As Director of Advancement & Communications at Theatre Bay Area, I was responsible for planning, coordinating and overseeing all aspects of marketing, development and communication operations for one of the largest performing arts service organization in the nation. The position directly managed a staff of nine across fundraising, marketing, communications and membership departments and supported nearly 3000 members from 11 Bay Area Counties.

 

Main achievements included:

• Formulation and execution of marketing, communication and development plans.

• Increased membership.

• Streamlined internal processes.

• Consistently presented brand images and messages across multiple communication channels to our audience (theatre companies, theatre makers, funders and the general theatre going public).

 

1. Identify and install a central resource management tool and content management system. Prior to the CRM / CMS installation, implementation of many new strategies was infeasible due to cost of hiring programmers or the previous systems unresponsiveness. This left the board and staff feeling powerless to create the changes necessary to attract and retain members and donors.

 

Before the new system, data was stored and tracked through five different databases and hundreds of Excel spreadsheets. This data was siloed across departments: marketing, development, membership, communication and accounting. Immeasurable hours were lost trying to arrive at a complete picture of any member’s activities, transactions and engagement. Now with all the data in one place, any staff member, from any department, can within seconds get the whole history of any of the members. This responsiveness is translating into more memberships, donations, online sales and better customer satisfaction and service.

 

Other goals included:

• A streamlined job-listing service that allows our members to elect to get alerts when positions they are interested in are posted.

• Comprehensive and up-to-date play listings.

• Integrated mass email.

• Groups and community forums.

All of which resulted in more effective communication between TBA and its members and between members and each other.

 

2. Reporting mechanisms. I worked with staff to streamline workflow and provide meaningful reports to measure progress towards clearly defined strategic goals. In a recent fundraising campaign we were able to segment our lists to micro campaign levels for greater effectiveness.

 

3. Re-Branded Communications. The website redesign was just one part of a comprehensive brand process resulting in a cohesive brand identity. Theatre Bay Area Magazine, Insider Email, Theatregoer Newsletter, TBA's online journalism, development collateral and marketing collateral were all redesigned to have consistent design and messaging. 

 

4. Social Media Plan and Online Advertising. I helped craft a communication plan for the year that addressed the promotion of the organizations events and membership activities. A/B testing, Facebook boosts and Google advertising were all employed to measure the results in real time. This enabled us to quickly adhere to the tactics that provided the greatest return and eliminate the ones that did not.