Recently I’ve become acutely aware that I can be somewhat of a negative grump. Now I have excuses for the last 2 months – I’ve been poorly, and am currently smashing down a new set of drugs that have so many side effects it’s laughable (it’s worth knowing that the accompanying leaflet suggests that I could become either “hysterically energetic and happy” or “suicidal” – No middle ground on that one then).

But back to the point.

What I’m talking about is being a bit down on achievement and ability. My amazing other half has started a grateful diary – essentially, every night, before you go to sleep, you write down what you’re grateful for – major and minor, funny and serious – one of them included the fact that when I get into bed I lie on her side first so it’s warm when she gets in. I know, a hero.

It’s a good thing I think – it reminds us amid the creeping negativity, the stress and the torrent of news flung at us, that we are lucky, and there is good in the world. An bed warming heroes.

I use evernote to keep track of my daily to do list – essentially so that I can scroll thought things and work out what I need to do now and next. But very rarely do I look through at the things I’ve done – I spend so much time thinking “what next” (thank you The West Wing) that I rarely look at it. I think it may be a useful exercise – it’s good to remind yourself, every now and then, certainly not more than bi-annually, that you’re not fully incompetent.

So here’s the five that I’d forgotten about – that panicked me or stressed me, that I did and then instantly forgot. I hope it’s interesting and maybe you’ll look to see what yours are too.

• I worked with a brilliant illustrator Rosie Brooks (link to her) to make a sweet as pie image for a show called Llew a’r Crydd by the amazing Emyr John. Both were a delight to work with and I thought at the time how lovely it all was.
• We discovered that doing hyper localised, regionalised and slightly OTT comedy club facebook ads is really effective for driving people to join facebook events – sales for the comedy night have been up and I worked hard on making it better.
• The marketing team along with Sean Kerrins (link to him), a brilliant designer, redesigned the season brochure making it cheaper and better and the current season is going very well.
• The theatre is currently having the most successful classical music subscription season it ever has – in large part due to Anthony and Ambrose’s top programming, the stirling help of Stephen and Christina of TRG and me designing stuff that did, if I dare say it, persuade people to buy.
• I made a great Tableau (more here) data visualisation sheet for work (more here). I’m dead proud of it – it’s incredibly geeky but I spent my time on it and I’m glad.

P.S. Regular readers don’t despair, we’ll be back to misery and graphs next week. For those also wondering how the anxiety thing is going – much better in the last month or so – turns out that being physically ill is distracting – that said I’ve become preoccupied with dying from whatever webMD says is the worst thing each and every symptom could be – I may have scurvy and/or a pulmonary embolism – I need to get off the internet – so up and down really.

Broad beans wot i grew

I’ve recently found out that I like gardening.

It’s relaxing, pulling out handfuls of weeds to leave a bare patch of earth looking like the set of Apocalypse Now, watering vegetables that steadfastly refuse to flower or fruit and trying to work out what the hell you do to keep things in pots alive. Two months ago my spade (handed down from generation to generation) snapped in half and since that moment I’ve been using a trowel to try and dig myself out of a metaphorical hole.

I found myself, about 4 months ago, thinking about data in a similar way to my efforts digging the garden. There must be an easier way.

The theatre I work for uses Spektrix (other systems available and will work in a similar way in terms of data export) and, while the reports are nice and user friendly I found myself needing something a bit more, well, spade-like. The issue with reports, particularly PDF downloads, is that they serve fairly singular tasks very well but don’t allow you to really explore and question data, not in a free flowing and speedy manner. You run a report, read a report, amend and repeat. Don’t get me wrong, it’s faster than most other systems I’ve used and is pretty good for basic applications but, greedily, I wanted more.

I was trying to do some analysis on the cinema we run, ask questions of the data to find out how programmes have changed and developed. What’s working and what isn’t and also, how we’re doing to date – better than last year? Worse? The same?

So I started off by downloading a row by row seat sales history for a show – pulling a range of data – from venue, date and genre, to days booked in advance, sales channel and event name. I threw it all into excel and… Well, a massive ball ache. Excel died pretty much instantly. The file size was huge (as an .xls) and the data I could gain from using smaller data samples was barely a step above my starting position.

But I gamely soldiered on, and through trial, error and some excessive swearing extracted some interesting data from a raw data file.

(fake data set)

(Full disclosure – I made a fake data set for all the charts in this document – sorry, some of the info in the real ones are sensitive and so I did some mocking up to show you what it looks like!)

So here’s what I ended up with (filled with a fake data set) – a clever, pivot table powered chart with filters based off a single large data table. So it could filter data quickly, provide answers to some questions and, visually, was workable.

The visual part is important because data is only as useful as its ability to persuade power to change or make a decision. This version has various basic dimensions and metrics but is limited by the cleanliness of the data underpinning it – my ability to make multiple pivot tables work together and also time. This took fucking hours, late at night, time that could be better spent writing blogs about brochures (which you should totally read btw – it won’t be at a conference any time soon and is interesting as a debate starter).

This chart looked at shows on a instance basis (each line is one performance of a show), interesting sure, but not actually that huge an upgrade from old reports. It’s also hamstrung by the challenges of updating and adding data. I’m not a programmer, or a mathematician, or a data scientist – I’m an enthusiastic amateur and geek who wants to make some charts to see if I can sell more tickets.

This table, while a little useful is essentially all just a bit tedious – I thought maybe the problem is the tool I’m using.

I’ve always used excel because it’s on every computer I use and, well, I’m quite geeky so its always made sense to use it. It can also do some really basic heatmapping (there’s a “how to” – click here – but beware, I did this 3 years ago so if you decide to do it there’s now definitely better ways) and data tables, but, if we’re being data led and trying to make decisions that are less gut reactions then maybe I need a better tool?

Typing in “data visualisation tools” I came across Tableau.

Now, before I start waxing lyrical about this I’d like to say that other systems are available, that while it’s relatively simple to use there is a learning curve and “yes, you should get me to come and show you how it works sometime” (or visit me, much easier, we can go for cake… yum).

Tableau claims to “help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.” A bold claim, and, largely a claim that it delivers on.

There’s an important point to make before I go any further too. Why do this?
Everytime I talk to anyone in marketing the resource they’re missing is time. Not budget, or inspiration, or creativity. Time. We, as an industry, need to look at how we make efficiency savings, a minute at a time to allow us to do the jobs we’re meant to, to find time to make that difference. Our 40 hours a week needs to work harder and smarter.

Lecture over.

Tableau allows you to import a CSV file and then simply drag and drop dimensions and measures into visualisation. I currently have a CSV file that has nearly 1.5 million lines of data that is a) easy to update and b) is powering about 30 different, instantly update able and explorable graphs and charts.

I was originally going to go through a step-by-step process of what I did but instead I want to show you the results and talk through what they do… If you want to give it a go then please do (there’s a trial version of tableau available for free) and if you want to chat about it with me then drop me a tweet (@mrfreeman1984).

Here’s some of the things I’ve made – all easier and fast to filter… (I made a fake dataset for these too…)

(fake data set)

A basic sales dashboard, that can look across any venue, show, genre, date, time etc…

Q – how quickly can you find out average capacity across a series of shows, year on year? I can do it in 14 seconds…

(fake data set)

A really simple dashboard that looks at customer behaviour (this is the really basic one… I’m hiding the juicy dashboard for this).

Q – If you wanted to know the difference in audience % booking online between 3 different programmes of work across 5 financial years how fast can you find that out? 1 minute 30 sec?

(fake data set)

A really basic mapping exercise using the postcode area and districts that then looks at where you’re getting weaker and stronger, oh and can be filtered by venue, show, genre, date, time etc…

Q – In the postcode your venue is in is it getting more or less people this year, so far, than last year? 20 seconds to find out.

(fake data set)

And this is a bit of an odd mix of data… In this (fake) example we see that 2017 in March had loads more visitors from a few postcodes… Know why? Not a clue, but knowing it means I can start to find out..

Obviously I’m overplaying the speed thing, it takes a while to learn and get set up – but in comparison to excel and manual reports this is like using a tractor and plough in you back garden instead of a trowel and spoon.

So, in conclusion, ditch excel, try a specialist data visualisation software, explore and ask questions and buy me cake.

I hope this is food for thought. Please let me know how you get on.

Best, Sam

(This is part of a series of blogs I’ve mentally entitled “things that might be interesting at a marketing conference” – please retweet if you think this is interesting and comment at the bottom to let me know your thoughts! Thanks, Sam x)

(Click image to zoom)

I’ve recently started writing the new marketing strategy for the next 3 years for the organisation I work for (Theatr Clwyd – this blog though represents my views only and not the views of the organisation). The last strategy, linked in with the business plan had gone quite well, it’d been relatively SMART and going through it after two years I found myself ticking lots of things off. What I wasn’t ticking off however was a sense of achievement, a sense that there had been a fundamental sea change that was really pushing at and questions what we do.

As I started jotting down new ideas I found ideas that I, and I’m sure many people have written a thousand times before, and as I read the list as it was, it isn’t that bad, if I handed my notes in then people would undoubtedly nod. However it felt like something was missing at the core of what I was writing.

We’ve been working recently with TRGArts, an American company, similar to Baker Richards who do pricing consultancy. Like all consultancy it is, in part, about telling you things you know but don’t necessarily want to hear. It is infuriating in some parts (on-the-ground and in-the-sky thinking don’t always match), reassuring in others and also challenging. It’s made me think about how we work. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve not had chance to put anything into action aside from the TRG mandated ideas, and my own thinking has mostly taken place after a short cry and drive in my car, but overall its been a good thing.

And so as I looked at my list of notes I had a moment of shock when I realised that the thing that was missing,  the staple of theatre marketing, Old Familiar itself, was the humble season brochure.

Season brochures as all marketeers will tell you are three things. They’re a massive pain-in-the-arse to produce, they’re incredibly expensive and, crucially, they drive sales. We know they drive sales because we see it everytime we drop a brochure – sure, they’re supported with e-mails and launches –  but they are the workhorses of our marketing toolkit. They also occupy an odd position – unlike practically all other marketing materials – in that they demand the attention of people who normally would have nothing to do with marketing. Everyone has an opinion on how this, the shop front should look. What noone has an opinion on is how it should work.

It seemed to me, looking at that list that if the brochure is such a key bit of marketing for us (which is it), and if it brings in as much money as it does from our core audiences (which it does) then it should, at the very least have a bullet point in my marketing strategy. I’m a visual person so I started to sketch out how it currently works for us and how I’d like it to work in future – this is the image at the top of the page – the following bullet points explain how it works.

• In the centre of the diagram are 12 circles – each representing a month – the orange circles are when we tend to programme heavily, the blue circles is the winter period where Panto and Christmas dominates (which feels like a slightly different time of year) and the pink circle is for August when we currently go dark.
• There are two boxes surrounding some of the circles, these show when we tend to produce work that has the highest impact on the organisation – the most important for us to get audiences to. There’s a period in autumn and also spring. There isn’t one in the summer generally as it’s too hot. These boxes represent the times we need our brochure to work hardest for us. The other time is Christmas however the advance sales on this begins in March so it’s a year-round preoccupation.
• The dotted line splits the ideas. Everything above the line is what we currently do. Everything below the line is what we could do if we wanted to work differently.
• The small arrows are individual solus direct mails.
• The small arrows with 3 multi coloured dots are grouped mailings which might contain genre-specific mailings.
• The big arrows are season brochures with, in brackets, the number of pages they contain.
• The green fading lines that emanate from the season brochure arrows represent where the brochure is most effective – so the closer to the drop date the more impact a brochure has.
• Finally the line at the top and the bottom indicate which parts of the year are most and least supported by our brochure.

Please of course bare in mind that this is a small part of a much bigger picture – nothing works in isolation and this idea includes this – also that this is largely conceptual.

Top Half: Before

The top half of the diagram shows what we currently do. We send 3 brochures a year which are all 64 pages. They’re incredibly big because we work bilingually (if you think creating you brochure is tough and expensive then chat to us…) and we land them at the following times:

• April – to get the summer season in, support the family arts festival, begin panto and autumn pre-sales.
• July – for the autumn season and panto – if it goes in August we worry it gets ignored as it’s holiday o’clock, and September is too late to make an impact on shows in September and October.
• November – for last minute panto sales (occasionally late programmed ice rinks) and to sell the spring subscription, again it’s battling against Christmas if it’s too late.

This strategy has a few issues. Firstly we leave ourselves with dead zone, where the brochures impact is reduced, it’s been out for a long time and sales off the back of it are at a minimum. These are annoyingly aligned with some of our best producing periods but moving the dates doesn’t help us as then we don’t have a sufficient lead time to get advance sales. As a result we balance out the brochure dead periods with increased solus mailings. It also means that the most supported time of year in brochure terms in July, which is also largely a time of little financial gain organisationally.

Bottom Half: After

This strategy looks at a hypothetic 6 brochure year, where we reduce the size of our brochures (we still trail things but not in as much depth – but more frequently), we make them specifically for mailing to already engaged audiences (after all they’re expensive, why throw them out into the abyss, we can also tailor the supporting messaging) and we try to reduce the number of solus mailings which have a lower ROI. The key here is that they’re for already engaged audiences and no longer a one-size fits all piece of print to cover multiple bases – we’d also look at what supports this in terms of distribution (that’s cheap and cheerful), and also digital.

The 6 brochure strategy has the potential to ensure we’ve no dead zones of brochure engagement throughout the year, that our key parts of the year are covered by multiple brochures and we serve shows in March and November better.

The print cost is comparable (64pg x 3 a year vs 32 pg x 6 a year), but design costs are more. The postage charges are more but then, hopefully so is ROI (and you’d redirect some of the postage costs into the brochures).

We’d be moving from a 3 season cycle to a more perpetual on-sale technique which means that some of the pain of producing brochures can be spread out, as and when a show is booked. There’s still an issue with how to make it less of a pain in the arse (arguably when it becomes such a frequently produced piece of print there’s a reduced focus on it to the same extent) although you’d hope that shows would appear in multiple brochures so you’d aim to move away from a “sign off” culture to a “I trust you to sell my show” culture. Interestingly we produce 12 film brochures a year which are turned around in 3 days to little or no ill effect. We’d also have the increased flexibility to be reactive: Artwork doesn’t work? Change it in the next brochure! Famous cast member added? Add it in the next brochure?

Major shows would appear 3 times, while smaller events, gigs where late booking is more common, would get exposure in a timely way (few people book for comedy club gigs 7 months in advance). You could also theme each brochure so they’d have a specific focus – not every brochure would contain info on everything the organisation does – it varies to give space and accepts that we don’t need to tell people that we do good community work 6 times a year.

So that idea. What do you think?

I’ve a few more images I’ve been designing up – interested?