How Cincinnati Shakespeare Company Aligns Marketing and Development
At many arts organizations, the marketing and development departments operate like neighboring kingdoms—sharing territory but rarely strategy. But at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, a different story is unfolding.
In an episode of the CI to Eye podcast earlier this year, Jeanna Vella (Director of Marketing) and Sara Clark (Director of Development) joined Dan Titmuss to share how their teams have bridged the divide between marketing and fundraising—and how that collaboration has strengthened their work across the board.
Their candid, insightful conversation offers a roadmap for organizations looking to align internal teams, clarify priorities, and cultivate a shared sense of ownership over revenue and relationships. Select highlights are below–consider these insights as you plan for the upcoming giving season!
Note: Some quotes have been edited for length and clarity.
ON USING PANDEMIC HOURS AND THE PATRON/DONOR JOURNEY
Dan Titmuss: The numbers from your last three seasons are really impressive, especially compared to what many other organizations have experienced. What do you think made that rebound possible post-pandemic?
Jeanna Vella: We really capitalized on the time that we had without doing shows. We were in these Zoom rooms and thought, well, if we had all this time, what is something that we could work on together? And that was really where our staff innovation took place, when we really started to rebuild the development side of our ticketing database and really integrate those teams (because our team went down to one person in marketing, two people in development). So the three of us joined forces and thought, well, let’s just lean into this. What do you need? What do I need? What can we do together? How can we capitalize on this time? In this case, the big one was our database. Really getting development up to snuff with that with our marketing was a huge investment of time and we had the time to do it.
Dan Titmuss: Yeah, I think that’s one of the most striking, exciting parts of your story is the way that marketing and development are working together, and that’s not always the norm. Was there just an aha moment of, hang on, we should all be working together a lot closer going forward, not just for this database?
Jeanna Vella: Well, yeah. I think we realized looking specifically when you’re stripping it all away and you don’t have shows, it’s the same people. Trying to think about folks as patrons or donors, it just didn’t make any sense. We had ticket buyers that had now become donors because they said, “Please take our tickets back or we’re not going to come.” And I don’t necessarily think patrons were thinking, “Oh wait, I’m taking my ticket buyer hat off and putting on my donor hat.” That’s not how people feel about their experience. So why were we operating as if those were very separate groups of people or those groups had different needs? They really didn’t. They were really combined.
Sara Clark: It’s just not as linear as people want to think it is. Sometimes it is. Sometimes someone will actually go from first time attendee, and then they subscribe, and then they make a small donation, and then they make a major donation, and then they write us into their will. That’s kind of the standard progression that we learn. And I’m sure there ARE people that are like that, but in our joint experience, most people come in somewhere else or they surprise you, they’ll start as a hundred dollars donor and then all of a sudden they’re a hundred thousand dollars donor because they had a moment, they wanted to make an investment–it was right, time, right place.
Jeanna Vella: Or they might have come in as a donor because they believed in something we were doing outside of the building, like our education programs or free Shakespeare in the park, and they’ve never even seen a show here. And so the win on them is to get them to come to a show, to make them a first-time buyer. So I think that myth and that sort of passing through, because if you’re structuring your plan that way, that means that one department’s not even looking at people until a certain point.
ON RECOGNIZING EACH OTHER’S STRENGTHS
Dan Titmuss: What is your team really good at and how does those strengths compliment the other team?
Sara Clark: Something that I think marketing professionals are amazing at is really understanding voice of the customer–understanding that while we are a charitable organization, while we have a mission and we do mission-driven work, we’re also a business and we need to not make a lot of assumptions about what our folks need and want. We need to actually ask them and put the work into listening there. I think marketing teams are really great at infrastructure, working within systems and creating operating systems and standard procedures. Jeanna in particular is also a data geek. She understands the power of making a data informed decision and the strength of sharing that with more than just her department. And then branding, creating a cohesive identity so that no matter what sort of external communication you’re doing, everybody is speaking with the same voice.
Jeanna Vella: And what I’ve learned from development professionals, and Sara in particular, is the value of small moves. So often I’ll hear these stories about someone that they’ve stewarded for years that hasn’t donated for–in marketing, I’d be like, great, we need to move on. We have a show that’s closing. And storytelling! Marketing, we often get very short amounts of characters to tell a story. Development sometimes gets a little bit longer in those grants or those long conversations, essentially building a story with a donor. How is development taking the time to build that story and really bring people into it to find their own place inside that story? And development has a curiosity. They always want to learn a little more about wait, what are they doing down in the scene shop? Because that might be something that I could find a sponsorship for, or a funder might be interested in that. Or actually now that I’m down here, I see that you have a need, maybe I could find some money for that. So slowing down sometimes in marketing, putting that development mindset on could really help us see ways that we weren’t thinking about before, just looking at something through a different lens. So I think finding those, we kind of call ’em our superpowers in each other, only benefited both of us.
ON DEPARTMENT SILOS
Dan Titmuss: Why do you think the silos between marketing and development are so common in arts and cultural organizations?
Jeanna Vella: So we just figured this out.
Sara Clark: We did.
Dan Titmuss: Oh, good. Okay.
Sara Clark: I think with marketing and development in particular in the arts, it has to do with the sort of shared business model that we are basically 50-50 earned revenue (so ticket sales, subscriptions, education, concessions, merch) to contributed (so individual giving, sponsorships, grants, government funds, things like that). And there is a natural tension there. It’s not like if I were to go work development at another nonprofit agency, I’m probably 90% of the revenue. If Jeanna were to go and do marketing for P&G, her responsibility is to the shareholders. It’s just to sell the product. And here–it’s both! We have to be the business, we have to earn your dollar. And also we are a mission-driven organization with a 501(C)3 and a charitable purpose. And so I think in between those two things, that is sort of the underlying tension that these two departments can feel like they have conflicting goals when actually they’ve got the same one.
Jeanna Vella: And that is very unique to arts and culture. We were sitting here like, what other industry has this problem? Arts and culture has this competing imperative, which is sort of ill-advised as a business model and can make things tough. But that kind of feeds into the idea of, how do you measure success? It can’t always just be ticket sales. We think about three lenses: sales, donations, and mission. And we can say something was successful if it was positive on two of those. So maybe some play we did didn’t necessarily sell a lot of tickets (or had lower sales goals), but it really hit our mission and it really excited funders; that would be a success.
