On a lovely summer day in December 2016 at the MPavilion in Melbourne, the ACF brought together artist, curator and writer Irene Barberis with co-founders of innovative classical music group anon., Thomas Lo and Nicole TJ. The below excerpts provides insights into Irene, Thomas and Nicole’s marketing strategies, with great tips and insights into their approach.
ACF: Let’s talk about marketing. In terms of using digital, social media, enews and emails – what do you use and what do you find the most effective?
Nicole: For us, it is definitely Facebook. It is not necessarily for everyone, it is definitely knowing where your audiences are. I know for others, Instagram is their main channel, and they do nothing with Facebook. For us, Facebook is good because there is a lot of integration with it – so it sends out to Instagram as well.
Thomas: We started on Facebook so in some ways that is where we have most of our contacts. While we are running the campaign, Facebook is a great way to share. And you can also share on your personal Facebook page. If your friends are interested enough, they will then share with their friends and those are the connections that you are trying to make. So you’re really trying to connect with friends who become so interested in it so that they will share outwards.
Irene: I had a video made and uploaded to vimeo and I have found that to be an incredibly useful tool. It has enabled people to get an overview of the project which I could not do through text. And I have a website.
Nicole: The content, and making sense of the bigger story, is something that we try to pay attention to. So in structuring a campaign, we try and make logical sense of things for them to understand the bigger story and to break it up into chunks.
Before you launched your ACF campaign, did you have a social media plan? Did you know when you were going to post, what days, what the message was for those posts?
Nicole: Yes, that’s what we always do. In terms of whether we execute it, on the right day and the right content, that is probably another thing! I strongly believe it’s good to have a plan.
It would be interesting to hear your views on having a video as part of the campaign. There are lots of stats that show that video is an incredibly important tool and campaigns that have videos are much more likely to succeed so I am interested in all of your views of having a video as part of your fundraising campaign.
Irene: The video for the Tapestry of Light was really fantastic. I found that expending however much it was at the beginning was a very good investment into the project.
Thomas: Our video always starts with a story that we want to tell. We like to keep it quite short because in our view it is almost like an appetiser, to get people wanting to go to the page. The video was straight to the point, telling audiences what the project was. Now you have vimeo etc., video quality is getting better and better and video can tell a story better than images can.
Nicole: Or a huge long paragraph of text. We find video a more readily available way to communicate. Sometimes it is hard to get the key points out in text and it is hard for us to know where to focus.
Thanks to Irene, Nicole and Thomas for taking the time to share their thoughts and insights into fundraising and campaigning through the ACF.
Keen to know more? Check out Part 1 of this discussion here.