The Arts Marketing Kit

You are the executive director and the marketing director and the person who writes the program book at midnight. You have a board that wants "younger audiences" and no one to go find them. Maybe you are the one staff member, and the season announcement is due Friday.

I have been that person. I co-founded an opera company in New York and ran it for almost five years, and I marketed seasons at a regional opera company where the posters, the program book, the social scripts, and the post-show survey all lived on my desk at the same time. Over those years, first-time attendance per production went up 101 percent and revenue per show rose 27 percent. I would never hand the credit to one tactic, but the work convinced me of the thing this kit is built on: the art doesn't need to change. The way we invite people in does.

What's inside

The Guide (28-page PDF). The thesis: two questions every company should ask, and why most season marketing answers only the first. Listing versus invitation. Three real stories from a real season: a theme that ran from the posters to the fundraisers, a Puccini comedy marketed like Knives Out, and the record-setting run that title recognition and the community calendar helped as much as the copy did. Then the tools, explained one by one. It ends with the one-pager nobody wants to write: how to say, internally and without blame, that a production didn't land.

The Season Marketing Planner (Google Sheets). Make a copy and it's yours. A season timeline that builds itself from eight anchor dates: what goes out when, on which channel, to whom, owned by whom, from the announcement through single tickets through every production and the morning after. An eight-week Show Sequence to duplicate per show. A Show Story tab per production. A Channel Calendar that shows you the gaps. An Audience Development Scorecard that tracks new versus returning, retention show to show, and the survey numbers, with the three questions to answer out loud every month. A Survey Log.

The Show Story Worksheet (fillable PDF). The twenty-minute exercise that makes every other tool easier: what the piece actually holds, who it's for that has never been, the familiar place to begin, the one sentence that invites them, what to leave out, and the practical facts for the first-timer. Type into it or print it and put it in front of your director.

The Copy Templates (PDF). Every framework blank and then filled with real examples: the season announcement for web, email, and a week of social; the production page; the three-email sequence per show; the first-timer email; the morning-after note; and the scripts behind the confessionals, the synopsis videos, and the artist spotlights.

The Post-Show Survey generator. Five questions, anonymous. Enter your company name and art form, and it writes the form for you, with the anonymity settings already correct. The survey I ran, including what to do with the feedback you can't act on.

Who this is for

A one- to three-person staff at a regional opera company, symphony, choir, chamber series, dance company, or theater who is doing marketing without a marketing department. The examples come from opera because that's where I did the work. The system isn't opera-specific: change "opera" to your art form, change the examples, keep the structure.

Who this is not for

Organizations with a marketing director and an agency. You already have this. Go write the one sentence.

How it's delivered

Instantly, after checkout. You get the Guide and the Show Story Worksheet as PDFs, plus a link that makes your own copy of the Planner, the survey generator on my site, and a link to the Copy Templates. Nothing to install. Updates to the kit go out to every past buyer for free.

A note on the planner

The planner is built for Google Sheets and the timeline formulas only work there. Open it in Sheets, not Excel.

What's included

• The Guide, 28 pages (PDF)
• The Season Marketing Planner, 7 tabs (Google Sheets, make-a-copy link)
• The Show Story Worksheet, fillable (PDF)
• The Copy Templates, blank and filled (PDF)
• The Post-Show Survey generator (free, on my site)
• Free updates for life