What Did You Learn?
I hope you had the opportunity to join us today for the second Open Forum of the year with the amazing Pete Giangreco and Mike Organ. We were thrilled to have the opportunity to learn from these two astoundingly bright men. In the next day or two we will be posting resources from the presentation and reactions from the participants of our "fishbowl consultations."
But right now we want to know what you think.
Please take a few minutes to become a member of this lovely new AEE website and leave us your comments and thoughts about what you learned. We can't wait to hear from you.
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On September 16, 2025 at 12:47 PM, Dona Vitale said:
As a long-time advocate for more use of database analysis and modeling in the arts, I thought Pete Giancreco’s presentation was great. I hope it encourages more people to at least consider what might be possible with more analysis of data they have on file or can easily add to their databases.
I also thought the fishbowl consultations were great, in that they threw out so many good ideas in such a short time it was difficult to take it all in. I was writing as fast as I could—hope the notes make sense when I go back to review!
Thanks to all for a great program.
On September 17, 2025 at 10:11 AM, Marc Muszynski said:
I agree with you, Dona, about database analysis, and I’m glad they drove that point home. Does anyone have any specific, practical information (preferably with URLs) about how to put that in practic? For example, what software (or intern) did you use to analyze the lists, how much did that cost, did you hire consultants, where can I go to get a big list to compare our little list to. The stuff they described in the presentation was excellent, but I know that the Obama campaign hired very expensive firms with proprietary data analysis algorithms that I can’t afford. So are there cheaper solutions, open source or intern, and if so where’s the best place to start?
Michael was the first person I’ve ever heard advocate emailing people more than once a week. Has anyone tried this? What sort of content do you share when you’re between shows? At CHRP we try to link out to other tap dance events or cool videos when we’re between programming, but I’d love to do something more with it so we have more reasons to communicate.
On September 18, 2025 at 12:21 PM, Gabriela Jirasek said:
I thought this presentation was great. The most interesting event I’ve been to this year. In terms of data analysis, last year we started some serious analysis and surveying of both our email list and membership base. It’s made a significant impact on how we plan our e-marketing strategies and helped us grow our member base this year.
One of the main tools we used for our demographics analysis was http://zipskinny.com/. It’s contains all the census data divided by zip codes. We correlated that data with our own to get a clearer picture of our audience base. It’s a free service, but it took a couple weeks of staff time to sort through.
For our email strategy, right now we are sticking to at least once a week. The Chicago Humanities Festival (http://www.chicagohumanities.org) is a bit different from other arts organizations in that we are so seasonal many people know to look for us in the fall. But now we are working on making the Festival a year round experience with rich multimedia content from our 20-years of archives available online. Driving content consumers to the site is our new challenge!
On September 18, 2025 at 12:39 PM, Marc Muszynski said:
Thanks, that census list will be very helpful.
On September 18, 2025 at 1:45 PM, Marj Halperin said:
Good news: a few of us are compiling our own notes from the forum and will post them here as soon as we can. So please check back here to see if there’s a URL or snappy tip you missed. And, I hope you’ll let us know if you can fill in something we missed as I agree, it did all speed by so quickly!