How San Francisco Ballet used Prospect2 to Solve a Communication Crisis
How do you break the news to 7,385 ticket holders that their show is cancelled without overwhelming the box office?
One of our longtime L2 website and Pro2 clients, San Francisco Ballet, faced this challenge early this week.
On March 6th, SFB announced that all performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were cancelled.
“By order of Mayor London N. Breed, to prevent the spread of COVID-19, all public performances, events, and gatherings at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center are hereby canceled from Saturday, 3/7/20, through Friday, 3/20/20.”
Initially, SFB reached out to us to make updates to their website that would allow patrons to choose what they wanted to do with their tickets—Donate the value or receive a Gift Certificate. This would have required additional money, time, and testing, and would require patrons to come to the website to make their choice.
When we heard their request, we had an idea. In conjunction with the marketing team at SFB, Prospect2 and L2 developed a plan that leveraged existing Pro2 functionality and provided patrons with an easy process to make their selection.
This plan (recipe) included:
1 Email
2 Tags
2 Automations
2 Tessitura Integrated CSIs
All things already built into Pro2.
Email
The email campaign SFB sent out contained two buttons: one to donate tickets and one to receive credit in the form of a Gift Certificate.
Click Action Links
Both buttons utilized the Prospect2 Click Action feature to add a corresponding Tag to the contact when the button was clicked.
Automation(s)
The Automation processed the contact when the tag is applied and deployed a Tessitura Integrated CSI personalized with the patron’s choice. Additionally, in this automation you could add an email deployment reminding the patron of their choice.
Tessitura Integrated CSI
This integration point was configured with a Contact Method, Activity Type, any Custom Fields, and the option to marked it as urgent or not.
The Results
This gave the box office a CSI on the patron’s record which is everything they need to take action on the patron’s selection.
The box office was able to handle these swiftly and without added stress. Patrons were able to see their options and make a choice with a single click. The marketing department was able to easily identify patrons who did not take action via this email and reach out to them another way to ensure they made a choice of what they would like to do with their tickets. No mess, no drama.
Only 36 hours from idea to send and SFB was thrilled with the results.
“Thank you so much for the Tessitura Integrated CSI feature and bringing it to our attention. It was so simple to set up. Now that we used it for Midsummer cancellation, we have been thinking of so many more ways we can use it. Again, thank you.”
Mary Goto, Associate Director of Analytics & Relationship Marketing
Here are the stats:
7,385 emails were deployed
5,415 Unique Opens (74.01% open rate!)
972 contacts clicked Donate
2,172 contacts clicked Receive a Credit (Gift Certificate)
In Closing
This was all done with functionality that is built into Pro2. We often talk about how we go beyond email and this is a fantastic example of that. This same approach could be used for so many different situations beyond handling cancellations. We’ve seen organizations use a similar set up for taking action on patron feedback from a post- visit survey or for following up with VIP’s who unsubscribed.
If you want to learn more about how Pro2 can help your organization solve problems like this, reach out to us at: hello@prospect2.com