Citi Performing Arts Center is one of the nation’s foremost not-for-profit performing arts institutions, offering theatre, opera, classical and popular music, sporting events, Broadway musicals and more.
One of the organization’s key goals it to make the arts an integral part of the community experience, on a daily basis. Member and audience feedback is critical to how Citi Center stays relevant and engaged.
Recently, Citi Center was able to meet two organizational goals with one well-designed survey. Citi Center wanted to learn more about how their members used social media, and it wanted to promote a great upcoming event, Cirque Éloize iD (described as “West Side Story gone hip-hop circus”), so they used SurveyMonkey’s new Rewards feature to create a survey with a one-of-a-kind VIP experience as the incentive.
Citi Performing Arts Center designed a Cirque Eloize iD VIP experience package that included fantastic seats, an artist meet-and-greet, and an exclusive backstage tour for 10. They were able to add the incentive directly to their survey:
Citi Performing Arts Center then sent their survey through several methods to gather responses:
- A targeted email just for Cirque Eloize
- Cross-promoting Cirque Eloize and the survey in emails for four other shows
- Posting it on their Facebook fan page
- Tweeting it out to followers
- Including widgets on their web pages promoting the survey
Of the respondents who started the survey, 99.3% completed the survey and entered for their chance to win the VIP experience. A completion rate that Citi Center was extremely happy with. In addition, Citi Center gathered important insights that will help them shape future outreach and promotions, including:
- Customers are very interested in winning cool, unique, experiential incentives
- The top two social media channels for their target audience are Facebook and Groupon, followed by YouTube, Mobile, Twitter and LinkedIn
- They would definitely recommend using a survey with a custom incentive for future event promotions and member engagement
Citi Performing Arts Center also tested incentives in a survey to their education alumni, so stay tuned for a follow-up post detailing their experiences there.
Have questions on how to include incentives in your next survey? Ask away in the comments below.
Tina Wick, Apr 28, 2011
This is great, however, how do you get your customers/readers to participate in the survey?
Anne R, Apr 28, 2011
Hi Tina–thanks for your question. In Citi Center’s case, they did a few things–they promoted the survey on all of their social media channels (several times) and they also created a unique incentive that respondents could enter to win. Depending on your audience, we’ve also seen other customers offer to send respondents a summary of results or tell customers what they’ve changed as a result of survey feedback (to show that participating really matters). Feel free to share more about what data you’re trying to gather and hopefully we can help you with some ideas.
Lavigne, Sep 15, 2012
Taking the oervveiw, this post hits the spot
Sheila G, Sep 17, 2012
Thanks Lavigne. We’re big fans of Citi Performing Arts and the work it does.
Adam R, Apr 29, 2011
We had a very similar experience. I work in the marketing division of a local arts theater and we launched a survey on facebook, on the website and sent out an email blast. We not only had an enter to win (if they gave us their email address and agreed to be put on out mailing list) but we also offered a coupon for free popcorn to everyone who completed the survey…In less than a week we have almost 1100 responses and over a thousand new email addresses! Very happy with the results so far…
Anne R, Apr 29, 2011
Hi Adam–what a great (and fun!) example of an incentive that worked. Thanks for sharing! And let us know the next time you’re giving out free popcorn for survey participation–you can sign us up for that!