Webinar Recap: Building A Freemium Membership Model - A Case Study on Scottish Ballet
April 28 (Replay at end of page)
For our most recent signature research initiative, Demystifying Digital Content Monetization, we profiled several arts organizations doing innovative work in the virtual space. This week, we were delighted to speak with Antonia Brownlee, Director of Philanthropy and Kate Carter, Director of Brand, Audience, and Digital at ABA member organization Scottish Ballet.
In our webinar, we reviewed our case study on the Ballet’s digital ‘freemium’ membership program that brings unique digital content to online audiences, followed by an engaging Q&A with our audience.
A Spectrum of Digital Monetization Models
To ground our conversation, we first took a look at the variety of monetization structures we have seen in our research into the digital space.
A range of options have emerged during this period of digital experimentation. We organized these from methods that are less direct, such as event sponsorships or digital advertising, to more the explicit monetization strategy of selling digital tickets or packages. Of course, most of these structures operate in tandem, with organizations finding the combination of methods that best suits their content and audience.
Figuring out this best-suited model can of course be challenging. It is understandably tempting for arts organizations to start by asking questions around “how” to execute digital content and monetization. Determining length, streaming service, price, and other logistical considerations feels urgent in this evolving space. These questions, however, focus on execution first and rush to solutions that may or may not be successful, rather than understanding the goal of digital content.
Questions that instead first focus on the goal will allow successful execution solutions to flow from clear objectives. These questions should be centered around the “why,” rather than the “how” or the “what” of an organization’s digital strategy -- why is the organization creating digital content, why the audience will want to pay, and so on. The answers to these questions will be able to help shape the more logistical elements of a digital initiative.
A ‘Freemium’ Model at Scottish Ballet
For Scottish Ballet, their “why” for digital content was to cast a broad net for future audiences, both locally to return in person and globally to develop a long-term digital base. This objective helpfully also identified a target audience -- new digital audiences -- which is another key element to aid in determining a strong digital strategy.
With a goal and audience in place, Scottish Ballet could set about shaping a digital offering that would both attract new visitors and provide value to their existing subscribers and donors. The result was a free membership, starting with an email newsletter that then creates pathways to access paid-for and donation-based content like dance classes, films, and online events.
One of the important elements of growing an international audience base is the ability to gather contact information and gain an understanding of the types of content that resonates with viewers. Scottish Ballet accomplished this through a thoughtful balance of what audiences give versus what they get in return.
The Ballet creates as few barriers to join as possible, only asking members for their name and email to start, followed by a request for their preferences for email content and some additional contact information. In return, members receive access to valuable benefits, including:
Member-only film releases and events (many with donation requests)
Backstage digital magazine and special email content
The ability to purchase ballet classes
These features are things that members value, and can also shift free members into donors or paying customers.
We asked Kate to share a bit of the audience research that led her to determine what benefits would be of interest to the digital membership. She explained that they began an effort to understand the current perception of Scottish Ballet back in 2019, using a market survey to both current and potential audiences in Scotland. Now they are rolling that out to a wider audience, doing focus groups with dance lovers in the United Kingdom and the United States that continue to inform the team on areas of interest in digital experiences for dance. Along with these results, the Ballet continued leveraging their most popular products for existing audiences, such as digital dance classes.
Membership as Community, Not Transaction
Adding to the value of the initiative is Scottish Ballet’s effort to make members feel part of a community -- membership is much more than just a transactional exchange of data for access to content. The company does this through intentional communication with digital members. During our webinar, we took a look at an example email from Scottish Ballet to a new member.
The message is inviting from the start, using phrases like “welcome to our world” and friendly language (“hello there!”) to warmly convey that the member is now a part of their community. This conveys the Ballet’s authentic desire to create a personal connection with their new digital audiences.
The request for donation is also thoughtfully framed, with the link to fill out the preference form and add further contact information surrounded by a description of what the member will have access to through their membership. Overall, the email focuses much more on what the member needs, rather than the Scottish Ballet.
Worth the Work
Now of course, some work is involved to put together a membership like this, but the benefits are well worth the cost.
The membership program provides value to the Scottish Ballet in several areas:
Data: by gathering both location and preference data, the company can create a truly tailored and engaging experience for digital audiences.
Scalability: digital classes and member events are much less resource intensive to produce, and can reach a wider audience, increasing income potential.
Brand Elevation: the membership builds their brand among new audience members and deepens it with those who already know and love Scottish Ballet.
Along with their audience research efforts and the new events they organized for members, there were two key components that went into creating the membership. First, the team had to create a technical backend system that pulled together all the disparate pieces they had across their website into one experience for a member. Kate shared that this was a combination of Tessitura and their email marketing system, Wordfly. She noted that they had not always been using Tessitura to its full potential, and so spent the past few years really investing in overhauling their data structures and sending people from various departments to training sessions so that each member of the team could have a full picture of the software.
The second element was the internal team cohesion that was crucial for accomplishing this project. Antonia noted that Scottish Ballet has always worked hard to make sure departments did not operate in silos, but that the membership initiative was different in that individuals from across the organization were actually working as one team. What has helped them along the way, she shared, was having regular meetings all together and redefining job descriptions to emphasize that everyone is working together towards shared goals for the membership. In terms of the size of the team working on the membership project, Kate noted that it is not a fixed number (as the number of members grows so does the number of staff working on it), but that around ten people have elements of the membership as part of their job.
Uniquely Scottish Ballet Digital Content
Once the membership was structured, Scottish Ballet needed to create pathways towards both paid-for and donation-based events, while also beginning to form the building blocks to develop longer term relationships. Their holiday production, The Secret Theatre, is a great example of how they created those pathways.
The Secret Theatre was their digital holiday performance, featuring the most popular characters from their previous holiday shows captured on film. By repurposing their past works, they could both appeal to existing audiences and show new members the unique offerings of the company.
While the program was free to watch, Scottish Ballet had a smart way to ask for optional donations. When someone registered for the free show, they were required to write a donation amount into the donation box to receive the link -- even if that number was £0. By making people take a conscious action in the donation box, they made it much more likely that someone would put in an amount, even a small one.
The Secret Theatre was also an opportunity for Scottish Ballet to work with their frequent collaborators across the United Kingdom. As Kate shared, she and her team knew that their partner venues were struggling during the pandemic, so as part of the booking process the Ballet made it easy for audiences to donate to these theatres as well. The theatres then promoted the film to their own databases, continuing their lasting mutually beneficial partnership.
Off to a Fast Start
The membership approach, while still in progress, has had a great deal of early success. As of February, Scottish Ballet has over 60,000 active members, which are those who regularly open communications and interact with content. The Ballet started by converting their 40,000 newsletter subscribers to members and got a nice bump from The Secret Theatre, but the overall growth in just four months shows that members see the value of the program and that awareness is steadily growing.
In addition to the growth in number of members, the initiative has also helped drive a significant increase in revenue for online classes and events, in no small part because of increased capacity and reduced costs. Antonia and her team have also begun to convert some free members into donors after these events.
So by using a freemium model, Scottish Ballet has developed a membership program that is successful at gathering something that is often difficult: new customer contact information. They have used this to build their mailing lists and develop members into tomorrow’s subscribers and donors.
Q&A
After walking through our case study on Scottish Ballet’s membership program, we opened up the floor for Q&A and had a lively discussion with our webinars attendees on a variety of topics.
Donor stewardship: one attendee was curious to hear how the fundraising team continued to make existing donors (in the ‘Friends’ program) feel special with all the free content being shared to members. Antonia shared that this was something very important to them when shaping the membership. The way she worked to frame it was that Friends should feel like an inner circle, and Patrons (their highest level of donors) are the family. Members, then, are the community. With this in mind, the team ensured that there were clear pathways, bespoke content and access to principal dancers for each of these groups, and early announcement of all programming for Friends and Patrons. The team has not received any complaints from their donors.
Working with Tessitura: we heard several questions about Scottish Ballet’s use of Tessitura in this initiative. Kate shared that the biggest investment to “unlock” the best use of the product was actually in recruitment and ongoing training of staff. Particularly, it was important to make sure team members knew how to use Tessitura beyond their own role, so everyone had an understanding of how their work fits into the broader picture. She has also attended Tessitura’s expert hours and worked with them on audience journey mapping. They also see technological changes coming to their website, and envision building a new site from scratch that is built with membership at its heart.
Audience research: when asked to clarify their strategy for conducting market research, Kate explained that they are looking to apply a segmentation model to their database in order to understand what types of new members will have the propensity to give or be engaged in different ways. Antonia added that there is a separate annual survey for existing Patrons that references their KPIs for the year, asking questions like “what do you want to hear about or receive from us?” and “what would you like to have in terms of events?”. Often the biggest draw for these high-level donors are events with the dancers.
Targeting demographics: when asked if this model works to attract a specific segment of audiences, Antonia shared that at the start, she and Kate focused solely on their adult audience. Now, however, they recognize the need to have a more strategic review of the young person’s interaction with Scottish Ballet. Other than that, Kate explained, the team is focused less on demographic segmentation and more on people who love dance and are willing to pay for it in some form.
Donor acquisition: one attendee asked how membership compares to general appeals, subscribers, and tickets in terms of donor acquisition strategy. Antonia shared that after a series of member events, she and Kate look at the level of interest they have and the conversion rates to paid Friends. After each event they send members a feedback survey and an offer to become a Friend with one month free. As a direct result of these events, they have had around twenty Friends sign up. Antonia noted that she anticipates having even more success in the future when they can hold these events in person. She also is considering running trials of some appeals on the membership based on the preferences they have indicated.
Music rights: a question on all arts organizations’ minds when working in digital is how best to secure rights, which was a challenge at Scottish Ballet as well. Kate shared that they endeavor to be canny about the music choices they make and will sometimes put constraints on projects to make it easier. The Ballet also recognized the difficulty their freelance orchestra faced during the pandemic, and so made sure to work with them specifically for a recording as part of The Secret Theatre. Beyond rights, there are also investments in equipment and production crews being weighed against program revenue. However, both Kate and Antonia emphasized that they are taking a longer term view on these projects -- while they might not break even as individual productions, each project can be a gateway into membership that will have its own value in the overall scope of the Ballet’s future goals.
Looking ahead: finally, we had a question around how the membership will evolve as Scottish Ballet transitions into in-house performances. Kate explained that the vision is definitely not for the free membership to be digital and in-person paid. Scottish Ballet wants to offer free and paid-for experiences for both in-person and digital audiences. Now that they have access to more data, they look forward to using this to take what they know about the digital experience and bring it into the in-person experience (through communications around ticket buying, additional content around a show, and more). At the same time, many people will be international. It will be important for the Scottish Ballet team to develop creative experiences for these members, Friends, and Patrons around the world so they never feel like they are missing out.
