key tips for each.
Remember that each community is different so it’ll be important for your organization to test tactics and
measure them to see if they’re working well for you or make adjustments as needed.
Channels & Examples
We’ve focused the channels we’re covering on the data we covered in Part One showing the most
commonly used platforms by non-profits.
That being said lesser-used platforms can sometimes by great ways to reach certain niche markets so
if you have particular needs (e.g. reaching tweens 11-14) it’ll be more important for you to see which
channels are most popular with your audience (e.g. SnapChat) than with other orgs.
We’ve picked a range of examples across arts and culture to showcase a variety of different individuals
and organizations. Wherever possible we’ve used Canadian case studies, but occasionally we found
things too good not to share from elsewhere...
WEBSITE
BEST FOR: AWARENESS, CONVERSION
STRENGTHS: CONTENT MARKETING, ON-SITE SEO
KEEP AN EYE ON: ANALYTICS
In almost all cases, your website functions as the central hub for all your digital marketing efforts. It is
essential that your site functions well, is simple to manage, and is easy to crawl by search engines so
your organization can be found quickly in searches.
Developing regular content (blog posts/articles/event announcements) not only helps establish thought
leadership and communicate regular happenings and dialogues around your community, when welloptimized it also develops your domain authority and rankings. The more optimized and shareable
content you create, the better it is for your online presence.
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In addition to content marketing, your website should also be optimized to help you achieve your goals.
If you’re building an email list, site visitors should be able to sign up on your site. If you’re campaigning
for donations, your website should have multiple touchpoints promoting your drive. And so on...
EXAMPLES
The Jealous Curator
Vancouver-based artist Danielle Krysa has made a name for herself by openly envying other people’s
work and rhapsodizing about it. Despite (and because of) the tongue-in-cheek name, The Jealous
Curator is smart marketing because by curating other experiences she is generously spotlighting fellow
artists and developing content that those artists will likely share widely with their own communities,
which in turn helps her grow her own following. It’s a very clean, simple website that is little more than a
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blog but allows her to build and grow her community by focusing on stellar, visually stunning content.
The National Arts Centre
Moving to an example from a large arts institution: looking at the clean, simple design of the NAC
website, you’d never guess there were over 10,000 pages on it (according to a Google search within
the domain). The hallmark of good UX and design is making an experience effortless, and the NAC have
done a great job making their incredibly complex and vast catalog of information simple to browse and
extremely readable for visitors of all ages.
Their simplified menu also helps support conversion, as the bottom right corner focuses on a few simple
actions that draw the eye in contrast to the largely monochromatic backdrop (connecting on social
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properties, signing up to their newsletter, and/or donating).
KEY WEBSITE TIPS
1. Build a great foundation
From the outset, make sure you pick a solid CMS and your vendor/developer follows SEO best practices
in their architecture. There’s nothing worse than a website that is hard to update, or that underperforms.
2. Invest in on-site SEO
Ensure your pages are optimized and easy to crawl by search engines. Ideally, start that process before
you re/launch your site as it may require architectural changes that are always costlier once development
is complete.
3. A little UX goes a long way...
You don’t need to put ALL your information on the homepage and in every menu. Take the time to think
carefully about how you group your sections and subsections. Simpler, cleaner navigation and strong
internal search usually go much further than putting every category or link front and centre.
Make it easy for your visitors to know where to click next, if there’s too much in front of them they may
give up trying to find what they were looking for on your site. Also, make sure your design uses high
enough contrast and that the selected fonts are legible for older visitors and the visually impaired.
4. Consistently produce fresh content
Event listing, articles, blog posts, reports, and the like help build your website into a more authoritative
resource and provide great shareable material for social media.
5. Put your goals front and centre
Make it easy for visitors to convert to newsletter subscribers, donors, ticket purchasers (and so on) with
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visually striking calls-to-action throughout the site and strong copy.
LANDING PAGES
BEST FOR: CONVERSION
STRENGTHS: CAMPAIGNS, SEM, PAID MARKETING
KEEP AN EYE ON: CONVERSION RATES
Landing pages are conversion-focused pages
with a single action the user can take. Driving
traffic to landing pages is a much more effective
technique than sending users directly to your
website as they can either clickthrough, or leave.
Essentialy there’s no multitude of options to divert
their attention.
When you can easily set up landing pages for
campaigns, creating customized experiences
based on your segments, personas, and/or
the channel you’re using to promote that page
can help you increase conversions and run
more effective promotions, especially for paid
campaigns.
EXAMPLE
Theater Outreach
This landing page has all the elements to help a
visitor decide right away if they want to complete
the action (in this case, hiring the touring live
theatre company). The testimonial helps reinforce
their offering with social proof and the design is
vibrant, using elements from in-person theatregoing (popcorn, etc.) as fun visual references to
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support their messaging.
KEY LANDING PAGE TIPS
1. 5 Elements to persuade people to convert
Landing pages are a persuasive tool, and should include
each element visitors need to make their decision. Learn
more about the core landing page elements from Unbounce.
2. Always be testing!
A/B tests are a great way to isolate an element to try two
different versions (like the headline, or the call-to-action) and
see which one wins. Once you’ve determined the winner,
you can run another test on the same page, optimizing as
you go along to improve conversions over time.
3. Never “Submit”
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are incredibly important for conversion
and should inspire your visitors to take action. “Submit”
buttons don’t speak to your users, think of lines that do…
For Justin Trudeau’s campaign their newsletter sign-up
landing page had the call-to-action, “I’m with Justin!” - that’s
a much stronger call-to-action that will appeal to his base.
In general, CTAs can be thought of as finishing the sentence
“I want to…” with actions like, “Sign up now!”
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EMAIL MARKETING
BEST FOR: AWARENESS, CONVERSION
STRENGTHS: FUNDRAISING, EVENT MARKETING, CONTENT MARKETING
KEEP AN EYE ON: OPEN RATES, CLICK-THROUGH RATES, QUALITY SCORE
Great email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to nurture your community with great
“EMAIL ACQUISITION IS
LIKE CUTTING HAIR: MUST
HAPPEN REGULARLY, CAN
BE DONE WELL, BUT ONE
BAD EXPERIENCE CAN SCAR
FOREVER.” DAVID BAKER,
COO CORDIAL
content and convert them at the right points during
your campaigns. With personalized messaging and
compelling information, drip campaigns can help you
stay top of mind.
You can use your personas to develop behavioural
segmenting and drip marketing to create email series
that speak to different types of audience members as
they build their relationship with you. This pairs well with
content marketing initiatives as sharing current, relevant
content and announcements is a great way to stay in touch with your base.
EXAMPLE
Uncalled For
This Canadian improv troupe has a knack for writing compelling, hilarious emails that their audience
enjoys reading. Because they see their marketing as an extension of what they do (not simply a way
to promote it), they invest time and effort into making their emails and other messaging as funny as
their live shows.
In the example here, while they could have segmented a separate email to Torontonians and Montrealers,
as many of their fans travel between the cities frequently it makes good sense to include them both for a
grassroots campaign.
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Subject Line: Uncalled For... Two cities, one love: YOU.
Attention Torontonians and Toronto sympathizers!
Uncalled For is in your town for a whole week, being happily burned alive nightly at the
PROJECTproject Combustion Festival, already in progress. Every night brings together
flaming-hot improvisers from all over the continent in a chemically unstable conflagration of
spontaneous comedy. Uncalled For themselves will be igniting the stage on Thursday May
29th at 9:30, and Saturday May 31st at 8 PM. Members of Uncalled For will be performing
every night between now and Saturday, in various smouldering experimental improv
unions. Hot! Uncalled For at the PROJECTproject Combustion Festival.
Today until Saturday
Comedy Bar, 945-B Bloor St., west of Ossington
Shows at 8 + 9:30 every night, with late night jams + parties ongoing
Tickets are $6, or $10 for two shows in one night
Attention Montrealers and Montrealaholics!
Uncalled For is in our town next week, and their friends Zack, Jimmy and Rufus from the
13th Hour will be hosting the burstingly-juicy Fringe-For-All on Monday June 2nd. This is
the Montreal Fringe’s annual preview event, where 50 companies have exactly 2 minutes
each to amaze the crowd with a sneak peek of their upcoming show. This will of course
include a preview of Uncalled For’s imminent comedy creation, Blastback Babyzap. The
Fringe-For-All is always a wild night, so put on your stainproof best and join us for a night
of theatrical chaos.
The 13th Hour hosts the Fringe-For-All
Monday, June 2nd, 8 PM
Cafe Campus, 57 Prince-Arthur
FREE!
Attention anyone who doesn’t live in Montreal or Toronto:
Uncalled For misses you, and has just sent you a care package.
----UNCALLED FOR
www.uncalledforimprov.com
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4 KEY EMAIL MARKETING TIPS
1. Experiment to find what works for you
Uncalled For have been at it for years, they’ve nailed what works for them. In time your emails should
develop a consistent voice that matches your organization’s brand. Find a formula that you enjoy,
works well and yields results and keep playing with it, pushing its boundaries. Subtle changes
(e.g. link placement) can have a big impact on clickthrough rates.
2. Use an email marketing service
Using an email marketing system like the ones we looked over in the Tools section can help you:
■■ Build a subscriber list with customizable forms that can be added as pages or widgets
on your website.
■■ Segment your lists by allowing them to specify preferences (e.g. location, genre, specific artist,
etc.) and target them for specific updates (“Come see us in Toronto, Torontonians!”)
■■ Create reusable branded templates for quick and professional email formatting.
■■ Track open rates (how many people open the email), clickthrough rates (how many people click
on each link in the email) and more.
In time this data will help you assess the effectiveness of your strategy, and combined with
experimentation (like A/B Testing) can lead to incremental increases in clickthroughs to your site,
Facebook page or event listing.
3. Pay attention to your content
■■ Write compelling subject lines no longer than 50 characters
■■ Use images, visual elements and whitespace to break text up
■■ Embed links with UTM codes (see the Measurement section of this eBook) to track what your
readers click on from email campaigns
■■ Keep content easily scannable with bullet points, lists, headings, subheadings and separators
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■■ Use a P.S. line: it catches the eye so it’s often one of the first things people read
4. Make sure you’re CASL compliant
The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) is coming into effect between now and July 2017 so it’ll be
important for organizations to ensure they are following regulations. You can read more about CASL and
its implications on the Third Wunder blog.
FACEBOOK
BEST FOR: AWARENESS, ENGAGEMENT
STRENGTHS: COMMUNITY BUILDING, CONTENT MARKETING, SEEDING IN GROUPS
KEEP AN EYE ON: FACEBOOK INSIGHTS
As we’ve seen in the research and planning phases, Facebook is currently the top social media
platform for non-profits, as well as the dominant platform for users worldwide. Because of this ubiquity,
it’s essential to build a page for your organization, but given so many users and brands are active on
Facebook, it can be very hard to show up in news feeds given all the activity that goes on throughout
the network and the fact that Facebook games their system to encourage organizations to boost
content for visibility.
Your Page timeline is an excellent way to populate the history of your organization and share content
geared towards engagement. People are less likely to convert through Facebook than other channels
like Email Marketing, however as their awareness and engagement builds and their touchpoints with
you increase, they are introduced to more of your ecosystem and they become more likely over time
to finally convert. So think of Facebook as an “assist” or supporting channel for conversion, but a great
environment for Awareness and Engagement.
An often overlooked aspect of Facebook is how groups can be an excellent tool to create your own
close-knit communities (e.g. volunteers groups) that can be leveraged to share material in their broader
networks, as well as to seed in other related groups by sharing relevant information. For example,
if you’re throwing a silent auction to benefit animal rights charities, sharing the details in local animal
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lovers’ Facebook groups can be a great way to drum up grassroots support.
This technique works better with groups than pages, as most groups are set to let members post (not
all, but most) whereas on pages other than your own, only your own friends or fans will see notifications
of a post you share to another page. If you’d like to spread the word on other pages the best approach
is to contact the page admins directly with a contextual snippet and link they can copy/paste and share
themselves with their community (offer to share something of theirs in return: they’ll be much more likely
to say yes!)
EXAMPLES
Against the Grain
This award-winning Torontonian opera collective has done an excellent job optimizing their Facebook
page to collect email information from fans (using both the new call-to-action feature and an email
sign-up tab). Their visuals are consistently striking, well-designed and impactful so the likelihood
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someone will stop scrolling their feed to look at their posts is high.
They share regular, thoughtful posts and behind-the-scenes photos of rehearsals and their opera
development process that keeps fans engaged and builds anticipation long before their latest show
opens. Their tone is very human and relatable, they even recently congratulated a board member
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on the birth of her child to the Facebook community:
KEY FACEBOOK TIPS
1. Post regularly
Ideally pages should post content at least once a day, at the very least several times a week. The more
often you post and the more engagement you get from your fans the more likely it is that future posts will
appear in their feeds.
If you don’t have new content of your own to share, curate interesting related content that will appeal
to your community along the core conversation topics you defined in the strategy. Bear in mind that
photos far outperform all other types of posts for engagement, so if you’re crafting a post that falls into
your engagement objective, find a way to express the information in a visual.
2. Go easy on the hard sell
If you post conversion-oriented messages too frequently you risk alienating your fanbase. Facebook is a
content distribution platform, your fans are there to engage with stories and people, not to buy or donate
right away. It’s OK to have a small percentage of your posts geared towards conversion, but a fraction
compared to the posts you should share for engagement and awareness (e.g. ten percent).
3. Update your page with a call-to-action
This relatively new feature allows you to link from the prominent Facebook cover photo area directly to
a campaign landing page, email signup form, ticket purchasing page, contact us form or your website.
It’s an easy way to keep your primary goal top-of-mind and help your Facebook presence translate into
meaningful actions.
4. Interact with other pages, as your page
When logged in as your page, be sure to “like” other pages and engage with them: commenting on their
posts and resharing the most interesting ones (on occasion). This is a great way to build connections
with existing or new partners and to get visibility with their community as other commenters may notice
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your engagement and connect with you as a result.
5. Pay to play
It is now widely understood that without boosting content you only reach a fraction of your fans’ feeds
on Facebook. Once you start a getting reasonable engagement level overall or if you’re just starting out,
it’s worth looking into investing a few dollars into boosting key posts.
Even $5 can make a difference to the distribution of a single post, so if it’s an important announcement
(like your new season lineup) consider boosting the post to fans and friends of fans to get it across more
feeds. Other types of Facebook ads (e.g. “like” ads) don’t tend to perform as well, but if your content is
great, boosting it will help a good deal.
TWITTER
BEST FOR: AWARENESS, ENGAGEMENT
STRENGTHS: INFLUENCER OUTREACH, CONTENT MARKETING, AMPLIFICATION
KEEP AN EYE ON: TWITTER ANALYTICS
Twitter is the perfect platform to connect with influencers and join conversations around your core topics.
Make sure you pick a dedicated hashtag (and do your research to verify nobody else is trafficking on it),
add it to your Twitter bio and to your print material so your followers know how to join live conversations
at your events.
CASE STUDY
Originally published in the Charlebois Post
For Théâtre du Nouveau Monde’s 2010 production of Le Bourgeois gentilhomme
they enlisted Phéromone to helm the company’s first forays into tweeting, and
together they produced the innovative interactive marketing strategy that won the
agency a Bee’s Award and an Infopresse nod, to boot.
SOCIAL CLIMBING
To get some industry insight into the campaign, I spoke with André Bélanger,
VP at Phéromone, who remembers the snowballing momentum of the effort
as a thrilling experience for his team. Spanning just four weeks, he laughs,
“the campaign was too short!”
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Originally, Bélanger says the campaign involved primarily giving voice to two Molière characters on
Twitter: the bourgeois gentilhomme himself, Monsieur Jourdain and his wife, Madame Jourdain. But early
on in planning they realized they would need a third wheel to build this world into a full conversation,
and not simply a duet.
Initially the idea was to bring one of the servant characters in to give a different perspective, but they
eventually chose to go with the seductive Marquise Dorimène to inject conflict between the married
couple.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
“For the game to have meaning you need to follow the rules,”
Bélanger states. To keep their writers on-brief, the agency
developed three main guidelines:
1. Tweet in Verse
From the get-go everyone knew to attempt tweeting
exclusively in Alexandrins would be too ambitious, but the
goal was for each post to include rhyming verse. Towards
the middle of the campaign, as things started taking off, the
writers relaxed this a little to keep up with followers’ post
frequency, but everyone agreed to bring it back to this original
intent during one of their daily touchpoint meetings.
2. Live Now, Think Then
The characters live in the present, but hold the values of their
era. “They refresh us with their 17th century perspective,
show us our reality through their eyes,” adds Bélanger.
3. Explore Molière-relevant themes
Tapping into the universality of consistent themes throughout
Molière’s body of work was a key part of generating post
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content. Bélanger is quick to point out that the playwright had some very progressive ideas, “themes like
feminism, jealousy, seduction, how men and women act, the relationships and power balance between
them.”
Monsieur Jourdain oft-tweeted a phrase when reacting to some of the extensive media coverage taps
into the narcissism shared across our eras: “On parle de moi!”
ALL A-TWITTER
In order to realize their vision of a trio bringing their 17 Century perspective to current goings-on, these
characters needed to be brought to life by a special breed of writer, a dedicated Twitterer capable of
following the rules while improvising as needed.
In order to find the right candidate, Phéromone tweeted that they were looking for Quebec writers
interested in participating in a theatre marketing project. From a pool of qualified candidates, they held
auditions at the agency office and finally selected two people whose tweeting chemistry together was
spot-on perfect: film-maker Alexandra Guité and former theatre teacher turned canine specialist,
Jean Lessard.
Using TweetDeck, Lessard took on Monsieur Jourdain, Guité the
Madame, and they shared the role of the Marquise between them. In
addition to the rules, Bélanger recalls the fun competitive spirit brought
about by turning their objectives into sport. The first of the writers to
meet their follower goals would receive a hefty bonus! In the end, by
constantly challenging and out-performing each other, they exceeded
their targets and both walked away with extra change.
TWEET FOR TAT
Larger companies and arts institutions are often still extremely traditional
in their approach to marketing, frequently sticking to media buys and
relatively static web strategies (we have a website!). When this is the
case, Bélanger points out, “they lose the magic of theatre where weird
things happen every night.”
He touts social campaigns as a way for the arts to harness that magic
as they market themselves with platforms that allow for quick adaptation
and evolution in strategy. Thankfully, TNM was up for the ride with the
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Molière project. In this informative video, Artistic Director Lorraine Pintal, talks about the process.
#RELEVANCE
The agency had hoped the campaign would go viral enough for the press to just stumble on this universe
without much public relations effort. In the end, they sent out a press release after the first week and as a
result, received significant attention from French media.
Throughout the campaign the writers would goose and challenge Quebecers identified by the agency
as key influencers, goading them into taking part in the game with a playful arrogance that inspired
hundreds of followers to jump on board. Here’s a favourite example of an inflammatory rhyming tweet
by the gentilhomme: @pplambert Sachez au moins, Monsieur, écrire vos nuisances de bonne manière
et cessez de faire le fier avec vos grands airs: “flatulence”
5 KEY TWITTER TIPS
1. Tweet a few times a day
The average lifespan of a tweet is about 20 minutes, much less than the few hours a Facebook post
lasts in the feed. As a result most marketers tweet about 5 times or more as often as they post on
Facebook.
Mix up the topics so you aren’t tweeting in a vacuum all day, and take a lot at trending topics to see
if there’s a relevant conversation to join (be sure to fully understand the context).
2. Vary your hashtags, do research
Broadly speaking, tweets with too many hashtags don’t usually perform as well. Best stick to 1 -3
hashtags per tweet, but if you share that content again on different days at different time be sure to use
hashtag variations to get picked up by a different crowd (e.g. #sustainability versus #socialenterprise).
3. Don’t just broadcast, but on the flip side: don’t just RT
One can always tell a well-managed Twitter presence when it has active outbound replies/conversations
and select retweets. Accounts that only use Twitter to publish their own tweets aren’t as committed to
getting involved in the discussion and aren’t using the platform to its fullest.
4. Schedule tweets
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Especially as it’s such short-form content, scheduling blocks of tweets at a time ensures there’s
cohesion across messages without tweeting too often about the same thing.
5. Start your tweet off well...
If your tweet begins with a username (e.g. @ACMEgallery) only those who follow you and the other
account will see the tweet as it’s treated like a tweet at them. So in cases where you want to start your
tweet with their handle because of the sentence structure but you want it to be seen by all your followers,
you can use a period before the @ sign (i.e. .@ACMEgallery’s vernissage last night was…)
LINKEDIN
BEST FOR: ENGAGEMENT
STRENGTHS: INFLUENCER OUTREACH
KEEP AN EYE ON: COMPANY PAGE ANALYTICS
LinkedIn is often overlooked in the arts and culture sector but it can be a powerful tool for connecting
with professionals in your network (board members, donors, sponsors, volunteers, potential hires).
Groups are especially useful for sharing information and seeding job posts, events or fundraising
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information, or for getting useful tips on marketing and PR.
EXAMPLE
TIFF Volunteer Group
LinkedIn can be a great tool to rally volunteers, especially as recent career-path graduates want to show
their extracurricular positions and groups on their profiles to showcase their professional development.
Giving them a space to connect and discuss, in a more professional setting than, say, Facebook, can
help facilitate knowledge-sharing, networking and empower volunteers to take initiatives of their own.
4 KEY LINKEDIN TIPS
1. Search for influencers, partners & potential hires
LinkedIn is an excellent tool for finding people in your network with specific skillsets, maybe because
you’re hiring, need advice or want to pitch a sponsorship opportunity. Use the advanced search features
to query specific details (e.g. searching for “marketing” and only “1st Connections” in your city will return
locals in your direct network who lists marketing on their profile).
2. Build your company page and employer brand
Not many organizations create and maintain a LinkedIn company page, but it can be a great way to
distinguish your employer brand and connect with professionals.
3. Create groups (and subgroups)
Creating a LinkedIn group makes sense if there’s a core area of your audience that engages with you
professionally (like the TIFF volunteer group). Similar to Facebook groups, it can help rally troops around
important announcements to share with their own networks, and give them a space where they can post
useful information in turn with the community.
4. Participate in other groups
Seeding in existing communities when you have content relating to their topics is another great way
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to leverage LinkedIn and spread the word.
INSTAGRAM
BEST FOR: ENGAGEMENT
STRENGTHS: VISUAL STORYTELLING
KEEP AN EYE ON: SIMPLY MEASURED FREE INSTAGRAM REPORT
Given the Facebook acquisition, unsurprisingly Instagram works very well together with Facebook to give
fans a window into your organization, behind-the-scenes teasers and share a more intimate side of your
organization to your artists and community.
EXAMPLES
TALWST
This Canadian-Trinidadian artist produces amazing work that is powerful to connect with on Instagram.
His images make you stop in your feed to look more closely, and have a profound emotional impact.
As his ring box artwork is scaled so small, the images tend to be quite intimate, often featuring his hands
still in the frame. In addition to the finalized pieces, he also shares works in progress, selfies at various
This powerful political piece has an
immediate impact, and the artist’s
hand in the frame gives the photo
a personal touch. Note that this is
a professional quality image, not
shot on a phone, which also helps it
stand out in Instagram feeds.
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Performers and speakers taking
photos and selfies with their
audience is a good way to ensure
people will watch out on their
channels for the post, and will likely
follow the account.
By juxtaposing his inspiration with
his work in progress, TALWST helps
involve his audience in the creation
process.
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functions, and pieces by other artists.
5 KEY INSTAGRAM TIPS
1. Using professional images can help your work stand out
Just because it’s on Instagram doesn’t mean it has to be a grainy, low-grade image. For in-the-moment
shots those can be fine (though you need a certain level for it to be a share-worthy photo), but in cases
where you want to showcase your work in its best light upload a photo from a real camera onto your
phone and share a high quality image instead.
2. Even if it’s not “in-the-moment” you can sometimes fake it
Instagram works best as a window into the here and now, and while some images have to be shared
within a timeframe to be current (like those from a big event such as the JUNO Awards) many can be
banked and shared later or over time. Work in progress shots are a good example of images you can
take daily over a period of time and share when it makes sense and in a way that helps you tell the
story of your evolving artform.
3. Do some hashtag research
Instagram is all about discovery, so research popular hashtags in your area of expertise and use them
where relevant.
If you share some of your Instagram posts to Facebook, keep the hashtags to a relative minimum in the
original post description, but add more as follow-up comments right after you post. That way you don’t
show a string of hashtags on Facebook (where users are less accepting of them), but you get the same
findability on Instagram.
4. At live events, stake out Instagram opportunities
Learn to scan the room for the most striking image potential. Beautifully designed cupcakes? Crazy
costumes? Standing on stage in front of 1,000 people? These are great opportunities to lifestream
for your organization on Instagram.
5. POV shots
Showing the first-person viewpoint of your artists or team members can be a powerful way to put your
audience in your shoes. So if one of your musicians is looking down at a vintage instrument in their
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hands for example, framing it from that vantage point creates a more intimate experience than taking
a photo of them, and draws your followers into your universe.
TOOLS
Instagram is very streamlined in terms of features, so many community managers use additional tools to
get more out of the network:
Repost Apps
Instagram doesn’t have “share” features so marketers rely on apps like Regram or Repost to reshare
images from people in the community. Remember to keep a good ratio of original posts & reshares,
reshares should never dominate your profile.
Sizing
If you have images that don’t fit a square, you can sparingly use Instasize to easily post vertical or
horizontal shots, it’ll fill in the extra space for you. Bear in mind that most of your Instagram photos
should be optimized for the platform, but once in a while it’s fine to share Instasized images where
there’s no way to make it fit.
Grids & collages
Collage apps help share grids of multiple images to show different perspectives, multiple steps in a
process, or more parts to a photo story. Instagram just released a new app called Layout to help people
create split-image Instagrams. And if you like that, check out their Hyperlapse app for easy time-lapse
videos, too!
YOUTUBE
BEST FOR: AWARENESS, ENGAGEMENT
STRENGTHS: VIDEO HOSTING, STORYTELLING
KEEP AN EYE ON: YOUTUBE ANALYTICS
YouTube is commonly used to simply host videos that get used throughout an organization’s digital
ecosystem, but it’s also a powerful social network in its own right and the second biggest search engine
online after Google itself.
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Professional YouTube creators leverage subscribers and snackable video content to build strong
channel followings, and arts and culture organizations often have rich content that is perfect for
capturing on YouTube.
EXAMPLE
Kaeja d’Dance
Toronto-based Kaeja d’Dance Company are celebrating their 25th anniversary this year, and they have
plenty of amazing works to show for it! On YouTube they showcase trailers for stunning dance film
Watch the Asylum of Spoons trailer
here: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=3U8xZy0lmQ4
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projects, glimpses into current projects through vines they’ve reuploaded to their channel and stunning
outdoor dance sequences. Video is a natural fit for dance given it can capture the movement and spirit
of each piece.
4 KEY YOUTUBE TIPS
1. Moderation
You will need to moderate comments on YouTube, and bear in mind they can get really outlandish.
If a commenter trolls you or other commenters, don’t take the bait. Block users if/when necessary if
they violate your community guidelines.
2. Optimize titles, descriptions and tags
As the second biggest search engine online it is extremely important that your videos are well optimized
so that people discover them when searching for related terms.
3. Create playlists
Grouping multiple videos together as playlists helps create series based on your seasons, projects,
or collaborators. Curating playlists of videos from other channels that relate to your area can also be
a great way to draw searchers onto your channel.
4. Ask viewers to subscribe
End your videos with a call-to-action, and unless the video relates to other goals (e.g. fundraising,
in which case you should ask viewers to donate instead) you should remind your viewers to subscribe
as they often forget to do so even when they enjoy the content and want to see more from you. Influencer Engagement
The SAPS influencer model originated in gamification circles from Gabe Zichermann, but has since
proven useful to community managers and strategists aiming to reward and activate influencers from
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S
A
bloggers to Twitteratti. This model can be
extremely powerful when applied to arts
and culture because it connects so well
with why people want to belong in your
community because it privileges experiential/
psychological rewards.
STATUS recognizes community members
P
among their peers (e.g. they’re given an
award, made a moderator, offered special
seating, recognized in an announcement).
S
ACCESS rewards influencers with exclusive
opportunities with the company (e.g.
backstage tour, meet-and-greet, photo opps).
POWER gives select members of the
community a position of authority over others (e.g. judge in a contest).
STUFF represents any tangible, material merchandise (e.g. contest prizes like free ticket giveaways,
t-shirts, etc.)
One of the biggest mistakes marketers can make when engaging their audience on digital is to assume
that money, prizes or gifts are the best reward that can be given to highly-engaged fans when Status,
Access and Power rewards are much more meaningful and build stronger relationships. Engagements
built solely on Stuff tend to be more transactional than those using a variety of SAPS rewards so try
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to delve deeper into the opportunities your organization has to forge lasting bonds through creating
unforgettable moments for your fans.
Against the Grain Theatre has
done a great job optimizing their
LinkedIn company page where they
post news about opera and their
ensemble.
Montreal-based photographer
Andrea Hausmann uses Instagram
to share lighting tests, giving fans
a glamorous sneak peak into her
beautiful sets and stunning shoots.
Czech immigrant and Winnipegbased artist Andrew Valko captures
this fascinating image of his mother
visiting his studio and viewing his
work.
Von Wong uses Instagram to give
a really personal touch to an invite
for Singaporean fans to join him at
a meet up.
Michael Platco is a Snapchat artist and
entrepreneur who reached star status
with experimental art and parlayed it
into income by promoting brands to
his fans. Check out his portfolio here:
http://mplatco.com/
Montreal-based novelist Arjun Basu
has used Twitter to create ultra-short
stories in 140 characters or less for
years. He calls them twisters, and one
was even made into a short film.
Western Canadian Music Award
Winners Sweet Alibi, a pop/folk band
based out of Winnipeg, use Instagram
to share fun moments on their latest
cross-Canada tour.
L.A.-based artist Miranda July
wears her heart on her sleeve in her
Facebook Page posts, speaking
to her fans as she would to close
friends about other artists and writers
she appreciates.
To coincide with an exhibit of Burton’s
work in Toronto November 26 at
TIFF Bell Lightbox in 2010, Tim
Burton crowdsourced an entire story
on Twitter, getting participants to
add each line 140 characters at a
time. Read more: http://mashable.
com/2010/11/22/tim-burton-twitter/
And here you can read more about
the rise of Snapchat art: http://www.
theverge.com/2013/9/27/4777966/
the-rise-of-the-surprisingly-beautifulsnapchart-art-movement
Montreal-based daredevil
photographer Von Wong
uses Instagram to capture
the thrills behind his
breathtaking shoots.
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What unique experiences could you offer your most engaged fans?
Food for Thought
Here is a collection of additional examples we loved that showcase other amazing tactics…
Useful Links
What Marketers Can Learn from Artists by Third Wunder
What Artists Can Learn from Marketers by Third Wunder
What Do Nonprofits Want from Content Marketing? Nonprofits use content marketing to up brand awareness, engagement
by eMarketer
Twitter, Facebook Serve Different Purposes in Canada. Huge variation in usage of ‘social graph’ vs. ‘interest graph’ networks
by eMarketer
Charities, Nonprofits Not Looking for Money from Social. Still, over seven in 10 charities and nonprofits say social media helps
with donations
Online Donations Jump for Nonprofits. Email metrics continue to fall by eMarketer
2014 State of the Canadian Web Nation: Charity Websites Across Canada by Good Works
In the Data Era, Theater Marketers Can No Longer Act Like Digital Understudies. Targeting takes center stage by AdWeek
2015 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report by the Non-Profit Marketing Guide
2014 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report by the Non-Profit Marketing Guide
2013 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report by the Non-Profit Marketing Guide
The Blackbaud Index for Canadian Non-Profits by Blackbaud
Culture 3.0: Impact of Emerging Digital Technologies on the Cultural Sector in Canada by The Cultural Human Resources
Council
Strengthening the Capacity of Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations to Serve Canadians Recommendations Based On The
National Survey Of Nonprofit And Voluntary Organizations by Imagine Canada
Trends for 2015 by Trendwatching
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Liesl Barrell
CEO & Co-Founder of Third Wunder
Liesl is an award-winning agency vet (High-Touch
Communications, Twist Image, w.illi.am/) who
has worked with clients like Van Houtte, Just For
Laughs, Birks, Lise Watier, Mary Kay, Bombardier
and more. In 2014 she co-founded a digital
marketing agency of her own, Third Wunder,
helping sustainable and cultural brands succeed
online. Before she embarked on her marketing
career, she studied theatre (BA McGill, MA U of
T) and her arts background continues to inform
and fuel her obsession with media, old and new.
In her spare time, she enjoys writing in fabulous
corners of the Internetz and is part of the
Montreal Girl Geeks team, running free monthly
networking events for local women in tech. Liesl
is also on the board of the YES Montreal WIT program and has been known to rock a moustache for
Movember:{) You can connect with her on LinkedIn, Twitter or in real life (if there is such a thing).
*Liesl would like to thank Gaëtan Charlebois and Sue Edworthy for their suggestions, as well as all
artists across Canada for bringing much-needed meaning to our lives with their important work.
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Thank you to all of our partners
National Partners / Partenaires nationaux
National Broadcast Partner /
Partenaire national de radiodiffusion
National Creative Partner /
Partenaire national de créativité
Federal Government Support /
Soutien du gouvernement fédéral
Making the Arts
More Accessible®
Founding Partners / Partenaires fondateurs
Inspired by / Inspiré par
Provincial Partners / Partenaires provinciaux
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