Three New Case Studies of Arts Organizations That Are Growing Their Audiences & Revenue
Different locations, different artistic disciplines, different approaches
Not that Isaac Newton’s laws of motion need further proof. But “an object in motion will remain on that path unless acted on by an outside force” is a great metaphor for arts organizations these days.
What’s the current path? Opera companies reducing their seasons, closures at orchestras, emergency fundraising at ballet companies…all detailed in my last article.
The situation for those arts organizations and many others across the U.S. and beyond is bleak. But that path can be changed. I know this because there are cultural organizations defying the negative trends and not merely scraping by, but actively growing their audiences and revenue. These are the organizations who decided to do something about their current path — to apply the outside force needed to change their trajectory. I wrote about three such organizations last fall, and now I’m back with three more.
The organizations described herein are not the biggest, not the most well-resourced, and definitely not perfect as you’ll see. They did not introduce sweeping, radical new ideas (i.e. inordinate amounts of force) to change their trajectories. And that’s precisely why their stories are so helpful. Each of these organizations took the hand they were dealt, decided they would not accept a doom-and-gloom declining narrative, and took action to reverse those trends in the ways they could handle with whatever staff, time, money, resources, skills, and knowledge they had.
And when they did that — when they started taking some small, strategic steps — they started seeing big results. Their trajectories began changing. We’ll visit a professional chamber ensemble in Idaho, a membership service association in California, and a music festival across the globe in Australia. Today we get to learn from them: what’s worked, the ways they’ve crushed it, and where their path takes them now.
I’m so grateful to each of these organizations who made choices to change their organization’s narrative and were willing to share about their journey and work publicly here. Let’s meet them.
Three Organizations, Three Disciplines, Three Locations
A Chamber Orchestra in Idaho
“Johanna Laney was brought on as executive director of the Boise Baroque Orchestra as they were coming out of the pandemic and had recently launched a summer outdoor concert series. Boise was a growing market, and the outdoor venue — the Chateau as it’s called — was in a newer area of town that was especially booming.
As Laney tells it, “Boise is an outdoor city. More people in Boise are probably excited by eating their picnic and drinking wine sitting on a blanket while listening to a concert than know exactly what Baroque music is.”
But what do you do with the people who do know and love Baroque music, aka, a lot of the people who were used to going downtown for concerts? Would they travel to the new venue? Would the indoor concerts suffer? The organization had more questions than answers, and Laney was tasked with finding a way forward and growing audiences for all of it.
She knew that getting people to understand that the outdoor series was a new product was key to its success. “Baroque music can be a scary, intimidating word. Boise doesn’t come with a built-in community of aficionados, so we really had to sell people on the experience, not the repertoire or artists or traditional marketing.”
And there was just one more challenge to mention: the orchestra had no database, just a dusty physical computer sitting in the office running an old Oracle program…
A Member Service Organization in California
Sarah Weber was thrust into her executive director role at the Association of California Symphony Orchestras (ACSO) in 2019 after being promoted from her role as Membership Manager. She knew from her role overseeing membership that the organization served orchestras of all types and sizes, not just in California, but also as in Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona.
Put these things together — coming into a new leadership role with a built-in deep understanding of the membership — and Weber saw both opportunity and challenge: the membership had room to continue expanding as it had already been doing, and there was no shortage of programs and services that could be provided to support ensembles of all stripes. But at the same time, she knew that ACSO was going to have raise more money in order to fund this work.
The only rub was that fundraising over the years had gone stagnant. Some longtime donors were still generously supporting, but with a lot of attrition and no new fundraising ideas introduced in recent history. She was going to have to make something from nothing (an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force).
An Aussie Music Festival That Only Runs Every Other Year
The Castlemaine State Festival had a lot of things going for it when Glyn Roberts took the helm in 2017. It’s the oldest festival in the state of Victoria, which attracts thousands of new attendees every year in addition to their many longtime, loyal festival attendees as well.
However, Australia’s flagship regional arts festival only ran every other year, leaving massive gaps in programmatic content and communications with their base of attendees and supporters.
Roberts saw there was no concerted effort to communicate with the various audience segments differently. And he knew that more could be done in the time between festivals to keep ties to the audience going. In other words, Glyn saw their one-size-fits-all messaging and content was leaving money on the table.
The Approach: Different Focus Areas for Each Organization
Boise Baroque: Patron Retention + Strong Digital Content Strategy
The Boise Baroque Orchestra launched their outdoor summer concert series in 2021 in addition to performing two of their three downtown concerts (fewer than normal due to covid restrictions). The following years after that, the 2022–23 and 2023–24 seasons, the BBO continued the Summer Concerts at the Chateau and increased back to their regular three downtown concerts.
For a small organization with only part-time staff, including the part-time executive director (did I not mention that yet?!), that’s a lot of concerts to produce, market, and raise money for. Laney knew the key to success was to create processes that were efficient, repeatable, and scalable. Let me just pause there for a moment, because a lot of arts organizations, regardless of budget size, struggle to build operational efficiencies that are repeatable and scalable. If you have a bigger staff, this lack of operational efficiency slows you down, looks like bureaucracy, and definitely prevents future growth, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t instantly ruin you (more like a slow burn or death by a thousand paper cuts). But for a small organization with zero full time employees, not having operational efficiencies just about always equals a death spiral. It’s simply not possible to do everything that needs to be done at a classical music organization without automation and scale.
So Laney boiled the strategy down to three pillars: creating repeatable practices to enhance the audience experience in person, leveraging digital content as a scalable means of communication, and automating patron retention.
Audience Experience
The artistic director, Robert Franz, who invented the outdoor series, was intentionally engaging on the podium, speaking to the audience, making them feel comfortable, inviting people to clap, and trying to use his role to make everyone feel welcome. Additionally, they added self-serve water stations to cut down the line at the bar, increased signage so folks knew where to go, added a perk where people got their professional photo taken as a souvenir at the entrance, and focused on optimizing parking (important not just to the patron experience, but limited parking was the only ceiling on space to make them “sell out,” which in this case, was not how they wanted to cap attendance).
At the indoor concerts, they also created better signage and transitioned to an electronic database and synched ticketing system (goodbye, old computer in the corner). “We really leaned into the newcomer experience and making everything super easy for the customer,” Laney recounts.
All of these tactics were repeated at every concert, indoor and outdoor. But Laney is quick to note, that was all in person; the audience was also the main focus in all ads and organic content — a big difference from a lot of organizations.
Digital Content
On the social channels, the artists and repertoire were not the center of the content; rather, Laney leaned into showcasing the customer experience. In other words, they focused on customer centric marketing. Knowing that classical music can be intimidating to people, their social accounts consistently showed attendees sitting on the grass, drinking wine, and referenced pop culture, like naming when their program had musical similarities to Bridgerton. Additionally, the social media strategy focused on being hyper local, with specific, location-based content. “We’re not trying to reach people who already love classical music,” Laney said, “we’re competing against other local things to do, not the symphony” [i.e. the other classical music organization in town].
Automating Retention
Shortly after joining the organization, Laney introduced an auto-renewing subscription option alongside a traditional subscription model for their downtown indoor concerts.
Were these strategies met with some skepticism at first? Yep. But did they work? To say these forces changes their path would be an understatement. More on their trajectory below.
“It’s simply not possible to do everything that needs to be done at a classical music organization without automation and scale.”
ACSO: One Major Fundraising Campaign a Year
For the Association of California Symphony Orchestras, the biggest step to start fundraising was…to just start. Executive Director Sarah Weber knew they needed to do something, anything. So they began with one sole calendar year end campaign and decided they would get very, very good at that one thing.
That first year was about segmentation — communicating to past donors who had not given recently with a message inviting them back, communicating with current donors with an ask to renew, and communicating to loyal members who had never before donated that ACSO was inviting them to deepen their relationship with a gift.
Important to the campaign was not only the tailored messaging each group received, but getting the organization’s data in order to be able to send each message to its intended recipient. All of these things were pretty new operational practices to ACSO at the time. And the truth is, all of this is new to a lot of small and startup arts organizations too. For every arts organization that hasn’t built operational muscle around accessing their data and thinking about how to communicate in segments, this is, well…work. Because it’s introducing a new force. And success — especially with growing momentum around fundraising efforts — doesn’t happen overnight.
That first year (2019), ACSO raised only $2,875. A lot of organizations might have thrown in the towel, saying “we tried this thing once and it didn’t work.” But Weber saw the opposite. Weber knew that taking the step to begin was just that, a first step. And in year one, she knew they had raised a few thousand dollars more than they had that same time last year, and that a few thousand was a lot greater than nothing. A beginning it was. And not so different from how the Boise Baroque above focused on repeatable efforts, so did ACSO.
Every year since, ACSO has continued their year-end fundraising, getting better and better each time. This is called iteration. Here are the ways Weber has led her team and organization to iterate and optimize the process:
- Planning in advance to have a cohesive Month of Giving campaign each December and giving it dedicated time and attention.
- Coming up with compelling images, testimonials, and a catchy “hook” or theme for the campaign.
- Experimenting with different campaign elements to see what resonates best, i.e.: direct mail versus email and digital only, or adding an incentive like a drawing.
- Including personal outreach. “You can’t just send out eblasts or letters and expect a good return,” Weber says, noting that the years where they saw the best return were when the ACSO board and staff also followed up with personal and targeted invitations to donate. “Those personal reach-outs make a HUGE difference. Followed up by thank yous too!”
Building organizational muscle is the name of the game. In Newtonian terms, this means applying the necessary force to forge your new path gets easier, because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every year, just keep optimizing and iterating on the things already working while letting go of the things that aren’t. And being clear on the difference between the two — “not working” doesn’t mean something that wasn’t a home run on day one. No one goes from 0 to 100 right away; that’s not how the laws of physics work.
With any type of communication and marketing, repetition is key — even more true with fundraising. “It’s literally about training your donors to expect to hear from you,” Weber said.
Did they end up raising more money the following years? Spoiler alert: big time. “I can’t imagine us not doing a December campaign now,” she concluded. “It’s become part of our operational DNA like anything else we do.” Exact results are below.
“They began with one sole calendar year end campaign and decided they would get very, very good at that one thing… This is called iteration.”
Castlemaine State Festival: Data Data Data
Down under, Executive Director Glyn Roberts was all over his organization’s data in service to my Long Haul Model. Just about everything the festival sent out had multiple versions tailored to different audience segments.
To illustrate this point, look no further than the Festival’s quarterly e-newsletter. As Roberts tells it, “There is nothing particularly special about the quarterly generic enews other than it encourages the reader to join our patrons [donor] program.” But what is special, is that that particular version was sent only to patrons on their enews list who had previously attended two or more festivals. Email subscribers who had been to fewer festivals received a version of the newsletter with no solicitation to join the program, only encouragement to return to the festival again as an audience member.
Additionally, those who did join the donor program were removed from the general enews list and began to receive their own program centric enews communications which subtly encouraged annual increases in giving.
By 2021 CSF was so savvy with their own data, they began alternating between the broad communications via the newsletter that persistently mentioned the patrons program, and direct, more personalized communications across other channels (written letters, phone calls, event invitations, and more emails). These more personalized communications were always to more refined segments within the larger dataset, such as audience members who had been to a decade’s worth of festivals and always spent above a certain amount.
One time, Roberts wanted to hit the gas on building the donor base. He sent an email to a data set of people who had attended the festival three or more times with no spend overlay. In other words, they were loyal as indicated by their attendance habit (don’t forget, attending three times meant you were part of the Festival for six years since it took place biannually — that’s a lot of years to engage with an organization). With that one email alone, because they smartly used their data, they secured a 10% leap in membership to their donor program. But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on their results in a moment.
“Just about everything the festival sent out had multiple versions tailored to different audience segments.”
The Results: Writing a New Narrative + A Cautionary Tale
Boise Baroque
Inside and outside the concert hall, overall ticket sales grew by 59% over the three years from the 2021–22 season to the 2023–24 season that just ended at the time of this writing — growth primarily driven by both an increase in subscriptions (30% growth in their subscriber base) and their automated subscription renewals. Longtime attendees didn’t balk at an auto-renewing plan at all; rather, they mostly loved it. And the folks that didn’t want to be on an auto-renew plan could choose to receive a traditional invoice. By the 2023–2024 season, 88% of their entire subscriber base had chosen to be on auto-renewal.
“It completely automated the people who were happy,” Laney shared. “I didn’t have to spend as much money on renewal mailings, it saved money in the budget, and we got to use that money saved toward growing the summer festival.” Wins all around.
And grow the summer festival they did. Within three years, concert attendance at their summer outdoor series tripled, increasing from 800 to 2400 people. A big driver of that attendance was their experience-focused social media content combined with a continued focus on patron retention.
On the former, they know the digital content was working because 1) their social media reach grew to thousands of accounts each month, all local to Boise (i.e. the exact hyper-local geographic demo they wanted and needed), and 2) over 70% of their website visits came from social media. On the patron retention side, they steadily sold more 3-concert ticket bundles (i.e. purchasing the full summer series), a 57% increase over the last three years. But maybe this next stat is the one that takes the cake: the summer festival “side project” grew so much, it became the biggest source of revenue for the entire organization.
And they’re not stopping there. BBO has tracked each person who attended for a 2nd and 3rd summer, and those people are now ready for a donation solicitation.
“I attribute all of this success to implementing the Long Haul Model and a robust social media content plan,” Laney concludes. “Now that we have a good portion of audience members who’ve been purchasing tickets for three years post pandemic, we are focused heavily on soliciting those people for donations for the first time. And because we automated subscription renewals, it freed up the bandwidth we needed to focus on that donor cultivation.”
ACSO
The Association continued to work on growing their calendar year-end fundraising campaign every year over the past five years and has come a long way since that first few thousand-dollar campaign. Their most recent end-of-year campaign brought in over $10,000, and — just as important if not more so — they have increased the number of donors by 150%.
While a lot of arts organizations are grappling with declining households and trying to raise more money from fewer people, ACSO has bucked those trends, steadily growing both donor households and dollars raised.
Weber attributes this growth to their consistency of approach. “Every year we kept what was working from the year before, and then added in a new element of something we wanted to try, testing and experimenting on what would help us do just a little bit better than before.” And just like the laws of physics tell us that an object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it, so it is with ACSO. Weber and her team continue to be that outside force molding and driving results without starting from scratch every time: “We are still learning and tinkering and are open to experimentation so we can continue to improve. We really want to expand the number of our broad-based donors and that is slow going. But we know what we’re doing now, and we aren’t slowing down.”
Castlemaine State Festival
The ultra-targeted, data-driven, audience-segmented communications worked well for the organization. The biennial Festival audience grew at every occurrence: first in 2017, then again in 2019 when the festival was the most attended in its history, until 2021, that is, when they broke their own previous attendance record.
Additionally, Roberts secured $6 million AUS to invest in the future development of the Castlemaine Goods Shed, a Victorian-era building salvaged to transform the undeveloped space into a creative hub in the heart of town. Now the Goods Shed is a venue for art practice, education, and creative enterprise — keeping the Festival brand active not just once every other year, but year-round.
And under Roberts guidance, in addition that one email I mentioned above that drove a 10% leap in donor membership, in 2020, the organization also began aligning everyone’s giving agreements to be at two different times in year instead of “random times” as Roberts described, making them annual cycles instead of a biennial, plus encouraged them all to renew using an online portal where they used their data to suggest increases in giving by at least 25%.
“The next big story will be moving patrons who have been donating for more than five years to secure a major legacy gift in their life or as a bequest,” Roberts shared with me. (Sidebar: He gets it — soliciting donors with demonstrated loyalty history for a legacy gift is absolutely what every donor shop at every arts organization should be doing, especially when organizations are concerned about their aging audiences, but that could be a whole other post.)
Despite all of the Castlemaine State Festival’s success, they also offer a cautionary tale. Roberts will be the first to tell you that audience and donor development via this data-driven work was led by him, from the top. In other words, he was the outside force driving their changed trajectory. “It was hard going to retrain marketing to not scatter gun. And for development not to really just focus on existing donors and their needs,” Roberts shared. “It had to be my project.”
Roberts moved on to another organization in early 2023, and no one took on oversight of their patron communication efforts. In other words, the outside force went away. They had a drop in audiences that year, some bad weather didn’t help, and revenue plummeted at the same time costs were increasing around the globe.
So Now What
Johanna Laney went on to work full time in digital content creation, and even launched her own firm, Classical Content, because she saw what an impact it can have for arts organizations. Meanwhile, the Boise Baroque Orchestra summer series went from a little outdoor event during Covid to become the main revenue generator for the entire organization. And now that they have a loyal audience they’ve cultivated over the past 3+ years, they are now able to accurately predict their contributed revenue because they see who is ready and primed to be asked to give.
Once the end of year fundraising campaign became a built-in standard practice, the Association of California Symphony Orchestras added in more campaigns throughout the year, as well as a donor stewardship love fest around Valentine’s Day. And they continue to personalize donor communications, even as they scale.
And the Castlemaine State Festival, a little over a year after Roberts’ departure as I write this, is now downsizing and announced that they’ve gone into voluntary administration, which is similar to liquidation on a path to bankruptcy. I hope they find a data-driven leader to bring them back.
I don’t want to end on a downer, but I think it underscores the sobering reality of arts and culture right now: growth in audiences and donors in today’s climate is absolutely achievable, as all of these organizations demonstrated, but it takes working differently than how it used to always be done in our industry. Audience and donor development doesn’t just happen on its own. An object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it. And for our sector, that existing motion is unfortunately a downward trajectory for audiences and donors, unless we enact a force to change that trajectory.
That force — that change — is possible though. To bring in one more law of motion, Isaac Newton said the acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied. That means you can essentially choose your rate of change: start with a single fundraising campaign (small force), introduce auto-renewals for your subscriptions (bigger object), or go hard on harnessing your data to guide your communications (bigger force). And through it all, continue to build that operational muscle of efficiency and consistency (massive force that gets easier for you to exert).
Three different organizations. Three different approaches. Three case studies proving growth is possible in this industry. The laws of motion tell us so.
Johanna Laney attended my Comeback Planning Sprint in 2021 and Uplevel Course in 2023. “I took the Comeback Planning Sprint as I was leaving Seattle Symphony. From day one as a new executive director, I just did what Aubrey said, and it worked.”
Sarah Weber and I worked together pro bono when I served on the board of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras. That first campaign took place my last year on the board, so to be clear, that meant I only helped get their fundraising off the ground; the rest of the growth was all Weber and her team.
The Castlemaine State Festival never trained the rest of their staff on these strategies in a formal capacity, and the organization saw their path revert to negative declines. Don’t let that be you.
And if you want more case studies and data-backed strategies to grow revenue at your arts organization, order my book, Run It like a Business: Strategies to Increase Audiences, Remain Relevant, and Multiply Money — Without Losing the Art.
About the Author
Hailed as “the Steve Jobs of classical music” (Observer) and “Sheryl Sandberg of the symphony” (LA Review of Books), Aubrey Bergauer is known for her results-driven, customer-centric, data-obsessed pursuit of changing the narrative for the performing arts. A “dynamic administrator” with an “unquenchable drive for canny innovation” (San Francisco Chronicle), she’s held offstage roles managing millions in revenue at major institutions including the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, Bumbershoot Music & Arts Festival, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. As chief executive of the California Symphony, Bergauer propelled the organization to double the size of its audience and nearly quadruple the donor base.
Bergauer helps organizations and individuals transform from scarcity to opportunity, make money, and grow their base of fans and supporters. Her ability to cast and communicate vision moves large teams forward and brings stakeholders together, earning “a reputation for coming up with great ideas and then realizing them” (San Francisco Classical Voice). With a track record for strategically increasing revenue and relevance, leveraging digital content and technology, and prioritizing diversity and inclusion on stage and off, Bergauer sees a better way forward for classical music and knows how to achieve it.
Aubrey’s first book, Run It Like A Business, published in 2024.
A graduate of Rice University, her work and leadership have been covered in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Thrive Global, and Southwest Airlines magazines, and she is a frequent speaker spanning TEDx, Adobe’s Magento, universities, and industry conferences in the U.S. and abroad.
