Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, located in Katonah, New York, is renowned for its rich blend of musical programming and commitment to cultural diversity. The venue offers a unique cultural experience, combining classical music with innovative performances, educational programs, and community outreach. Caramoor’s mission is to nurture the arts while actively engaging a diverse range of audiences, ensuring it reflects the broad community it serves.
Aligning audience needs and audience growth with a data-driven culture
When Marc Lowenstein, Director of Marketing and Communications, joined Caramoor in 2023, he joined an organization dedicated to a data-driven strategy. Primarily, there was a need to broaden the audience base and ensure it better mirrored the surrounding community. Caramoor’s existing audience was predominantly older, which posed sustainability issues both in terms of audience engagement and revenue generation. The marketing and development strategies required a data-driven approach to meet growth ambitions and make informed decisions about programming and promotions.
Unlocking audience intelligence through data visualization tools
To address these challenges, Caramoor implemented Activity Stream as a robust tool to guide data analysis and unlock audience insights. Activity Stream enabled the team to monitor sales trends, audience behavior, and marketing effectiveness with granularity. This tool proved essential for:
- Audience analysis: Helping the Caramoor team understand audience demographics and sales patterns.
- Strategic decision-making: Guiding decisions on programming, ticket pricing, and promotional strategies based on data insights.
- Marketing execution: Providing actionable data to support promotional initiatives and evaluate their success.
- Cross-departmental support: Allowing other departments, such as the major gifts officer, to access relevant data and tailor their approaches.
“I use Activity Stream all the time to try to get answers, try to understand the audience, and understand our sales trends. It’s been an incredibly useful tool. One of the things I like about Activity stream is that it works for the boss who just wants to see the big number up top, but also works well for pretty much as deep as you could ever possibly want to go into audience and sales insights.” Marc Lowenstein, Director of Marketing and Communications, Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts
Optimizing Strategic Campaigns with Data-Driven Insights
The use of Activity Stream brought 360-degree insights and benefits to Caramoor:
- Unlocked effective revenue generation: By employing strategic discounts and promotions informed by Activity Stream insights, Caramoor not only met but exceeded its revenue goals. The ability to demonstrate the effectiveness of these strategies to stakeholders improved internal support and alignment.
- Improved cross-departmental efficiency: Other departments, including development, benefited from the ability to independently access and utilize data. This facilitated better coordination and more targeted approaches, such as the major gifts officer’s use of data for engagement strategies.
- Strategic value of free events: By analyzing the demographics and engagement of attendees at free events, Caramoor better understood their value beyond immediate revenue. This insight supported more effective budgeting and strategic planning for these events.
Overall, the adoption of Activity Stream has been instrumental in aligning Caramoor’s ambitious growth strategies with actionable data, fostering a culture of informed decision-making, and ensuring the venue’s continued success and relevance in the community.
“We’re on track to meet our goals, but we don’t stop selling the shows just because our goals are met. Being able to use data to demonstrate why we are executing these strategies and how the strategy performed, and being able to back it up after it happened was super useful and broadly well received. “ – Marc Lowenstein, Director of Marketing and Communications, Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts
To learn more about Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts and their upcoming programming, visit their website.
Contact us to learn more about how our marketing intelligence solution helps venues boost audience growth, improve engagement, and surpass revenue targets with data-driven technology.
