The Client

The Undermain Theatre is an 80-seat regional theater, home to the professional theater company, Deep Ellum Theatre Group. This ensemble group is a company of artists seeking to inspire, educate, and challenge audiences and artists through production of new and experimental works throughout Dallas, New York City, and Europe and has become known for producing many contemporary writers. With the aim of providing cutting-edge theatre, all the artists are deeply embedded in theatre’s artistic life. The theatre was founded by a group of artists almost 35 years ago, and is based in Dallas, Texas.

Challenges

Anyone in the performing arts will agree that one major challenge is to get people into your venue, and tougher to maintain some kind of challenging, rewarding, and profitable program to entice new viewers and keep old viewers in the fold. It is a delicate balance. Reach out to existing and prospective patrons, informing them about upcoming shows, and working to build larger audiences. All while trying to raise sufficient funds to maintain a vibrant arts life in the community. Undermain is no different, and as a non-profit organization, it relies on donations as well as audiences to keep the show going on. Beyond the Horizon had some ideas on how to help keep the culture growing and thriving.

The Solution

Beyond the Horizon was able to implement Patron Manager on Salesforce to help Undermain Theatre manage shows and productions. The solution starts with identifying the target audience, sending timely communication about the upcoming shows to targeted audiences and then managing reminder emails. Beyond the Horizon also configured Salesforce reports and dashboards to help Undermain analyze donors, audiences, and target market to their show interests. With the help of the visual dashboards, Undermain can easily analyze audience demographics and market specific interests by age group, geography, and more. All this has helped Undermain in designing a subscription model that fits the needs of their audience members and donors on a micro-interest level.

Salesforce automation tools, such as Workflows has helped the Theatre in better managing Season passes and sending email notifications to the right people. Customized email templates have saved a lot of time and effort from re-creating email content repeatedly.

Beyond the Horizon also integrated additional applications for email marketing. Implementation and integration of MyEmma has helped the Theatre in sending targeted marketing emails, managing subscriptions, sending thank-you emails and sending show schedules and reminders. Automations such as setting up scheduled emails with dynamic report data from Salesforce has also provided the Theatre an option to prepare well in advance for their busy show season. And implementation and integration of Conga Mail Merge has helped Undermain in expediting the delivery of year-end tax letters to all donors.

Results

Salesforce has become the integration point of all the other applications for Undermain, enabling a level of data analysis previously unachievable. Salesforce automations and integrations have expedited the process of corresponding with donors, maintaining donor information, managing ticket sales and sending targeted emails.

According to Katherine Ownes, Co-Founder and Artistic Director for Undermain Theatre,

“Beyond the Horizon has migrated Undermain Theatre’s data to the cloud and integrated data and processes across the theatre’s operational functions. The donor management and ticketing capability has expanded in to grants management, marketing and membership management. Now, with all data consolidated, Undermain Theatre can readily see an individual patron or donor and see all of the activities and engagements with that person, a task that was not possible before migration. These benefits were derived while actually decreasing Undermain Theatre’s on‐going operational expenditures for technology”.