You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions
are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are
Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of AttendMedia.
Jenny, today’s topic, what marketing should look for in their next ticketing system? Jenny,
why are we talking about ticketing systems?
This is an exciting topic for us to dive into. We’re no expert here by any means, but
I think as we’ve gotten deeper into this space and have talked to a lot of leaders and
marketing teams at nonprofit attractions, I think a big pain point that has come up multiple
times, no matter who we’re talking to, is really round ticketing systems. Some could
just be, there’s not a lot of communication in between teams or lack of education around
what some of these platforms can do, but I think from marketing teams specifically, we’ve
heard a lot of frustrations around what they’re not able to get out of their systems. Then
I think also just growth, as an organization grows, they tend to outgrow a lot of these
platforms quickly. In fact, we’re hearing summer changing every two to three years almost
to be able to do the things that they’re trying to implement at their organization. Excited
to talk really today with more of an expert around these platforms and what options are
available and what are the things that we should be looking for and asking for when we’re
really looking at switching this type of software? Yeah, I like what you said because we think
we’re pretty smart. We’re marketing these museums, museums, gardens, but the reality is
we’re not in that four wall building every day. We’re not inside the marketing department.
So kind of understanding, getting some clarity on the pain points that some of these teams
might be going through, we need some outside help. So we brought in a guest, Michelle Paul.
She’s the vice president of growth strategy at Back Office, thinking she’s joining us on
the program right now. Michelle, welcome. Thanks for the time.
Hello. Thank you so much for having me.
All right, Michelle. Well, let’s just jump into it and start off with what are some of
the common reasons that nonprofit attractions are switching ticketing platforms again?
Some of these are switching every two to three years. What are you hearing when they come
to you? Yeah, absolutely. And so to be clear, I’m also not within the four walls or gates
or whatever the boundaries of that institution are, right? Back office thinking helps nonprofit
organizations make better use of technology to support their missions. So for us, this
includes designing websites, implementing CRM systems, providing ongoing tech support
maintenance and most relevant for this conversation, consulting on overall technology strategy.
So a lot of what I do is helping organizations create a roadmap figure out which of those
other technology things they actually need to prioritize first. As a company, we are technology
agnostic, which means that we don’t favor any particular system while we certainly tend
to do more hands-on work with some systems more than others. Our assessment work is purposely
broad, drawing on that experience across a wide variety of organizations using a wide variety
of tools. And my own background in expertise is, and
my own heart, is primarily in the arts and culture world for nearly 20 years now. I’ve
been helping nonprofit arts organizations adopt technology solutions around ticketing,
membership, CRM, marketing, and all those related needs. So I have seen it all. So I think
to answer your question about, you know, what are the reasons these nonprofit attractions
are switching ticketing platforms? I think there’s, I’m going to be a little judgy here,
right out of the gate, because I think that there’s good reasons, I think there’s okay reasons,
and I think there are some not so great reasons for this, depending on where the organization
is coming from. So to me, the good reasons are a little bit of what you kind of hinted at.
A good reason is something strategic. So it might be that the organization has sat down
and made a strategic plan or made a roadmap for their technology and they’ve actually identified
needs that are not being met today by their systems, or they’ve grown, right, and a system
that had been meeting their needs at one point is clearly does not have the ability to match
the scale of the organization today or the new offerings that they might have added in.
Those are great reasons to consider making a change. What I’ll call okay reasons are
the passage of time, you know, so if it were not in a two to three year cycle, and you’ve
actually been using the same system for 12 years, for example, it’s probably possibly a
little bit out of date, and probably it is not making your needs from a growth perspective,
but more importantly, is it a modern system that is up to date that can do all of the things
that systems can do today, right? That’s a reasonable reason to switch, even if you don’t
exactly know why, right, or really, truly sometimes systems are being sunset, right? They’re not
going to be maintained anymore. The organization doesn’t have a choice, but to make a change.
Again, might not be the most strategically driven point at that moment, but at least it’s
there’s a clear reason behind it. And then there’s the part that I’ll call bad reasons
or the not so great reasons, which is sometimes staff changes, leadership changes, somebody
comes in to an organization and says, “Oh, you’re using System XYZ?” Well, I’m familiar
with System ABC, and that’s what I know and that’s what I love, and so we’re going to bring
that in now the end. Or what I’ll call the grasses greener syndrome, just a general vague
feeling that something isn’t right here, and things could be better. And surely another
system, a different system, we’ll solve all of our problems and make everything good.
So those kind of three main categories is what I see as the reasons for an organization
to want to make a change. Yeah, and perhaps even like a, maybe in that kind
of poor decision for it, it’s, it’s just kind of a lack of understanding of what that
platform can do for you too. So maybe you weren’t involved in the decision for the current
platform that’s being used, or you know, you haven’t got a full rundown of what it actually
can do for you, or maybe the right questions just aren’t being asked to get out what you
want, because I know we’ve talked to some that will say, like, yeah, we just switched ticketing
systems to platform X, and now I can set up all my online conversion tracking, and I couldn’t
do it with platform Y, and we’re like, no, we’re working with a client on platform Y,
and that’s all set up, right? So I don’t know, it’s almost like there, some of these platforms,
some of the software, maybe they’re just not as great at helping you build strategy around
how to use it. They’re just more so answering, like, yes, we can do this or no, we can’t do
that. But I don’t know, that seems like something that’s kind of common too, because I’ve definitely
heard people say they couldn’t do something that we’re absolutely doing with another client
who’s using that system. So I used to be kind of on that side of the conversation, actually,
so I’ve been in consulting for four years now, but before that, I spent 15 years at a vendor
actually making a ticketing and CRM system, and I can tell you, some of it is that people
don’t read, some of it is that people don’t listen, and some of it really is just the kind
of grass-as-greener thing, right? And sometimes it’s true, also sometimes systems don’t do things,
I don’t want to say that that’s not the case, right? But in my experience, as the, you know,
the vendor side trying desperately to communicate about updates and new features and releases
and things like that, you have to be listening in order to know about them. One of the things
that I always wish organizations would do if they get to the point for whatever reason,
if they get to the point that they’re going out and looking and evaluating new systems,
is if you’re going to do an RFP process, for example, please don’t, but we’ll talk about
that later, if you’re going to do an RFP process, include your current vendor as one of the
respondents to that RFP, because you don’t know what they can do, right? The set of features
that you are using today, or the way that you’ve got your system set up today, may not
reflect the system’s capabilities, and so giving yourselves the chance to not have to
make a system migration, I think is really important in that, in that scheme of things,
in terms of making that decision.
We’ve kind of touched on a few things there, but I don’t know, grass is greener, this
ticketing system looks really cool to shiny object, I’m just going to go do it. Maybe that’s
the logic that some of our audience might have. What are some reasons why an organization
won’t want to work with an outside consultant such as back office thinking to help them
choose their next ticketing system?
Certainly to avoid that impulse, right? Having someone come in to maybe slow you down.
Again, one of my main goals, anytime doing a strategy assessment or system selection,
can you not? Can we keep you where you are? Because change is hard.
I like that.
But I want to both plug my own services here and also kind of democratize it into this
is stuff that organizations you can do this for yourself, right? The process here is thinking
and talking and communicating and understanding and knowing things, right? A consultant can
help you understand where you are today and kind of actually help, you know, are you
looking into making this decision for a good or okay or bad reason, right? But you can
be your own consultant first, right? You know your organization best. So asking good questions
internally, getting a good sense of all different related departments and what their needs are
and what their challenges are and what’s working today and what’s not working today. The
time to bring in a consultant is either to validate a decision that you’ve maybe mostly
made, but you want a little bit of a, you know, blessing from outside of that or possibly
streamlining a decision process. There are a lot of ticketing systems out there in the
world. I used to joke that basically you could take the word ticket and put like any noun
or verb before or after it and you will probably have named a real life ticketing system.
So there’s a lot out there. So working with consultant can help streamline that and kind
of narrowing down the universe to a set of things that you should be focusing on. And then
thirdly also just getting on stock, right? If you can’t even get yourselves that far,
if you can’t get to the point of validation or you can’t get to the point of streamlining
a question, then maybe it is time to bring in some outside help to be the one to lead that
process and ask the questions and bring everybody to the table.
So you’re going to help an organization not only select, but how about once that is selected,
are you helping them onboard and understand how to use this properly? Are they getting
all that training from the ticketing platform? Like, where kind of how long are you hand
holding a client through this?
It really depends on the system on, and I’ll even say on the solution. One of the notes
that I had kind of made to myself when we were prepping for this is what is a ticketing
system? Really? Not to get philosophical, but you know, there’s, there’s ticketing systems
and then there’s overall solutions that are needed by organizations in order to meet
all the needs that you have, right? And I’ll just rattle off those ticketing and membership
and fundraising and volunteer management and class registration and, you know, all
of these different pieces of everything coming together.
Most systems don’t do everything equally well. So very often, the right solution for an organization
is a suite of tools that are interoperable and integratable and work together. And that
would be a good reason to use a back office thinking, right? Because it’s not necessarily
just one thing. It’s helping to have things talk to each other or integrate those things.
You know, there are some platforms. There are some technology vendors that do their own
implementation, that do their own support, that do their own training. You can get that
all in-house and we don’t want to get in the way of that, right? We want to, if we want
to help you find the best resource for the kind of help that you need. So there’s certain
kinds of things where you might need to help doing through the implementation process.
Or just even a ride along, we’ll call it sometimes, right? Like if the vendor might do the project,
but if you need help with data extraction or decision making or just understanding how
things are going to work together, just being that kind of one step removed bird’s eye view
of going through that process, we love to help with that.
You gone through this process. I’m assuming quite a bit. What are some of the common mistakes
that you’re seeing organizations make when selecting a new ticketing system?
Some of that is probably implied by my first answer in terms of the grass being greener,
right? And assuming that everything will be perfect in the new world. I think there’s
a couple of main things, which is not understanding priorities and sometimes getting swept away
by buzzwords and hot new terminology, features and functionality rather than matching the system
features to your actual requirements and capabilities. I think is one of the main things
that happens. And another thing that happens is only trying to solve one problem at a time.
So, and that’s why I ask the question of like, what is the ticketing system? Because there’s
a couple of versions of this that I see, but it’s all the same story of not bringing the
right people to the table. Sometimes it’s that an organization has decided that technology
is technology and technology is scary and technology is something that belongs in the realm
of IT exclusively. And thereby, kind of limits the input from other teams that are going to
be the actual primary users of the system and just kind of concentrates the whole process
just in the realm of, you know, and I speak, I say this as a tech nerd of the tech nerds,
right? Like, no, no, you don’t only want that voice to be there. So that’s one flavor of it.
But another flavor of it is acting like a ticketing system is only a ticketing system.
And I think this is closer to the problems that you guys end up encountering, right? Which
is there’s the ticketing system that’s going to let people give you money in exchange for
a visit, right? Or give you money in exchange for a membership or whatever the needs of ticketing
in front of how it’s got services or you want to call it, right? But marketing is really important
to all of that, right? Understanding like without, broadly speaking, probably without marketing
who’s going to buy the tickets. And it’s worth noting there also on a say we’re talking
about nonprofit attractions here, right? I think there’s two entirely different realms
of audiences of marketing. There’s more than two, but of marketing in this way, right?
Because as a nonprofit, there’s one realm of your business that is focused on ongoing long
term multifaceted relationships, right? Members, donors, volunteers, these folks that become
a core audience for the organization. And that’s where we get into the like CRM realm, right?
The real customer data, like overtime relationship stuff going on. But also for most nonprofit
attractions, there’s a huge amount of audience and revenue that comes from basically single
ticket buyers, right? Like the mass audience, the people who either are not there yet in
the relationship realm or maybe are not even candidates for that, right? If you’re operating
a zoo or garden or anything that it brings in tourists audience, your goal with that is
not necessarily to build a long term member of relationship, right? It’s to get as many
of those people coming to you instead of any of the other things that they could possibly
be doing that day. And so that flavor of marketing of getting the word out of paid placement
and other things like that requires a different set of features and data and approach to the
work. And those are both important, right? There’s not, there can be a hierarchy of needs,
not every organization, like every any given organization is going to have a different
balance of where that sits in their kind of priority list in their budget, right? And
so knowing who you are, right? Like know thyself as an organization is kind of the answer
there. Common mistakes come about when organizations don’t. Getting ahead of yourself and not knowing
who you are and what you need by not having enough people involved in the conversation
is the biggest place where things go wrong.
You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how non-profit
attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing. Your hosts
are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media. Attend media is a media planning and buying
agency, specializing in zoos, aquariums, gardens and museums. For more information please visit
attend.media. Now back to Ryan and Jenny.
Michelle, I like how you kind of broke out the two different lenses to look at a ticketing
system or maybe even a CRM system in the eyes of marketing. Yes, on one side there is
that donor relationship, that volunteer relationship, more of a long term nurture. And then you
mentioned on the other side, that single ticket sale, like getting people through the
turn style, getting into the attraction. And Jenny, I think that’s the world that we primarily
play in is getting that first time visitor through and letting our guest experience team,
sell that membership and hopefully move them over into more of a long term relationship
with the non-profit attraction. Let’s look at what would be your wish list, Jenny, of
the features we would need to see from a pure marketing, first time visitor standpoint
in a ticketing system. What are some of the holes that we’re seeing in the ticketing system
from just a pure marketing standpoint?
Yeah, whether it’s campaigns we worked on or just talking marketing directors about limitations
that they have in terms of getting data from their tools and systems. And again, selfishly,
I think with us focus on paid media, paid advertising, we’re really focused on that single ticket
sale. So what are the limitations that we see when it comes to that? But I think one is
just kind of online attribution, right? So I’m running a digital campaign. I’m driving
traffic to the website for a lot of people. That’s where it ends, right? They say I can’t
set up tracking in that checkout process because of my ticketing platform. It moves over to
another page, another checkout page and it’s separate from what we own. And so we can’t
set up that tracking, right? So all they really do with their online media is drive it to
a landing page and then whatever happens from there, they don’t know. So we are working
with some clients here.
So though we’re tracking all the way down to the buy tickets now button, but we’re not
getting the information if they actually completed the purchase.
Possibly, right? Some might just have it set up for a landing page or can they get all the
way down to a buy ticket and then it goes somewhere else. Right? Just depends on how that site
set up. But yeah, then you lose everything after that. But ideally, you’ve got it where
it goes all the way through and oftentimes what happens is it’s really just kind of a lack
of, or I guess in some cases, it could be a lack of education from that software in terms
of what you need to do next. But in many cases, what we found is we can just set up a separate
Google Tag Manager container on that checkout page from that ticketing software and we can
mimic that checkout process and now we can set up all the tags on our end. So I think if
you’re thinking that the software itself is going to set all of this tracking up for you,
I think that’s where you have to realize that’s never going to happen, but they’ll give you
the documentation for you to be able to do it. At least that’s what we’ve experienced
for the platforms that can. If they drop those pixels, there’s nothing we could do about
that, right? But that’s one. So I think just making sure that you’re asking about or letting
them know that when you want to look at online tracking and attribution, it’s not just
from a Google Analytics standpoint, you want Tag Manager set up to place a pixel to track
back to Google, back to Meta, back to your online platforms. So I think that’s a really
big one, especially as more tickets are purchased online versus at the gate and more budgets
are being spent in digital media. But another one that we’re seeing, I guess in relation
to that would be revenue tracking. So if we’ve got that online attribution, that tagging
that pixel tracking set up, then we can actually set up tracking to where we can actually pull
in the actual revenue from it. So it’s not just, hey, the button was hit to drive that ticket,
but also, and it sold $60 worth of tickets, right? So we can start seeing that tree return
on ads bin with our media. So from like a paid media perspective, I would say those are
like the two key ones, but two.
I would say just on that note for one second, you know, that’s not only just bringing
marketing to the table in that case, that’s like, bring finance to the table because there
are the ones who care about where the budget that they’ve authorized is going and being
able to tell an actual ROI story of, yes, we are doing paid advertising and we are spending
this much and we are making this much as a result that there’s a lot of these organizations
that should care about that, right? So so true, so true. We should be talking about
it. It will be honest, I guess, but just kind of tying these two points together, like this
idea of online attribution and then taking it to the next level of like just being able
to report on revenue, if we’re only able to see, hey, they clicked on my Facebook ad, went
to the page and then maybe click the buy now button or we’re just tracking they went to
the page, we don’t know if that was one ticket that was sold on the value night or if that
was 10 tickets that was sold for the whole family is getting together. So that value of
that click really becomes muddied or just not as strong as a data point of better understanding
how much revenue or you mentioned ROI or return on ad spend. So I think that’s something
that maybe sometimes our audience kind of, it gets a little lost in translation sometimes
in the complexity of these ticketing systems doesn’t help.
And I think it’s part of this is not every organization needs that because not every organization
is going to make use of it. But any organization that is talking with you guys and bringing
you in to work with them, I think helping them understand that they have already made a
decision to do the spend part of this. And so therefore they, you know, if I was working
with them as a consultant and an assessment case here, right, that would be the huge glaring
note to me saying, okay, this is the thing that is important to you. This is the thing
that you care about. Therefore, specifically, if you’re not able to do exactly what you
guys just said in terms of taking it all, taking the tracking all the way through from purchase
from from the this ad or even the email send or whatever it is to the actual purchase,
then you’re going to be missing a piece of the puzzle. And that’s a difference between
organization that isn’t at that level yet, right? Like, or maybe just isn’t thinking that way
and is earlier on in their kind of marketing, like either resourcing, understanding or
evolution or whatever it is is like there are some organizations where just having the
data of like, yes, oh my God, people clicked on the thing and we know that they bought something
is enough, right? So knowing where you are affects knowing like affects the decision that
you make about what you need to do with the system and it is due with the system, right?
Like you already just said, this any system itself doesn’t have to have doesn’t have to answer
that question for you. It just has to support the data in order to answer the question. So
I think that’s very fair. If I’m an organization that, you know, we’re going to run two billboards
on the highway and that’s our entire marketing plan, then the capabilities that we’re probably
asking for is total overkill. So I absolutely appreciate you bringing that to the table. But
I think my other side of the coin here is digital advertising is at least our point of
view is is going to continue to become a larger and larger share of most organizations marketing
budgets. And if we look at, you know, that biggest piece of the pie for advertisers that
are investing in advertising, that biggest piece of the pie, the biggest line item in
their overall marketing budget is the investment into advertising. So the biggest piece of the
line, the biggest line item is once again, the dollars that we’re investing into advertising.
And we’re seeing like that biggest part, the growing share of that line item is going to
be digital advertising. So if we kind of want to set ourselves up for the future and I’m
coming at this from one perspective, Michelle, I know that. But if we want to set ourselves
up for the future, I think kind of these capabilities that Jenny’s mentioning would be kind
of a must have. Yes. And I guess part of my take on it is most systems can do this. Like
right? It’s it’s it’s actually you’re not you’re not asking for something so outrageous
that it’s like, Oh, this is the real deal breaker here, right? And I would even, I guess, I
guess part of what I’m arguing is that like literally as long as the system can enable
the fact that you just said, right, which is we can track using pixels and tag manager.
The purchase all the way from the click to the thing so we can do that revenue attribution.
The how is actually less important because it’s going to get there. And my guess is that
if there were a system where like if I was going out and trying to find a new taking
system and that was I put that at the top top top of my list as a feature to be like as
what am I assessing this system on? First of all, I’m going to get a lot of yeah, we do
that. Second of all, if I found a system that led with that above all else, okay, what
other really important operational needs are not going to be met, right? If they’re if you
know because at that point are you a ticketing system or are you a digital marketing tool,
right? Which is fine. It’s like you don’t have to it doesn’t have to all be one thing.
That’s the thing as long as you’ve got as long as you’ve got a platform that has that
is putting out the right data that has the right API and export and everything else capabilities.
Right. This is me getting on the soap box a little bit about like vendors and focus and
like whether things can be all things to all people or not, right? But like what is this
tool for and what is it going to what is it great at and then what other tools does it talk
to and work with that those tools can be great at, right? The overall picture of the solution
is the thing that matters more than does this one literal system do everything we could
possibly dream of. Yeah, and I think you’re right like the that online
attribution. Actually, going back to what we were talking about before with people switching
every couple of years as they grow, they’re going to need a new system, right? So I think
you’re right going in and leading with a wish list of things that you’re not quite there
yet for probably isn’t the right way to go about finding a new system. But you know,
when it comes down to other things that you’re looking for, I think it’s just as someone
representing the marketing team, you’ve got to have that list of things that you want.
I think a few other things that we for people say that they couldn’t get and again, whether
that was just because they didn’t know that they could get it or because it truly was not
an option. We’re things like zip code reporting, right? We’ve had people come to us and say
like we get most of our zip data from survey data and you know, or because a lot of the
purchases happen at the gate versus online, they don’t get the zip data. So it’s just
a questionnaire that that person gets at the gate and they have to fill out their zip code
and then it’s, you know, a bunch of zip codes from New York that aren’t real, right?
It’s one, two, three, four, five, not a true zip code because someone just didn’t feel
like filling out this form. So some of these things seem like really basic and there’s probably
some people listening or like, oh my gosh, there’s platforms out there that don’t give you
this. But, but it, but again, knowing like what is important, again, that data, something
that you’re going to want to utilize to make smarter marketing decisions, but you’re not
expecting this platform to make all those decisions for you, right? But then like the
audience segmentation, you might not be looking for a ticketing platform that’s also true
CRM, but how can I segment data or segment, you know, ticket purchasers based off of a
particular event or a member versus a non-member or they, you know, come on a weekend versus a
weekday, right? Or whatever it is that you’re trying to look at, like you want to make sure
that that tool that you’re using gives you the ability to break that down to that whether
you’re using a separate CRM or not, you can feed it with this type of data to make smarter,
you know, marketing decisions as well. So yeah, there’s got to be sort of this, even if
it’s a laundry list, our laundry list is great. And then to your point, going through prioritizing
what’s most important, knowing you might not get everything on the list, but you got to
come to the table with that, that information.
Most of the things that you have described as being important here, frankly feel like
table stakes to me in a lot of ways, right? There’s a lot of this where it’s good, Lord, yes,
of course, you should be able to get people to the current, right? And of course, you’ve
got to be able to understand what is the set of people who have bought tickets or what
is the set of people who are members. When we do our assessments, part of what we look
at is we frame it as people and process and technology. So it is not just a straight
up, “Oh, here is a list of system requirements and here’s all the boxes that we’re going
to check.” A lot of the things that go wrong in the areas that you’re describing, I would
attribute more to process and therefore also sort of people than the technology systems
itself, right? And that’s a decision for an organization to make on purpose.
Right? So if I think about just the example of zip code specifically, right? Let’s assume
certainly on-line sales, because you’re giving your credit card information, there’s zip code
information attached to that, right? So if we’re talking about the kind of door sales
gate sales, that says to me that somewhere along the line, either the organization has
thought about it and prioritized, “Oh no, we just need this 2b as fast as possible. We cannot
possibly slow down for half a second to ask this other question or require this other information
or whatever it is.” So, and that’s, I think, back to the question of like, “When should you
bring it to Consulcent?” Right? Like, okay, if that’s a choice that you are making, what
are going to be the impacts of that choice over here? And then vice versa, right? I
don’t mean to belittle the idea of like, sometimes things do need to move really fast. And that’s
a valid choice if it’s a choice, but it’s not a valid choice if you haven’t thought about,
“Oh no, that means we’re not going to be able to get,” right? Like, no, like if you’re
making a sacrifice, make it an intentional sacrifice. And I don’t think that’s what happened
most most of the time. I think what happens most of the time is panic of, “Oh no, the lines
are long. We have to move fast. We have to see this quickly. People don’t want to
give us, like, whatever the reasons are, without situating that in the context of, “Okay,
and without this information, we can’t do thing x, y, or z. Are we okay with that or not?”
That changes what these objections were. Yeah, maybe it’s not so much like it’s the,
I like what you said, there’s not really necessarily always the ticketing software, right? Or that
platform that they’re using is not their fault. It’s just the lack of process in either
using it right or making sure that that data is getting input. But I think it goes back to
what we said before. It’s just the lack of education, understanding maybe how to use it,
how to get that data in, what’s the best way to do it. And so, like, you know, your team
can come in and help with all of that as well, too, not just selecting the actual platform.
Which, what are you, what, what tool are you going to use? How are you going to use it?
What are you trying to achieve? Five of those things.
Michelle, what are some of your ideas to make sure that marketing would get a seat at the
table when an organization is going to be making that big switch?
I think, you know, I’ll just kind of repeat myself from what I’ve been saying about there’s
a lot of people who should have a seat at the table, right? Any selection process or decision-making
process in this that doesn’t bring front of house guest services and marketing and IT and
depending on what, you know, membership, what way and/or fundraising, like, depending on
what the scope of the thing that you’re looking for is, right? If you’re not bringing all
of those voices to the table, you are not getting it right. And, again, not that every voice
has to be equally loud and considered, but they’ve all got to be there. So, I would say
at, like, within an organization, part of it is just inserting yourself and making sure
that you’re there in those conversations, right? For you all, Denny and Ryan, specifically,
you know, whoever it is that you’re working with, like, pushing them in that direction. You
know, and anyone out there who doesn’t work in marketing, hi, bring your marketing colleagues
to the table on the house.
Excellent. Well, Michelle, so folks are interested in back office thinking, how can they get
in touch with you guys?
You can always email me. I sometimes answer my email.
mPaul mpaul@backofficethinking.com. That’s our website backofficethinking.com. There’s also
a contact form there. And I just want to, can I give one kind of final, final, summarizing
thought here on this?
A lot of what we talked about today is with common mistakes that people make or why do
you not bring certain people to the table is really thinking about is your technology there
to support your operational needs or your strategic needs or both? Spoilers, it’s probably
both. And when things go wrong, it’s because folks get too focused on one of those areas
versus the other. So that’s probably, like, number one takeaway tip is are you paying attention
to your operational needs versus your strategic needs versus both? And if anybody wants to
talk about that further with me, yeah, go to backofficethinking.com and send in a contact
form and I would love to have a conversation.
Awesome. Thanks for your time.
Thank you.
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