Category: Audience

Engaging Families in your (not necessarily “Family”) Dance: Exploring the best strategy for a successful dance series

Session notes on how engaging families can help you create a sustainable dances series with inclusive and sensitive dancers, a dancer demographic that’s intergenerational, as well as increase effective marketing and be a long-term investment in your beloved dance tradition.

From Chrissy Fowler at Puttin’ On The Dance 2015

Attracting Younger Dancers: Creating and maintaining a multigenerational dance

How can we find youth, incorporate them, and keep them? Getting younger people to attend dances (and keep coming back) seems to be the holy grail. Notes from this 2014 session cover two major areas: promoting youth participation (dancers, callers, musicians, board members etc.), and how to have a successful multi-generation dance. Includes practical ideas and tips from people who have successfully achieved this, and we will discuss things that have been tried but did not work.

From Karina Wilson & Laura Gorrin at the 2014 Southwest Regional Organizers Conference

To Market, To Market… Jiggity Jig

A dance organizer’s heart swells to see a sea of smiling dancers, just as an entrepreneur is gladdened when her business attracts happy customers. But how do we pull in those dancers and customers? Together, we’ll venture beyond the proverbial flyer table, discovering practical tactics for marketing our series, from the well-crafted press release to preaching to the converted.

From Chrissy Fowler & Lisa Sieverts at Puttin’ On The Dance 2011

Marketing 101: Finding and keeping the crowd you want

Notes from a session on how marketing can help you find and keep the crowd you want. Focuses on the scope of marketing has beyond just advertising and that organizers seeking to attract more people to their dances need to ‘market’ rather than ‘advertise’ their dance. Including the role and importance of the organizational vision in marketing; the benefits of thinking about your dance series as a ‘product;’ the importance of understanding your audience and their perceptions of the product (dance series) you are offering; and the all-important ‘marketing mix’ (a set of tools used to help pursue the marketing objectives).

From Michael Barraclough at the 2014 SW Regional Organizers Conference

Press Releases

A brief how-to on creating press releases to promote your event or series.

Marketing Tips—Old School News Releases Still Work!

In this article, Lisa C. Brown & David N. Boyer describe recent success with using news releases and provides some best practices.

From the CDSS News