February 10, 2010
Introducing the Storyboard
Here’s an idea we’re really excited about: the Chroma Storyboard.
The goal here is to capture and communicate the story of the relationship between your theater and a specific patron. When someone calls you, or someone walks up to the box office window, who are they? Have they been coming a long time? Is this their first visit? Did they talk to someone else at length about a question or concern, and if so, what was the gist of that discussion?
The Storyboard is going to help answer those questions. The design is simple and familiar: kind of like a Twitter feed, or a wall on Facebook. We’ll be able to pull the Storyboard into any page that references a patron. It will be the little trail of interactions you’ve had with this patron—the historical context of their relationship with your theater. We think this will help give your patron a more consistent experience, and give you a chance to develop a stronger relationship with them.
Below, Jesse walks you through the first iteration of the Storyboard:
Nick Keenan says at
February 10, 2010 at 12:33 pmYes. Yes. Perfect. Question from another thread –
Can I import my past history into the storyboard?
Can I generate reports using the storyboard? i.e. Snapshot patron history on each box office report for the night. But also, could I say, print a report of all the storyboards of patrons associated with a particular patron tag?
Emery Roth says at
February 10, 2010 at 12:34 pmVery cool. From my limited time working in a box office I think it would also be cool to be able to setup some tags. I.e. ‘board member’ ‘press’ etc. All of those tags could then probably be used for other sorts of mailing lists and searches like “I wonder if all the board members came to that last show” “Oh shit, press tonight!?”
Jesse says at
February 10, 2010 at 12:38 pmWe haven’t looked at importing history, yet, but it would certainly be a valuable feature. What format do you have that data in now?
And yes, we were thinking exactly that – tags would be another way to slice all your box office data.
Nick Keenan says at
February 10, 2010 at 12:52 pmOur formatting is everything from excel to csv to bits of mysql. I think if you can get a csv import working which maps external fields to Chroma fields, then that should work for almost every existing system.
Only tricky thing with that is exposing old patrons who haven’t purchased through Chroma to the Chroma system, list-wise. Having all the history in one place is a big problem for most companies of our size, but I understand that there are some patron-level issues when migrating their histories in.
For instance, let’s say I import some of their information into Chroma. While I’ve been pretty good about keeping my list CAN-SPAM compliant, not everyone has. Maybe my patrons get peeved if they get an email from Chroma when they haven’t purchased through Chroma.
Another scenario – let’s say I import Joe Schmo, and he’s not in the system. Then he purchases and creates a new record in the system… can I then identify and choose to merge those patron histories into one record so that Joe can now manage his own info and preferences?
So: import is VERY valuable to companies, as long as it’s not at the expense of Patron experience.
Jesse says at
February 10, 2010 at 1:10 pmYep, you’ve nailed some of the tricky issues. Speaking of CAN-SPAM, would you mind telling us what tools you use for email campaigns? (Feel free to tell us in email if you’d rather.)
Nick Keenan says at
February 10, 2010 at 2:03 pmHa ha. We built our own, eventually. But I’ve played with both Constant Contact and Groupmail (which I prefer) – http://www.group-mail.com/asp/common/default.asp . As far as compliance, I do unsubscribing and sign-up manually (not quite double opt-in, but it is single opt-in, and I’d love to improve that), which is not ideal, but our list is fairly small.
Nick Keenan says at
February 10, 2010 at 2:04 pmUltimately, also: Email is a very ineffective tool for us since our target demographic largely doesn’t like hearing about us through email. Big picture, what we really need is something that spans an overview of patron relationships via email, facebook, print, lobby, etc.
Chris says at
February 10, 2010 at 4:56 pmNick you’ve raised some really great points and given us some important things to think about as we work on the Storyboard.
And Emery, regarding “oh shit, press tonight!” : Heh — I love it. It made me immediately think, oh, maybe we need to find a place to list all the patron tags for a given performance on the box office dashboard. In other words, maybe the central ticket-collecting page should have a little section dedicated to: “here are the categories of folks who you’ll be seeing tonight….heads up!”
Buck says at
February 13, 2010 at 2:21 pmI think you guys are hitting on something really essential with the easy capture of comments heard at the box office. I’ve always felt that the box office staff have the most in-depth contact with patrons (especially in larger organizations), and a lot of time their in-depth knowledge is not tapped. So many of the little things patrons say at the box office window are actually really valuable information for people higher in the food chain to hear (anything from–”oh, I loved the show and am going to bring my whole family back with me” which could be used for marketing purposes, to “I’m interested in serving on the board here” to “the last time I was here, somebody spilled their drink on me, and I’m ready to never come back and you aren’t going to see my $1,000 annual fund donation this year unless someone calls me and apologizes”.
If there was a simple way to both record this information on the timeline so that you’ve got a comprehensive patron history, but also to email/send it directly to the relevant department instantly with one click, it could really up the staff/patron relationship.