Recently, an a chamber orchestra client asked me what I would suggest they do if they suddenly had $10,000 to spend on new marketing initiatives for next season. As of now, their marketing program consists of one season brochure mailing, e-mail newsletters before each concert, a website and a moderate Facebook presence.

Their renewal rate for existing subscribers is high, so my advice was to add 1) Killer offers to onboard single-ticket buyers and mailing list joiners; 2) Reciprocal advertising with related groups; 3) Printed postcards to the mailing list and as table info.

Any other thoughts? Add them to the comments.

The sixth and final part of my series of Arty Face articles (February 2) on the recommendations of Dan and Chip Heath in their book Made to Stick covers story telling, which essentially means using newsletters effectively in the arts marketing context.

The January 17 edition of Arty Face contains the fifth installment in my series on sticky messages based on the advice of Chip and Dan Heath in their book Made to Stick. It gives a brief overview of the advice on using emotion to connect with the audience.

The fourth part of my series of Arty Face articles (January 11) on the recommendations of Dan and Chip Heath in their book Made to Stick covers credibility.

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!