One of my Team Member clients in Southern California, Music at St. Matthews, recently sent me this nice note:

"Something must be working. We had about the biggest crowd we've ever had last Friday. Granted, it was Handel's Messiah, but the interesting thing was that we had a lot of advance ticket sales and a goodly number of walk-ins." -- Tom Neenan, Artistic Director.

In past years, nearly all of this chamber orchestra's sales had come from subscribers, so we worked on the branding, e-newsletter, website and brochure for the 2011-2012 season to make it easy for potential patrons to find the information they needed to purchase single tickets or subscription add-ons.

It worked.

One of the orchestra's long-time supporters wrote, "... something inspired you and your colleagues to turn the internet into a lively source of information about your programming and musicians who will perform .... And the layouts of your printed brochures has also suddenly improved."

The letter included a nice donation, so I'd say that's one patron who really knows how to give a compliment!

Part 3 of my series on crafting sticky marketing messages, based on Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, continues in the December 28 edition of Arty Face with an explanation of why concrete, specific messages are stickier than abstract ones, even though the abstract ones might be technically more accurate.

My series on crafting sticky marketing messages, based on Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, continues in the December 20 edition of Arty Face with some ideas about giving your message an unexpected twist.

The December 1 edition of Arty Face covers the first of seven strategies for making your messages sticky -- making them simple by finding the core message. Click on the link to view the newsletter, and if you are not already a subscriber, use the form at the top right of this page to join the list.

I gave a talk called "Applying the Six Principles of Sticky Messages to Your Promotional Materials" twice at the most recent Arts Reach conference in San Francisco. It was well received both times, but I ran out of time. Drat! If only there were just five principles!

The talk is based on the fantastic book by Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick, published in 2007. Their advice is extremely similar to my "Five Keys to Effective Communication," which I've been talking about for years, but since they have cognitive and behavioral psychology research to back up their advice, I decided to use their terminology this time.

Here's a PDF copy of the PowerPoint if you are interested. If you'd like to know more about the book, go to the Heath brothers' website. They also have a terrific book about organizational change called Switch, which I recommend just as highly.