Nonprofit Event Marketing

QCSO uses Feathr to maximize concert attendance

QUAD CITY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

1 min read

Nov 13, 2023

Challenge

The Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) was running their email marketing in Mailchimp, digital advertising through an outside firm, and social media in house. This siloed strategy meant they didn’t have cohesive audience data to inform their marketing campaigns, and they were essentially starting over with each event.

Solution

By bringing all of their marketing efforts into Feathr, QCSO was able to run more effective omnichannel campaigns to promote concerts. And with all of the data in one place, they could track conversions down to the cent to see which ads and emails were really driving attendance.

Until 2023, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra was paying an outside firm to manage most of their digital advertising. But the partnership deteriorated over time, and QCSO switched to Feathr to gain better visibility on their audience and increase the efficiency of the dollars they were spending on marketing.

Caitlin Bishop, Director of Marketing at QCSO, uses Feathr’s omnichannel marketing templates called Flights to promote events throughout the year. She runs a variety of digital ad and email campaigns directly in Feathr, and she uses tracked link campaigns to bring all of her marketing data into Feathr for truly comprehensive reporting.

After years of not being able to track conversions via email, Caitlin was able to attribute $20,000 worth of ticket sales for their Harry Potter 6 concert to the initial email she sent promoting the event.

“Before Feathr, we weren’t able to track conversions via email. It was just kind of a guess. With our Harry Potter show, we could track $20,000 worth of tickets back to our first Feathr email promoting that concert.”

Caitlin Bishop

Director of Marketing, Quad City Symphony Orchestra

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ABOUT

The Quad City Symphony Orchestra (QCSO) seeks to inspire, entertain, and engage the Quad City community through superb symphonic music, music education, and cultural leadership. The QCSO provides community service and programs to a market of more than 450,000 residents of eastern Iowa and western Illinois, staging performances in both states. Learn more at https://qcso.org/