For performing arts organizations like yours, keeping patrons engaged isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s essential. Your organization thrives when people stay connected to your work, return for future productions, become subscribers, and support your mission as donors. But in a busy season filled with rehearsals, production deadlines, and countless moving pieces, maintaining meaningful communication with your audience can feel nearly impossible.
That’s why we’re excited to introduce OTS Plays, a new suite of automatic marketing campaigns that help you keep patrons engaged — automatically.
Why Patron Engagement Matters
Long-term sustainability for performing arts organizations depends on a mix of attracting new patrons (acquisition) and inspiring them to return (retention). But the reality is stark: nearly 90% of first-time patrons never return.
Source: Medium
That means even the most successful season can leave tremendous value on the table if you aren’t continually nurturing relationships with patrons. And while mass emails announcing upcoming events are valuable, generalized blasts can only go so far. Patrons respond best to messages that feel relevant — messages that reflect who they are, what they’ve attended, and how they’ve engaged with your organization in the past.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Targeted marketing is dramatically more effective, but it traditionally requires time, tools, and expertise that many organizations simply don’t have. Ironically, what most organizations do have is a lot of information about their patrons – such as historical purchase, attendance, and donation behaviors – which is the single most important asset to delivering targeted marketing that achieves results.
This is the exact problem we set out to solve: how can we empower performing arts organizations to leverage their patron data to create effective always-on marketing that will keep patrons consistently engaged? How can we enable our customers to automatically deliver the right message to the right patron at the right time? And how can we make it make it fast, easy, and free of technical jargon or detailed marketing speak?
The result: OTS Playbook, a collection of individual “Plays” that are designed to keep your patrons consistently engaged over time – automatically.
Introducing OTS Plays: Automatic Personalized Marketing That Works
OTS Plays are marketing flows that operate in the background like a silent partner to automatically deliver personalized marketing campaigns to patrons based on who they are and what they care about. Each Play is specifically designed around engaging patrons at various phases of the patron journey, with a clear goal of either retaining patrons as they are or growing their relationship to your organization. As an example, consider the following sample patron journey for a not-for-profit performing arts organization.
While the specifics might look a little different at your organization, the point is that every performing arts organization has a patron journey with consistent goals: to keep existing patrons coming back, and to deepen their relationship to your organization by growing them to the next phase.
Plays use information you already know about your patrons to automatically deliver the right message to the right patron at the right time, which in turn boosts patron engagement in the form of increased ticket sales, donations, and average order values. Each Play is designed to address a different phase of the patron journey, from thanking first-time attendees to re-engaging lapsed patrons, promoting subscriptions, or inviting recent ticket buyers to donate.
Pre-loaded Plays
There are several pre-loaded Plays, each designed to grow or retain patrons at various phases of the patron journey.
- Thank First-Time Patrons – Automatically thank first-time attendees with a warm follow-up email and a targeted incentive to encourage them to return.
- Announce a New Event – Whenever you publish a new event, Plays can automatically share the announcement with your full marketable list.
- Re-engage Lapsed Patrons – Reach out to patrons who haven’t attended in a while, paired with a one-time promo code to spark reattendance.
- Invite Loyal Patrons to Become Subscribers – Identify patrons who’ve attended multiple events recently and encourage them to take the next step by becoming subscribers.
- Solicit Donations from Ticket Buyers – Send timely, targeted donation asks to patrons who have recently purchased tickets.
- Solicit Donations from Subscribers – Invite your most dedicated patrons to deepen their support through a charitable gift.
- Subscription Redemption Reminders – Automatically alert subscribers if they have unredeemed tickets from a subscription that they purchased.
These Plays are the building blocks of effective, ongoing patron engagement — no manual setup required.
What Makes Plays Great
Plays brings together your patron data, best-practice email copy, automated logic, and simple setup into one unified experience.
Key Benefits
- Easy Set Up – Create a Play in two minutes or less in a single window using templates that include preloaded segments, promos, and copy.
- Customizable – Specify who the Play is for, change the copy, set the terms for promotional offers, and adjust lookback windows.
- Always On – Set up a Play once and let it run at a cadence that you set until you turn it off, automatically delivering relevant outreach to patrons over time.
- Automatically Kept Up-to-date – Patrons will automatically be added to (or removed from) Plays – and receive relevant emails – as their relationship to your organizations changes over time.
- Designed Around the Patron Journey – Create Plays to encourage return visits, upsell subscriptions, solicit donations, meeting your patrons where they are.
- Jargon-free – Build Plays using plain English, no technical syntax or marketing know-how required.
- Simple Reporting – You’ll see how each Play performs — including uplift — directly within your OTS dashboards.
Better Marketing, Same Workload
The beauty of Plays is simple:
You get higher-quality, more effective marketing without adding a single new task to your workflow.
Instead of sending broad blasts, Plays helps you deliver targeted, personalized outreach that resonates — the kind of messaging that drives return visits, subscriber conversions, and donor support.
And because Plays is purpose-built for performing-arts organizations, it reflects the rhythms of your season and the realities of your audience. No complicated marketing software. No technical jargon. Just meaningful, automated engagement that strengthens relationships and supports your organizational goals.
Get Started with OTS Plays
Plays are available now to customers on our Essential and Plus plans. If you’re an OTS customer and are interested in learning more about Plays or how to get started, you can reach out to your Account Manager.
If you aren’t yet a customer, we invite you to book a demo to learn about how OTS empowers performing arts organizations of all sizes to manage ticketing and box office, unify marketing and promotion, boost donations and revenue, and simplify operations.