TOCG Blog

Our consultants are seasoned arts and culture professionals who have worked in the trenches and in leadership for collective decades. We are also eclectic life-long learners uninterested in "the way it's always been done.” Here our team shares ideas to help and support organizations and the people who run them.

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TOCG TOCG

Do You Really Want to Engage with the Community?

For community engagement to be successful, it's got to be an organization-wide effort with clear roles and responsibilities for each department. Everyone needs to buy in. Everyone needs to be clear what the outcomes are for the company, and why this work is important. It demands a shared language and should be positioned as a core value and a core strategy, not “additional work.”

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Rani Haywood Rani Haywood

Meeting Our Audiences Where They Are: Flexible Ticket Models

Across the industry, performing arts organizations are reporting a decline in subscriptions numbers and revenues since reopening their doors post pandemic. The 2022-23 season in North America – and the 2023 season in Australia – is certainly seeing some uptick in both renewing and new subscribers, but the trends seem to indicate that the numbers may not return to pre-pandemic levels.  Over the last couple of years we’ve been advising clients on how to respond to the trends, and have been recommending experimenting with new models and approaches

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Rani Haywood Rani Haywood

Are New Audiences During Reopening the Key to our Industry’s Renaissance?

It is worth focusing marketing effort and budget on understanding new audiences and crafting campaigns that speak to those people who are reevaluating their priorities in our post-pandemic reality. These audiences could provide the roadmap to recovery for our industry as we emerge from the difficulty of the past two years.

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Rani Haywood Rani Haywood

Returning Without Reverting

We’ve seen our colleagues and clients tackle enormous challenges over this period and make enormous organizational changes. If some of these new ways of working and interacting with audiences “stick” we believe that they will not only make huge impact for individual organizations but also help our industry meet our audiences where they are and return stronger than before.

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Tom O'Connor Tom O'Connor

A Path Toward Arts Marketing Transformation

Transformation doesn’t occur through a new logo, a new piece of technology, or one new hire. These are parts of a system that move together, and this is a time for forward movement.

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Tom O'Connor Tom O'Connor

Shifts for Arts Marketers in 2021

Over the past year, arts marketing as a discipline has weathered as many changes as the industry we support. From the work that we do, to the roles that we occupy within organizations, and the ways that we relate to one another—everything is in the process of evolution right now.

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Rani Haywood Rani Haywood

The new KPIs for Arts and Cultural Marketing

For arts marketers, our traditional objectives or KPIs have been tied to visitation or to ‘butts on seats’, and all of the related metrics such as frequency, recency and value. When our venues are shuttered this season and possibly next, what can we measure and what objectives can we set for ourselves with this data?

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TOCG TOCG

CI to Eye Podcast: The State of the Arts in 2020

Our President Tom O'Connor and a panel of colleagues recently shared their thoughts on the state of the arts in 2020 on the latest episode of the Capacity Interactive - Digital Marketing Consulting for the Arts CI to Eye podcast.

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Rani Haywood Rani Haywood

Using This Time We’ve Been Given Wisely

There’s been much made of the fact that this time is giving our earth a moment of rest and regeneration. And it seems that it’s a moment for us to do that too. If we can lift our heads above the day to day struggle to adjust, we might be able to accept that this time we’ve been given as a gift. A gift that allows us time to stop, reflect, rethink and retool.

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Tom O'Connor Tom O'Connor

Engaging Arts Audiences in a Time of Trauma

Our entire world is in the midst of a profound traumatic experience. A return to any semblance of normalcy (and relevance) for the arts and culture fields will require facing and integrating that trauma head-on.

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Rani Haywood Rani Haywood

Marketing’s Role in Delivering Digital Programming

For the past two months, in every conversation I’ve had with industry colleagues, their primary focus has been on delivering a digital program while their venues or events are shuttered. The question is: what happens when the web becomes your venue, and the only place that your organization currently operates?

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