Perfecting their Pitch

How do you get to Boston's Symphony Hall? Practice, of course. How do you get music lovers to buy tickets and make donations? That's a little more complicated.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra — comprised of the BSO and the Boston Pops — is utilizing a multichannel mix of direct mail and online marketing to attract ticket buyers and donors to its doors. The nonprofit is complementing a program of telemarketing and over a million mailing pieces annually with a robust Web site (www.bso.org), personalized online commercials and a soon-to-launch outbound e-mail initiative.

The BSO's audience is educated and interested in reading, cultural events, traveling and music — about 50% played an instrument at some point in their lives, says Kim Noltemy, director of sales and marketing for the BSO. The Boston Pops audience is a bit younger than the Symphony's, and more likely to have children in their households. Both the BSO and the Pops attract more suburbanites than city dwellers, with more Boston residents attending the BSO than the Pops. The median household income of a Pops attendee is about $75,000, vs. $180,000 for the Symphony. “Of course, this is before the stock market took a wild dive,” notes Noltemy wryly.

Symphony Hall, located in Boston's Back Bay section, seats 2,700 for the BSO and 2,300 for the Pops (which offers some cabaret seating). For the BSO's late September-April season, there are roughly 20,000 subscribers who purchase packages of anywhere from three to 23 concerts. Some do subscribe to an entire series, attending each week; many have subscribed for 20 years or more. In comparison, subscriptions only comprise about 3% of ticket sales for the Pops, which features more guest performers, with 60% coming from group sales to corporations, universities, fundraisers and smaller groups. The Pops season runs from May to mid-July, with a Holiday Pops season in December.

The BSO has a database of 250,000 names that purchased or donated in the last three years. The file also includes supporters of the BSO's late June to Labor Day weekend Tanglewood summer festival in western Massachusetts.

BSO subscriptions are sold primarily through direct mail, with approximately 70% of previous subscribers responding to direct mail renewal offers. An acquisition campaign — which typically generates a 15% response — makes up a good part of the difference, along with other advertising and promotion. Print advertising vehicles include The Boston Globe and Boston Herald. For Tanglewood, print ads are also placed in The New York Times, Albany Times Union and The Hartford Courant. About 30% to 35% of the Tanglewood audience comes from the New York metro area.

Sixty percent of the BSO's $65 million annual budget is derived from ticket sales, which Noltemy says is “pretty high” for the symphonic world. About $20 million is from corporate funding and individual donations, with 15% to 20% raised through direct marketing.

The BSO's annual marketing budget is $4.3 million, with about 40% of that earmarked for DM. Most, but not all, of the marketing for the Symphony and the Pops is done separately.

Noltemy first became acquainted with the BSO through her previous job in destination marketing for the state of Massachusetts. When she joined the BSO about six years ago, crossover sales were in the 20%-25% range. That number is now up to 30%-35%, but she says there's still “a huge amount of work to do in that area.”

Between its annual fund and acquisition and renewal campaigns, the BSO mails almost 1 million direct mail pieces each year. There is one fundraising and one ticket solicitation campaign each for the BSO, Pops and Tanglewood, as well as “campaigns within campaigns” for different types of concert series and target audiences to keep sales momentum up throughout the season. Infrequent concertgoers get self-mailers, while regular attendees receive fuller packets.

While Web marketing hasn't allowed the BSO to reduce the number of direct mail pieces printed by very much — people like to have the magazine-like brochures around to refer to — it has helped to save money on list rental by generating prospects.

While some success has been seen renting files of other symphonic organizations and festivals, as well as museum lists, the BSO has found building its own prospect files works better than anything else. Promotions are done at record stores and bookstores, cafés and events around Boston to collect names.

Telemarketing initiatives are relatively small; about 20% of BSO subscriptions (some $1.2 million in ticket sales) are brought about by phone, with nearly $600,000 in fundraising revenue coming in through that channel.

The BSO went online in 1996 and started selling tickets on the Web in late '97. About 500 e-mails from customers are received per day on various issues.

At press time, about $1 million in tickets for Tanglewood had been sold online this year, representing about 12% of overall sales. Noltemy estimated that could go up to $1.5 million by the end of the summer season. Around 20% of the Pops tickets were sold online last season; such sales for the BSO are lower because the vast majority of subscribers renew by other media.

Only about $60,000 was raised online last year; they're primarily impulse donations made through an area in the shopping cart that allows site visitors to add a donation to their purchase. The Symphony is reconfiguring the donations portion of the site to make it more accessible.

“We haven't done the best job telling compelling fundraising stories on the Web,” admits Noltemy. The changes will include streamlining content; special promotions; “making the case” to give on high traffic pages; and highlighting the benefits of giving, such as parking access and advance mailings.

The BSO will start conducting campaigns to a 40,000-name e-mail database to solicit new donations this fall, targeting attendees who have not given before and lapsed donors.

Some will tie in with the BSO's “intellimercials,” personalized TV-like commercials that are accessible on the Web site. Noltemy says the format allows the BSO to convey a lot of information quickly in a style that feels intimate to recipients, and helps convert direct mail buyers to Web customers.

The design and architecture of the spots were developed by three Chicago companies: AMN New Media; audio-visual execution by Eyetopia Design; and database and back-end systems through Anobi Technologies. The BSO and Brookfield Zoo were beta sites for the technology, which brings up animation with personalization, such as the user's name or hometown, says AMN president Stephen Belth.

The BSO's first intellimercial test was last October to 35,000 past ticket buyers, infrequent attendees who had made purchases over several years. Letters were mailed to the prospects, touting specific November concerts, and inviting them to visit a special Web address (www.visitbso.org) and type in a registration code. They were then identified via the database and greeted by name by an announcer's voice.

The test resulted in an 8% clickthrough and about 500 tickets sold.

A March 2002 Pops intellimercial went to 50,000 ticket buyers and resulted in selling 1,500 tickets for dates that hadn't sold out. In the past, events like this would have been promoted by post card; online efforts enable the BSO to reduce those mailings.

“We're able to focus on things we actually need to sell, so suddenly we make the budgets for the concerts in the end and that's what's so great,” Noltemy says.

This fall the BSO plans to use the intellimercial for fundraising. “It's hard to tell a compelling story about why, in addition to giving us all the money you do for tickets, you should give us more money. Those who are close to us know that story, but others don't know how many kids we mentor each year in the city. [They're unaware of] how inexpensive our youth concerts are because we subsidize them, [or] how many tickets we give away to charities so people who can't afford to can come,” she says.

In an intellimercial, the BSO can illustrate vividly, for example, how donations can help get a child an instrument and music lessons. “Those are the kinds of things that help people understand why they should give us money.”