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- Well, what I want to spend
the last little bit of our time together talking about
is what MacPhail has done.
Yes, I'm gonna talk-- just give you an overview
of what we did with our Wallace grant,
but mostly I want to focus on
how can you use this in your organizations.
So after I give the little overview
of what we did with Wallace,
I'm gonna tell you about
three kinds of market research we did--
focus groups, event surveys, and an annual survey,
and for each of those,
I'll let you know a little bit how we did it,
the results and action we took because of it,
but then most importantly,
how you can do this in your own organization,
and I'm assuming many of you are like us,
where if you were lucky enough to have Wallace grant dollars,
once they're gone,
there's zero dollars for market research.
But it's something that we all need to keep doing.
So that's gonna be what we do.
But before I begin,
our research told us that a lot of people
have no idea who we are.
So I thought I'd start with that.
MacPhail Center for Music
reaches 10,000 students every year
in three facilities.
This is our downtown Minneapolis facility
sort of near the Guthrie.
We have a sight in Apple Valley and in White Bear.
And then the most unknown part of our story is,
half of all of our students are served in 72 partnerships
throughout the Twin Cities
and then throughout the metro area.
The market research stuff that we did
focused exclusively on the students that we serve
in traditional tuition-based programs.
So our Wallace goal,
we created something we called the customer centered approach,
and the bottom line with that
was to increase enrollment of adults.
So here's what this customer centered approach looks like.
It was a radical departure for us,
where before, teachers were sort of at the center
of the way we operated.
And as crazy this sounds, we put our students--
our customer at the center of how we do all of our business,
and step one is, we look at how's our service to them.
Are we providing good service,
and can we create some excellent communication channels
so we really know what they want and need?
Not just once, not just when we get a great grant,
but create a system so we can talk to these folks ongoingly.
And when we hear what they have to say,
how can we alter the product that we offer,
the way we talk about price,
maybe where we offer it,
and then how we promote it.
And any of you who are in marketing,
you might know the familiar battle cry of,
"Uh-oh, ticket sales or enrollment are down.
Throw some ads at it."
That's where we came from,
and instead, we needed to look at,
is it--is it the right price?
Are we offering it at the right place?
All of these different things,
and we began a conversation about this.
We don't live in a vacuum.
So we have to, you know, take into account,
are the demographics in our community changing?
Is the economy being affected
like it kind of affected a lot of us?
And then, if we have an ongoing cycle like this,
we have really happy customers.
Our teachers are happy,
which is part of our customer base.
And then we have positive enrollment.
So for our Wallace grant,
it was primarily focused on data collection,
something we'd almost never had the chance to do.
So a huge part of our resources went to doing 26 focus groups
with potential and current students.
Something that we did
independent of the Wallace grant is,
we do biannual demographic research in-house.
We have an annual survey,
but with our Wallace grant,
we were able to completely gut it
and do a crazy thing,
take what we learned in the focus groups,
build our annual survey around, "Well, what did we learn?"
and can we measure over time if we're doing it any better?
Quarterly, we do things like many of you do.
You--you know, we talked about the Google analytics,
Facebook analytics, all of that.
And then something that changed radically
with building these communication systems
is monthly, weekly, daily communication
with our frontline staff,
who we called Student Services.
We built an ongoing open communication
of somebody who talks, actually, with the customer,
talks to us in Marketing and Development and what not
and Program.
So gathering the data is actually the easiest part.
Hard as it is, it's the easiest part.
What you do with it is the tricky part.
So at MacPhail, how we do it,
the Marketing department handled the gathering
and an initial analysis of it.
And then our Program team was super involved, then,
in taking their own analysis,
and then the two groups together
built really rigorous action plans around,
"All right, well, that stinks.
"They think our communication is kind of crummy,
"and our customer service is iffy.
"And there's a lot of other stuff we need to do.
Here are the action plans we're gonna take."
And we built those into annual plans,
monthly, weekly plans,
and then we were held--
you know, we held ourselves accountable to that,
and our president, who oversees the program team,
every week, we check in with them
and every week, we'd be tracking, "How are we doing?
Is it working?"
And then that was all shared with our staff and board--
oops-- for results.
All right, so here's the first
of the three categories of research
that I said we're gonna cover--
the focus groups, event survey, annual.
So with our focus groups with adults,
it was awesome to be able to talk with folks
who are potential students,
and we talked with people who said
they were looking for music instruction
in the last six months,
and we were horrified to realize
nearly 30% had never heard the word MacPhail Center for Music.
Our board is still reeling from that piece of information.
But, of course, it was really critical to know.
We also learned that people thought we were for--
well, we knew this.
But it reaffirmed that they thought
we were for rich kids from the suburbs,
no idea that we have programs for adults
or for kids in the early childhood music area.
So that's why we focused on this age group.
So we--they thought we were really spendy, too,
which, in fact, we were right there in the competition.
So we changed the way we listed our price,
created some very specific ads to that audience,
the adult audience.
Like many of you, gutted our website,
which you'll get to take a peek at.
and then our Student Services area,
we have lots of work to do around our registration
and just the whole process.
So because it's very specific to our organization,
I won't go so much into that.
But fundamentally, the thing that's important to know is,
these results, increasing adult enrollment by 27%,
didn't happen because of one marketing strategy.
It happened because, organization wide,
we had this seismic shift in the way we did business
to ask them, "What do you want?
"Is what we're offering what you want?
How do we talk about it so it matches what you want?"
And the whole package, when together,
resulting in increased enrollment.
So we--we added a new catalog.
Folks with white hair said
they wanted to see people who looked like them.
Younger people said, "Oh, my god, that's too scary
if there's people with white hair."
So we changed it so there's always a mix of ages.
Our website we geared so that you can track by age.
And then the other adult audience
that we saw was underrepresented
were the parents of the early childhood music students.
So a bunch of stuff that we did here you can see.
And we have really strong enrollment there.
One thing that they told us--
we've got programs from babies through eight years old--
and they didn't have any idea where they went next.
So we created this simple in-home, in-house document,
because that's the size of our budget.
But it's beautiful, and it works.
And then many of our competitors for early childhood music
have--are national chains.
So they've got a ton of money for tchotchkes,
you know, bags of goodies and all that,
which we don't have.
So instead we added some depth.
And so every week, if you had a, you know, Tuesday class
with your child,
on Sunday, you'd get an email
talking about what you're gonna learn that week.
We simply use constant contact.
There's embedded videos of a song that you're gonna learn,
links to research,
so there's some real deep learning,
which was a match for our audience,
and it's for all of our programs now
from baby through eight years old.
So how can you do this?
We were lucky enough to have Wallace grant funds,
but it can be done
for, you know, little to no cost or free.
Before we had the Wallace grant,
we conducted focus groups,
more like informal gatherings,
just through out networks,
of, of course, your current attendees or participants.
That's a little easier.
But we just used an informal friend of friend network.
We went and met at schools.
We met at the different physical sites.
So we made sure that we were getting folks
in Apple Valley and in White Bear.
So that can be done, and all we--
we paid nothing for the recruitment
and gave them, you know, a free ticket to one of our concerts
or a coupon, that sort of thing.
And for a facilitator, the thing that I would recommend is,
it's really hard as the Marketing person
or the Program person to not maybe be a little defensive
when they're saying, "Your website stinks."
So if you're gonna do it free and in-house,
get a neutral staff person.
You know, people have different skills like this
or maybe a volunteer in your community.
I offer here the person that we used.
Wallace regularly couldn't believe
how low-cost our market research was.
So if you're curious, that's the person we used.
But you can do this in-house.
Know that you're gonna always get--
you know, it's qualitative research.
You get with focus groups.
But listening to your customers, no matter how you do it,
is always valuable.
So that was our first-- the focus group.
Second area, event surveys.
We offer nearly 500 events every year,
multiple ones on the day.
At the time that we conducted our six event surveys,
we had three main concert series,
and here's what we learned.
The first one was great, our spotlight series--
and we've made a lot of things to improve that--
and the other two stunk.
Well, they were good, but they just weren't good enough,
so we got rid of them,
and we added a free family music series,
and that matched trying to engage
our early childhood music families, obviously.
And the results are, you know, we sold out three of the six
of the Spotlight.
We have near capacity crowds,
and had to actually double the number
of free family music events,
and we are increasing our student attendance
at the events,
which is part of our educational goals.
And how do we know that?
In our--in our annual surveys, which I'll get to in a minute.
Event surveys:
actually, the most transferable, I think,
for all of us in the different genres here.
I have passed along our event survey
that we created with our Wallace funds
to the Arts Midwest folks.
So any of you can use it.
I think the Minneapolis Institute of Art offered
to share theirs as well,
and I think the whole spirit of the Wallace grant
is to share what we learned.
So take it, borrow it, use whatever questions work.
And then some suggestions
that came from our professional researcher,
if you're going to do this on your own, to--
we had phenomenal response rates
on our event surveys,
and the reasons were,
we didn't just stick it in a program.
We literally had volunteers with logo'd T-shirts
tape pencils onto the survey.
So there's not rummaging in the purse.
At intermission, we physically handed every guest the survey.
Our president thanked them for their time,
invited them to take a moment to fill out the survey,
played some music,
gave them a minute to take it.
The volunteers took it back,
and there was an incentive for everybody who turned them in,
and that was that.
So it's kind of a tried-and-true--
maybe this is old news for all of you,
but it really offered--
it made phenomenal difference for us in our response.
It was, like, 60% response rate instead of maybe 10%.
And we did the analysis in-house.
So that one's an easy one.
So the third area, then,
is our annual student satisfaction survey.
And here's how we do it.
Again, we had our consultant help us one time
to recreate the survey,
and it was super, super important.
What we heard from our focus group--
I'm gonna repeat this.
There were some main categories of information
where we realized we weren't as strong as we wanted to be,
and we built questions.
The whole leadership team decided,
"How do we want to measure this over time?"
And so we built that into the survey.
To distribute it, pretty straightforward--
email, on-site, through our teachers--
an then we do the analysis in-house.
And then, again, this is where the action
gets built into our annual plans.
So here--this is fairly specific to MacPhail,
but we really tore apart every chain of communication.
How can we make sure
that it's just not front desk to our students,
but every phase of the way?
Are we doing a good enough job having communication?
Because there were a lot of breakdowns in that chain.
And I want to just show you this chart,
not to look at the details,
but, you know, here, this shows
that we are able to track with the same thing
over a three-year period of time.
And then these questions represent, you know,
the areas that we decided.
And then I just chose some color coding,
'cause it was so much information.
How do we decide, "Well, is that good?
Is that bad?"
And so you don't have to be a genius to do it.
You can just choose some things
that make sense for your organization.
This, too, you can do pretty easily in-house.
If you can hire a researcher, great.
If not, you know, you all know about
SurveyMonkey, totally free,
SurveyGizmo, pretty low-cost.
And the analysis,
those two tools help you do it really easily,
and I'm happy to share our tool as well,
if that would be helpful for you.
So what worked?
How did we increase enrollment by 27%
by following this research?
Now, this is gonna be a radical thing.
We used it.
I mean, how many times do we do surveys
or research of any kind,
and it just gets dusty in the Marketing department's office,
and nothing happens, as excited as we are?
So we had top level on down buy-in
to actually use this information.
So kind of repeating our customer center approach,
what we ended up having was a radical paradigm shift
in the way MacPhail Center for Music does our business.
So we are constantly looking at instead of saying,
"Well, I don't know, would the teachers like that?"
I regularly hear Program staff saying,
"I don't know, but is that very student friendly?
Is that very customer centered?"
We're constantly looking at, you know, the four Ps
of our product, place, price, and promotion;
always looking at how the world is changing.
And we are--you know, our enrollment has grown
in all categories since the time of our grant.
So that is it for MacPhail's customer centered approach,
and I guess I'll go stage left for questions.
Thank you.
[applause]