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A Network To Build Chicago Arts Audiences

||| July 29, 2025 by Leslie Shook

Campus Connection: Engaging College Students In The Arts

College students … I have been surrounded by them for 29 years at DePaul University.  They are youthful, demanding, smart, talented, challenging and friendly.  Understandably, they are self-involved, but they are always worthy of our time and energy.  They represent the audience of tomorrow that so many arts organizations are concerned with building.

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Tags: Diversifying Audiences, Psychographics, Return on Investment

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||| July 6, 2025 by Lara Goetsch

TimeLine Theatre’s ROI: Email Marketing Optimization

As I’ve spoken on behalf of Americans for the Arts about Return on Investment (ROI) over the past few months, I have been sure to highlight email-marketing optimization.  You can find slides from one recent presentation posted in my previous AEE article published at the end of last year (reference slide 10 and 11 here). AEE asked me to go into a little more detail on this particular topic.

Measuring the ROI of email marketing can go beyond the open rate and click-through results that are track-able through your email system. Ensure that your emails are connected to the Google Analytics of your website, and you can see how each email (and even each link within an email) performs related to specific goals being measured.

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Tags: Return on Investment

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||| June 1, 2025 by Marc van Bree

Evaluating Socia Media for Classical Music Organization

Will Rogers contacted me earlier this month to ask if he could post my evaluating social media series on the Arts Engagement Exchange site. He learned about it through You’ve Cott Mail, a clipping service from arts marketer Thomas Cott.

The series on evaluating social media, which I wrote from the perspective of classical music organizations, was inspired by the communications evaluation guide Are We There Yet? by the Communications Network. I learned about that guide through IssueLab, an online publishing forum for nonprofit research.

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Tags: Diversifying Audiences, Internet Marketing, Research, Return on Investment

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||| January 25, 2026 by Claire Sutton

Workshop: Best practices for your front of house

A pleasant front of house experience will bring your audience back again and again and help identify your brand. It can also help grow your audience by reaching out to new constituencies you may had overlooked, such as customers with disabilities. Learning best practices for your front of house, and making ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) improvements may jump start that ideal Box Office experience.

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Tags: Diversifying Audiences, Return on Investment

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||| January 19, 2026 by William Rogers

Social Media Pays: Chase Giving grants $25,000 to two Chicago theaters

Many of you may have followed the Chase Community Giving Program on Facebook.  With this project Chase claims, “We’re exploring a new way of charitable giving – harnessing the power of social media to give individuals and communities a voice in corporate philanthropy.”  So engaging your audience and testing the limits of your network were crucial to winning one of one hundred $25,000 grants and becoming a finalist for the $1,000,000 prize.

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Tags: Diversifying Audiences, Internet Marketing, Return on Investment

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||| December 16, 2025 by Lara Goetsch

NAMP: TimeLine’s Return on Investment

I’m excited to be able to share some of what TimeLine Theatre has been able to do using Return-On-Investment measurements.  Through an AEE Learning Circle with Philippe Ravanas in 2007, and a generous implementation grant from the Chicago Community Trust, we have been able to build a solid foundation and start creating effective tools to measure ROI.  

Over the next few blog posts I will share portions of a presentation I gave at the recent National Arts Marketing Project Conference about how TimeLine has been using ROI. I was thrilled at the response I have gotten (in fact I’ve been asked to give it again at another NAMP-sponsored workshop in Minneapolis in April, maybe I’ll see some of you there), and I hope you find this useful in jump-starting your efforts. 

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Tags: NAMP, Return on Investment

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Customer Service Data Management Diversifying Audiences Grants Internet Marketing Itinerant Companies NAMP Psychographics Research Return on Investment