Live from RECHARGE! Missing Audiences and Legitimate Interest Communications

Anna Walsh : Welcome to the Arts and Everything in between podcast brought to you by ticketsolv.

Lucy Costelloe: I’m just going to give a big warm welcome. We’ve got a few people now joining us up on stage. The first is Anna Walsh, director of Theater Forum. I’m also delighted to welcome IFA from Mermaid and Mary Claire from Montana. And we also have our own Elaine Irene joining us as well to take us through a case study example now of a project that we’ve been working on with Theater Forum and lots of different organizations as well in Ireland. So I’ll welcome Anna first to the stage. Thank you.

Anna Walsh : Lucy. Thank you very much. But standing here today, this is a bit of an impostor role because Lucy and everybody who’s participated in the Marketing Commissions project has actually done all the hard work. But going back to the start of this project, back about this time last year, we were hearing reports that ticket sales were very slow with the few exceptions, few notable exceptions, but ticket sales in general had slowed down and audiences were not coming back as quickly as we might have expected them to. And capacity was an issue where people were finding it difficult and their marketing efforts, albeit that they were very significant, weren’t yielding them the results and the ticket sales that they might have or that they should have. So over the course of the summer, in association with Katie Reigns, we carried out the Missing Audiences Survey, which many venues participated in and that identified the reasons why people might not have been coming back as quickly as they might have been or might have been expected to. The reporting and the analysis of those findings identified that people weren’t really familiar or didn’t know about again, with a few notable exceptions about the work or the shows that were available or that they could go and see, or that they could attend, whether it be their city venue or in their town venue, art center or wherever. So a lack of information over those early few months was a feature of why or one reason why audience didn’t seem to be returning as might have been expected. A series of certainly I would have been receiving emails from a number of organizations, but notably not receiving any from others. And then when we came to a marketing forum last September, it was Katie Reigns and Heather Maitland who worked in delivering this project with Lucy over the last few months, flagged that people’s database and contacts, which, when the missing audience survey was being sent out, people were cleaning that database for the first time in maybe two years. Two and a half years. So there had been a lot of decay and a lot of contacts in that database that hadn’t necessarily the cleaning hadn’t been done regularly. So it took people longer to send out the missing Audience’s survey than we had expected or we had projected that combined with different organizations, sending out email and other information to previous ticket purchasers. They were doing things differently, people were doing things differently. And Katie Flagged to us. And with the ticket solve team, we looked more closely at what we described as the marketing permissions workshops and going back and I know the horror show of GDPR. And all those years ago, it had us all sort of cornered into GDPR opt ins, opt outs, receiving email, promotional material, receiving brochures by post. And it had us all terrified into the fact, including Theater Forum, that once we had our mailing lists and our database, we didn’t want to do anything more. We didn’t want to touch it, because we knew that there were potential GDPR breaches all over the place. But Katie flagged at that time the fact that for most arts organizations with the database that you might only have permission to contact between ten and at best 30, 40% of those contacts on your database, they might not have given you permission. The database could be made up of people who had received opening night invitations, who’d received comps, who hadn’t given you permission, had given you permission for email, but not for post or vice versa. So that combination, it’s obviously different for every organization, but it means that the traditional opt in to receive marketing information from the organization was working against the marketing effort. So it was Katie who I say identified the legitimate interest, which was the reason that we were all receiving emails and promotional material from airlines, from retail organizations, from ticketmaster. If you had bought anything from that organization. They can take that as legitimate interest. And that’s the basis on which they were sending you and me and everybody else lots and lots of marketing material and lots and lots of promotional material in relation to adopting a legitimate interest. Assuming that if you as an audience member have bought a ticket, you are then treated as being legitimately interested in receiving marketing information for that organization does have a basis in GDPR and in legislation. So you do have to be careful and you do have to do what is called a balancing test, where you look at the interests of the consumer or the person who’s receiving in the information balanced against the basis on which the organization is making that assumption that it can send you the marketing information. So Katie and Lucy have very kindly worked through these templates and they are available. And it’s simply a test for you to work through with your team, with your board, to say that yes, it is in the interest of the customer to receive this information. And on balance, this is what the team are signing off on. So the first round of marketing permissions workshops are about to come to a close in the next month. The templates and so much of the useful working through all of the sort of back end privacy policies, all of the wording for statements for customers, they’ve all been very carefully crafted and put together by Lucy working with Katie and with the frontiers people who’ve already moved to legitimate interest. So over to you. And I hope that your experience might persuade others to adopt this. And essentially in the current climate, this is probably thankfully, I think audience numbers have come back and people are experiencing ticket sales are on the increase and that is a very healthy and a very good thing. But what it might do in the future. And in going back to some of the climate action actions talked about this morning, moving to legitimate interest for your future marketing effort might actually make that effort more efficient, more time efficient, more cost efficient and more communications efficient in that you’re not wasting time and effort with those audience members ticket buyers. That is not going to produce another ticket sale or in the future. So it’s probably in the future it’s probably more about efficiency and marketing efficiency and a return on your time and on your investment and your effort rather than a GDP or legitimate interest database argument. But that’s for over to you IFA thank you.

Lucy Costelloe: And I’m going to grab Elon now, who’s going to come up and give a quick tour just on how you might set this up through ticketsolve. Thanks, Elon.

Aoileann Ni Rian: No bother. Hi there, I’m Elon and I work at Customer Support with ticketsolve, no doubt. I’ve been in touch with a few of you. So I’m just going to show you, if you do decide as an organization to use legitimate interests, how to set that up in ticketsolve. So there are kind of four main steps to this. So the first step is to navigate to Snippets in the settings tab and then you need to change the email opt in Snippet, which is essentially the message that displays on your ticketsov website when the customer is putting in their customer details. So the opt in message. And then you also need to make change to the terms and conditions. So that would be the privacy policy within the terms and conditions. And then the final step is to tick the customer opt in auto select. That means a box will be ticked for that customer and they’ll be opted in automatically. And then you just check the website to make sure it’s all set up properly. So the first step is to look at your Snippets. So I’m not sure if many people have been in here before, but it’s in the Settings tab in the public website Snippets tab. So you first go to the opt in for email message and you change the message there to whatever you want. That to be what you’ve decided it to be. And then click Update on the bottom right hand side. Then the next step is to go to stay within the Snippets tab there and to search for public website terms and conditions to scroll down to the Privacy Policy or scroll up because it’s generally at the bottom of the terms and conditions. And to set the reasons for your legitimate interests within the Privacy Policy, whatever’s been decided by the organization, you update that and then the next, this is updating the text to the Privacy Policy and this displays on the website so the information is available to the customer at the time of booking. And then the final step here is to turn on the customer opt in auto select in General Settings. So you go back into the General Settings tab, into the Settings tab, and then General settings and search for that setting. And you just tick that, click Update and then it should be available on your ticketsolve website. And then the last step really is to just check your website to make sure the opt in is pre ticked. So as you can see here, it’s a little bit blurred, but that option there is automatically ticked. So when a customer books a ticket and is adding their customer details, if they scroll on down there, that will be ticked automatically. And just above that, you’ll see the terms and conditions and you can check within the terms and conditions if the Privacy Policy has been updated. So that’s how you set that up. So it’s your turn to kind of take a chance if you want to go on with the legitimate interest to do that. And we also have an article on our Zendesk, which you can access with this QR code or by getting in touch with us. Okay, thank you very much.

Lucy Costelloe: Thanks very much, Elaine. So we have the absolute pleasure of welcoming two organizations today who have gone live with legitimate interest and are going to share a little insight into their experiences that they’ve had. So I think we’ll just start off, if it’s okay. Some of our delegates here today have been speaking with so many of you on lunch, and so far the feedback has been really positive. So we’re going to talk data now or we’re going to talk GDPR. We all love a little bit of GDPR, but what we want to do is just kind of highlight some of the results that IFA and Mary Claire have really experienced since changing over to legitimate interest. So if you’re okay, maybe IFA just to give a quick introduction into you.

Aoife Damel: Sure. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is IFA Damel, and I’m marketing communications manager at Mermaid County Icloarts Center. Just to give a tiny little bit of background, mermaid actually turns 21 this year. Can you believe that? And as part of kind of reviewing where we are with our marketing and our comms, we carried out a lot of audience research over the past 18 months and a lot of focus groups. And we looked at our mailing list, we looked at who gets our brochure, where we’re spending our marketing budget, all these different things and it was really timely. Then when the audience research was happening last summer and then once this Gdpure was mentioned, there was the initial oh Jesus, I was there in 2018, in May and there is a little bit of trauma associated with that word with me. But once that was mentioned, I kind of thought, well, everything that I buy, everything that I click, everything is already ticked. And I realized through the conversations and the great training that we were having that there really was a missed opportunity for us. And taking all our focus groups with our audience and all the learnings that we had gathered both pre and during the COVID period, it just seemed to make sense. I was completely daunted by things like balancing tests and privacy policies and the mention of them. And I won’t go into too much detail, but basically, suffice it to say, it’s not half as bad as it sounds. It’s actually not that difficult to do and it’s really satisfying. And we made the change over on the 9 January and our mailing list has gone up by 5% without us now we’re not doing anything that’s passively happening, so I’ll pass you over now to give you Mary Claire’s experience. But for us it was actually definitely not half as bad as it sounded initially. The changes were made quite quickly. It actually made us look at our privacy policy and realize it was out of date. All of the templates were brilliant that Katie Reigns gave us and we just amended them for our organization so there wasn’t a huge amount of work involved. The thoughts of it was worse than actually doing it. So I’d highly recommend it. So I’ll pass you over now.

Mary Claire Cowley: Thanks. IFA so yeah, I guess to kind of explain where we came to it as well. So I’m Mary Claire Cowley. I’m the audience development manager from Ontarian Arts Center based in Dundalk. And we were, again, as everyone said, and we’ve heard it today coming out of COVID everyone kind of reacting differently. And one thing we did during the pandemic was we had pivoted to an off site model and we’d really thrown ourselves into it. We never took any time to kind of stop and think and think about ways we could do things more cleverly or smarter. So when this came up on the theater forum, marketing forum, I just was like, this sounds like a really good opportunity for us to do something that is clever in our approach in terms of our resources. You put in the work at the start and then you get all this passive results as IFA said, so that’s why I was really excited about it. It was like a smart way of doing it, doing less, but doing it better. So that’s kind of why we got excited about legitimate interest. So yeah, again, I have to say, I let IFA be the canary in the coal mine. We were all on the Marketing Forum together, and she was the first to transition. And I definitely was a bit cautious and a little bit like, oh God, let’s just see how she gets on. Will we get loads of unsubscribed, all of these kind of fears, but they were completely unfounded. I think we transitioned over on the 1 February, and in that time, in those four weeks, we’ve exactly four weeks of data. Our actual new newsletter subscribers has increased by 400% when you compare that on February last year and 3% when you compare it on our average monthly subscribers broken out over the year. So I cannot recommend how satisfying and how amazing it is also to see these come in. So, yeah, I mean, there is the work that has to be done. There’s the privacy policy. But again, ours was a little out of date as well. And the training that we received from Theater Forum and from Katie was just fantastic. There was great resources. And the other thing that I found really helpful as well was they were just really, really open. If you had any specific queries to our organization, because lots of us do things different ways. How we communicate with our customers was different. Some of us talk to all of our customers about donating, some of us don’t. You’ve got your donors, you’ve got your actual memberships, you’ve got all these different types of communications. And I just found it really helpful to be able to ask those questions. Well, we do it this way. How does that apply to our organization? So could not just recommend the training and the materials provided to us enough? It was absolutely fantastic.

Aoife Damel: And can I just add to that one of the biggest fears for me personally, and I think for our organization, was the backlash that we’d get from customers. And there has not been one single comment made like we were geared up for. We had our script ready, we had little things printed, what we’d say to customers, we have our privacy policy up. We had done all our little checklist, which was really useful, and not once has anybody said, I didn’t want you’ve auto ticked me in, or There hasn’t been any comment at all, which we’re still surprised about, to be honest. But that was really we were really geared up for at least a certain amount. Customers would object to being automatically added to the mailing list without having to untick themselves. But I think people are possibly getting more used to that with everything that they buy online. And we’re not spamming them. We’re still limiting what we’re sending out. And it’s very targeted and it’s of interest to them. So there have been a couple of unsubscribes, but nowhere near what we were expecting, and it would be in line with our usual unsubscribed behavior. So go do it. It’s great.

Lucy Costelloe: Thank you. And just, I suppose, a question that I have. And Anna, if you have any questions as well for ifo or Mary Claire, but in terms of, I suppose, particularly giving guidance to members of your team who might be dealing with customers over the phone or in person. And kind of instilling that confidence amongst your team. Have you any tips or advice? Or could you just share a little insight into the experience that you’ve had?

Mary Claire Cowley: Yeah, well, one thing we did, I have an absolutely amazing colleague. She’s here today, Linda. She’s our front house and marketing officer. So we work very, very closely together. And her and I basically just really sat down and thought about, okay, how are we going to talk to the rest of our front to house and box office staff and explain to them how they need to save? Specific things now and make sure that they do it with every customer purchase as well. So that you know that we’re definitely adhering to all the guidelines. And so I just got all of our front to house staff in a room. I scheduled the time. I said, Everybody come in, told them why it was important that we were doing this, told them what the reasons were behind it all. And then we just role played and just pretended to be different customers and just role played the conversations. And we had a little script and what you say to somebody if they’re like, oh, no, I don’t want that. That’s no problem, that’s fine. So that’s basically just what we did. And then just alleviated their fears as well. If they’re feeling like they’re under pressure, there’s walk ups coming up and the show is about to go up and I have to ask the customer this. And we just found different ways that suited within our organization to give them the opportunity to be able to manage that and not feel under pressure.

Aoife Damel: And very similarly, in Mermaid, we’re blessed with a really strong box office team. We have Steph here, our box office manager today, and she has a fantastic way with customers. You’d want to opt in for more after talking to Steph, so we haven’t had any problems at all. So she has briefed her team and we have our little script on that, but we haven’t really needed it. We just say to people, most people are buying tickets online anyway, so it’s their decision. And if they’re at box office, then staff will say, you’re ticked in there now to get our newsletter. Is that okay? And it’s something as simple and as friendly as that, and if people don’t want it, they’ll say it. But the majority of people seem happy to hear from us and it’s definitely working so far. Now, we only have seven weeks of data, but it’s a lot of email addresses. When I was doing our analysis of our mailing list, I do it on a monthly basis, but there’s been a couple of blips through the years. There was the GDPR, which we we lost a chunk of emails there in 2018. Then, I don’t know if you recall, AIRCOM started to charge for the email addresses and there was another drop down. Then it picked up a little bit as people came back to us with their Gmails. And then during COVID it did despite our best efforts to send them newsletters on what was not happening, we did lose, we did lose. Like, the chart will go down a little bit, but it’s skyrocketed since the 9th of Jan again. So it’s really nice. It’s nice to have some positive news after the pandemic. And people can unsubscribe at any time, so we don’t feel like we’re doing anything shady or tricking them. They have the option to leave again. So definitely would recommend it.

Lucy Costelloe: We were doing a little bit of a conversation yesterday because as you can imagine, if and Mary Claire in the hot seats currently, like, they’re talking GDPR to a room filled with GDPR enthusiasts, as we can clearly see. But I think something that really struck out in the conversations as we were developing how we were going to pinpoint some of the fear aspects. So definitely around customer complaints and mass on Subscribes, they were instantly wiped out because neither of you have experienced those. But something that I found so interesting was what became our conversation started, and it was very much filled with fear and we weren’t too certain, and it started to grow into something that turned into and now we love to see the numbers rise. And I think that’s something maybe just to touch on, like the fun side of legitimate interest.

Mary Claire Cowley: So satisfying. Like, I come in and I go, linda, will you hit the button? Not ticket solved. Update our MailChimp. What are we at? And it is really satisfying, especially then when you all that great and they showed it earlier, the missing audiences, we had all those kind of formulas in our spreadsheet, and then just being able to see the percentage, it’s like, wow, actually, and this is passive. Like, I did X amount of work at the end of January, scheduled it in my calendar, and oh God, privacy policy did it. But it was amazing template. So it was like, great. But now we just get to sit back and enjoy it and just see the numbers go up, really. So it is incredibly satisfying. I would definitely recommend it as IFA said, like, I’d echo everything that she said. Yeah.

Aoife Damel: And as I said, our our privacy policy was due for a refresh anyway, so if anything, it kind of triggered that with me that that was written probably 2019, I’d say, or 2018 at the GDPR. And we hadn’t really looked at it since, if I’m honest. So it was a chance to actually review that. And it turned out that the template Katie gave us had a lot more information in it so it was actually a more updated version. So it was actually relatively easy to change the privacy policy to the new one. We just added our mermaid specifics into it and it was more the thoughts of going in now on a Monday and doing a privacy policy that put me off. But I kind of had the deadline of the start of January in my head. So we’d have the full year of data since we turned over to legitimate interest. So definitely was not as bad as I thought it was going to be and it’s step by step in Casey’s instructions and the team at Theater Forum have been brilliant as well. So it sounds like a nightmare and how like you walk out of here today and go, god, I should really do that legitimate interest thing. It’s actually really easy. So if I can do it, anybody could do it. So go home and do it.

Mary Claire Cowley: And actually if I can just add on to that one thing that I know, like and we talked about this on the call the other day is thing I feel like I really want to say is we’re a really small organization. So for anyone who’s sitting here going but we’ve only one person in our marketing department or we’ve only a part time person, we’re really, really small. And if we could do it, I definitely think anyone can. It’s literally you just have to. Again, maybe to feed into that talk earlier this morning about habits, if you schedule it in your calendar, if you say on Tuesday, I’m doing that. Like you said, you picked a Monday, I don’t know why you picked a Monday to your privacy policy and put it in. And the same with the staff training. It was like, I’m just going to put it in the calendar and that’s my plan. And if I do the privacy policy this day, if I do the staff training that day and then we launch on that day, it all just worked and it was great. I guess the training really prepared us for all of that.

Lucy Costelloe: Amazing. So who would have thought GDPR was a Friday afternoon task? But there you have it. I just love to just kind of touch on Anna and Mary Claire. Sorry IFA and Mary Claire have spoken so much about their resources. Anna and just if you would maybe direct some of our because I can feel good things are happening and there’s a wave towards legitimate interest. Maybe just to give an insight into the amount of instructions and webinars and step by steps that are currently on the website available.

Anna Walsh : Well, all of the policy templates as well as the balancing test template, they’re all available. The sessions with Lucy and with Katie reigns have been recorded. The Q and A’s are there and I think there have been additional ticket solve webinars that particularly in response to things like MailChimp and combining maybe the contacts that you had collected from the older opt in system and then combining those with the legitimate interest ones. So all of those things have been worked out and all of the support material and ticket solve instructions are there. We will collect it all into one place and maybe share that link with Lucy on the website so that everything is there. And if there was enough interest, we would repeat the series of workshops because I think there is value in the workshop in that if you have to turn up in the group and be interrogated by Katie lucy was always the very nice one, katie was always the very demanding one. And to be interrogated by Katie as to what you had or hadn’t done since the last workshop I think might have been an inspiration to some, but we’re very happy to do a short sort of repeat of those workshops because I think they do help. And the one to ones and the ability to ask questions and the support and other people’s experience I think is really useful. So we’re very happy to do that. If people are interested, there may be a group of festivals because the first group was art centers, but another group before festival season is in full flight. There would be maybe value in doing a similar series of workshops, but with a focus on festivals, but very happy to do either if people are interested.

Lucy Costelloe: What we could do is open up the floor for any questions that you might have for either Anna IFA or Mary Claire. Oh, we do have questions. Thank you Connor for I was like, I won’t be able to see them now.

Speaker F: Thanks, Anna. Gillian from Triskell. Well done, ladies. I’ve been sitting on that privacy policy right now how long? So fair platy one question did you let people know that you were changing from that whole opt in to the automatic to the legitimate interest or did you just let kind of change over and kind of let them find out on their own?

Aoife Damel: Yeah, no, to be honest, no, we just made the change over at the start of the new year we didn’t do out of comms notification that we’re doing this internally yes, with our management team and with the team but we just made the switch as part of our ticketing I’d have to think about that. I suppose you’d need to look at the amount of ticket sales that came through the system and see how many of those customers are opted in. The unsubscribes are very low. So people who were signed in and then left afterwards after a show but I don’t have data on how many people would have bought a ticket and then unticked. I don’t know if it’s possible to see that in tickets off if they’ve unticked. I don’t know.

Aoileann Ni Rian: It might be a.

Aoife Damel: Ticket solve question, but I don’t yet anyway. It’s a good question though. And also I’d be interested in spending time to work out from the emails that have signed up since the 9 January what the revenue of that is. I mean, maybe they were going to come anyway, but now I have them for selling the next show to them. So it’s interesting. Yeah, I don’t know if you do.

Mary Claire Cowley: I actually don’t have anything just like same but no, it’s true. Again, I don’t know if tickets off know how to do that report that that might be really helpful to do and also to find out the actual financial benefit to the organization of this transition would be really helpful to know as well.

Speaker G: It would be possible to report on that. So it’ll be date based. So from the 1 January, for example, you can report on people who bought online. You can also see those people who are opted in. So there are people who left the tick in the box and you can see people who are not opted in. There are people who physically opted themselves out. So you can get access to that data, certainly. And we can help you do it if you’re not sure how.

Aoileann Ni Rian: Great.

Aoife Damel: What he said.

Lucy Costelloe: We have a few questions coming in here now. So we are just say recording this session. So that’s why if we could just use the mic. Perfect. If we can’t, no worries at all.

Aoileann Ni Rian: Hi. Janice from Backstage. I’m hoping that old adage of there’s no such thing as a stupid question holds for this. Mary Claire, you mentioned that you ticked the update button on tickets all for MailChimp and I was like, there’s an update button?

Mary Claire Cowley: Oh, just update the report. Yeah, okay.

Anna Walsh : All right.

Mary Claire Cowley: That’s all right. No, sorry, use the wrong language.

Speaker H: Hi, I’m Mary and I am the marketing manager at Gawi International Arts Festival. So I just like to say yes, there is definitely interest from Gawi International Arts Festival. If you do run another series and is there a way I can get an email or how do we just get in contact to express interest in kind of running this workshop or learning more about how to implement this?

Anna Walsh : If you would want to just find myself and Lucy just directly after this session when there’s a coffee break, we’ll look at maybe just putting in place a series of workshops. It’ll have to be soon though, before festival season kicks off and before you go on sale, we have a question down here.

Speaker I: Hi, I’m Fiona from Thrive. I’m the data gig, so I’m on after you. So I suppose when I listen to it, my question is always, what next? So you get all this really good new customers. I want to know how they behave differently than the people that you already have. So just wondering what metrics you’re looking at. This is a stupid question. You’re not going to know the answer to this question, but I’d be fascinated to know if there’s a change in either the demographics of those customers, are they different people or do they behave differently on future reporting?

Anna Walsh : In a general way, fiona? In a general way. I think the thinking and the origins of this change over go back to people who have attended a performance in your venue before. Getting them to come back for one and ideally, two or more performances is a very efficient use of your marketing budget. So that’s the basis of this entire approach. The analysis of the customers, whether it be by the numbers of types of show or the genre that they’re interested in, can all be done in the way that it’s been done before. But I think the legitimate interest approach certainly facilitates the presale of tickets to audiences who’ve been to work of a similar nature before and has been used very effectively. So it’s probably more rather than hugely detailed sociodemographic analysis, it’s probably more what are the preferences in terms of program preferences that people have? And it makes it much easier to sell and pre sell tickets to similar work in the future, sometimes well into the future.

Speaker I: Yeah. It’s so interesting. I’d love to see the results of it. Just a quick plug for Thrive. We’ve worked with Kitty many times in the past. We also have lovely stuff we’ve stuffed on privacy stuff on our website. I’m a great proponent of write your privacy statement in the same tone you write your other marketing material and make sure it’s not as dry as Dos.

Lucy Costelloe: Thank you. Are we any more questions this side of the room? No. In that case, I’d like just to take the opportunity to give a massive round of applause. Chief and Ray Claire, as you can imagine, it was not easy getting up talking about GDPR. Thank you both. Massive. Thank you as well. To Anna at Theater Forum. And Irma and Casey are also here today from Theater Forum. Thank you so much for everything. And thank you to our wonderful panel.

Anna Walsh : And Lucy for making it all happen as well.