Does your arts organization have a long list of email subscribers, yet a much smaller number of social media followers? Are your social media followers just a small sample of your audiences? Even if your organization has the same number of email subscribers as social media followers, do you know if they are the exact same group of people? While social media marketing is increasingly being valued by arts organizations as a more interactive approach than traditional marketing, according to a survey conducted by Economist Intelligence Unit, email is still people’s preferred form of receiving product promotions and post-purchase follow-ups. Therefore, the question for arts organizations is how to combine email with social media in order to best understand and communicate with current and potential audiences.

Attentive.ly, a start-up launched in 2012, strives to fill the gap between email campaigns and social media marketing. Attentive.ly is a Customer Facing System (CFS) that supports interaction with customers, and a backend cluster that processes data from external resources. Upon importing a list of contacts from your organization’s CRM system or Excel spreadsheet, the first thing Attentive.ly will do is going through a matching process to find email subscribers on social media based on information like first and last name, email, and zip code.

After finding audience members on social media, Attentive.ly can help to measure their influence (Klout Score) and monitor their online conversations through its powerful text-mining and mapping functions. Meanwhile, based on Attentive.ly’s findings, your organization will better be able to segment audience members, interact with them on social media, and send tailed emails to target groups. 

Here is what arts organizations can do with Attentive.ly:

• Group your members and identify VIPs

Attentive.ly can help users group their members by Klout score, number of followers, number of posts, and geographic location. Sometimes the results can be surprising, as organizations find that their email subscribers include celebrities and top journalists with whom they might want to cultivate relationships, co-founder of Attentively Roz Lemieux once explained to Personal Democracy Media, a site for the conversation between political practitioners and technologists.

• Improve customer service

Attentive.ly allows users to find negative feedback about their organizations on social media, so that they can proactively provide explanations and solutions in order to improve customers’ satisfaction.

• Say thank you and/or offer a discount

For people who say positive things about a brand, the organization can send individual thank-you letters and/or offer coupons through email, as Attentive.ly connects social media profiles to an organization’s mailing list.

• Introduce your efforts to people who are interested

Attentive.ly enables organizations to better segment their market. Hence different events and fundraising efforts can be introduced to targeted audiences and donors who already have interests in related topics. 

While Attentive.ly is integrated with several CRM systems, mailing services, and social media platforms, some major players in these three areas are missing, including Salesforce, Constant Contact, and LinkedIn. The good news is that Attentive.ly plans to include more platforms in the near future. 

As shown below, Attentive.ly currently offers three product packages based on the number of contacts and the level of customer support. While not inexpensive, the prices are still reasonable for an arts organization trying to deepen relationships with its audiences. Especially for mid or large-size arts organization, Attentive.ly is a great tool to enhance digital marketing efforts. 

As a partner of NGP VAN, a leading campaign technology provider, Attentive.ly is currently utilized by nonprofit organizations that focus on political and social issues to facilitate their campaigns. Less clear is the extent to which arts organizations are using Attentive.ly and if they are, how effective it is for their purposes. If your arts organization is currently using Attentive.ly or has used it before, please share your experience below. We would love to hear your thoughts!