||| September 22, 2025 by Marj Halperin

Open Forum Takeaways

Most of the comments I’ve heard so far from last Tuesday’s open forum with Pete Giangreco and Michael Organ have something to do with trying to keep up as they threw out so many great tips, stats and smart ideas.  So, I thought I’d follow up with my own notes to see if they help fill in some blanks.  And, I hope you’ll post whatever you caught that I missed.  Between us, we should be able to build a solid record of the whole session!

The presentation slides are posted here, so I won’t try to recap those in any detail.  But my notes do pull out a few points that I know I’ll continue to think about. 

• When Michael Organ explained that Obama supporters had created and joined 35,000 different groups on the mybarackobama site, he said something like, “we had 2 million people create profiles on this site—and they did so for 35,000 different reasons.”  This said more to me than anything else about the power of sharing control.  We spend a lot of time trying to “create a community” on our websites, but letting the community create their own structure seems smarter—and maybe easier?
• “Did you ever see an Obama internet ad which asked for a donation?”  Organ assured us we never did.  Through testing, he says, they discovered that you get people in the door (aka, to your website) through emails about issues and events that matter to them.  THEN they’re ready to see the ask for a donation.  When you send the right email messages, you’re telling people why they should support you.  When they get to the website, you’re giving them the way to do it.
• “Complacent people don’t act.”  That comment—accompanied by the Sarah Palin slide—sure raised the bar for email content.  We don’t all have the equivalent “urgency, anger, fear and special moments” but it’s a good reminder to try to send email messages that will jolt the complacent reader into action!
• “The Internet is a direct response medium.” I know people hated those Obama splash pages with the sign up forms, but this was a good reminder to make sure links go directly to relevant information. And I don’t think linking to a sign-up page is such a bad idea for arts organizations! With a click-thru option, of course.
• Sharing content control.  Here’s that idea, again.  Is there anyone who attended this session who still feels too timid to allow patrons to post reviews of their shows on your own website? Go for it!

These are just some of the thoughts that stand out to me.  I encourage you to leave me comments with your own thoughts.  In the meantime, please poke around the slide show from the presentation and stay tuned over the coming days as we post video of Pete and Michael and check in with our "fish."

Tags: Internet Marketing, Return on Investment