During my time at Ravinia I created over 300 emails annually which means I’ve designed and deployed over 3000 emails over that 10 year period. While the majority of campaigns focused on marketing our summer concerts, I also was responsible for the majority of donor related communications including appeals and benefits information. I helped create communications for various boards such as trustees and Women’s board members as well as communications to patrons and donors of our in-park music conservatory.
Below is a sampling of these various types of emails:
Neighborhood Alerts
One of the projects I am most proud of is this one, whereby we needed a solution to reach out to neighbors who were inconvenienced by the traffic and noise from concerts with large attendance. We created an opt-in list for folks who wanted to be notified. I worked closely with the data team to identify these concerts ahead of time. Complaints were greatly reduced afterwards.
Third-party Emails
Occasionally Ravinia would partner with other arts organizations to help cross promote each other’s performances. I would create the email template and send over the HTML for our partner to send the email to their audience. (We never buy or trade lists as a best practice).
Special Initiatives
During the pandemic, Ravinia closed the park but maintained visibility with patrons by sharing a 20-minute weekly variety show called Ravinia TV. We created an opt-in list and sent out weekly reminders to watch. Over the years we used email to market lots of special initiatives such as this one.
Donor Appeals
Over my tenure at Ravinia I worked very closely with the development department to handle the majority of donor communication and appeals. This is an example of one such email showcasing the great work Ravinia’s mission based education programs bring to the city of Chicago. With 12 giving levels with varying benefits, we were able to streamline email creation by relying on dynamic content and feeding in donor data from the donation CRM.
Customized Branding on Forms
I was able to utilize my extensive skills in HTML, CSS and Javascript to customize many of the pre-built forms in our ESP. This is one of those details that is often overlooked but goes a long way in instilling trust for the user that they are still using an official Ravinia product.