ELY SINFONIA

PUBLICITY 2016-17: REPORT FOR THE AGM

There is something really magical about being in Ely Cathedral here at twilight when everyone has gone home and it’s virtually empty. The lengthening shadows on the stone and the reflections from the windows give the place a sense of immense calm and majesty.

But not if you walk out into the Octagon to perform a concert and there is a tiny audience. In fact, there’s little so depressing than playing to an empty hall.

That’s why publicity is so important. It literally make all the difference between having a good audience and having a tiny one – or none at all.

The problem with any marketing is that you can’t really tell how effective it is unless you stop it. Then you see the drop-off in take-up – but I’m not sure that we want to take that risk! However, what we do know, thanks to well established statistics, is that people need to see something around six times before they take action. So it’s important to use a mixture of different activities to raise awareness of concerts. Just seeing a poster once simply isn’t enough. So for each concert, we carry out a variety of activities to attract an audience. A copy of the publicity plan is on the website if you would like to see it, but it broadly covers the following:

  1. Banners

For years, we used to put a banner up on the railings of the Old Bishop’s Palace, then a Sue Ryder Home. It was really effective at attracting attention, right opposite the Cathedral. But then the building was sold to the Kings School, which put the khybosh on that. Earlier this year we tried putting it up on the railings by Tesco and it was removed – we have never been able to recover it. So we now have between one and three disposable banners made for each concert and IJmkje does an amazing job of going round Ely persuading people to display them for us. A big thank you to her for all she’s doing: this time we have banners outside the Cutter Inn and on some private railings opposite the Broad Street car park. The third banner, in the Jubilee Gardens, appears to have been confiscated, but IJmkje is working on that. Thank you, too, to Evert, who used to do the banners for us until he moved to Newmarket.

  1. The local press and media

I generally send out at least one press release to local newspaper, magazines, radio and TV. We are usually well supported by local radio and the Ely Standard, but I’m sorry to say that the Cambridge News is pretty feeble when it comes to promoting classical music.

  1. Publicly accessible websites and portals

There is a long list of publicly available websites and, although it’s difficult to tell how effective they are, they do seem to attract attention and clickthroughs. We generally put our concerts on between 28 and 30 websites, and this year have had the help of Roz’s niece, Lottie, in doing this. Thanks to her.

  1. Mailings

The Cathedral do regular monthly mailings by email to between 3000 and 10,000 people. These are free and they are generally pretty good at including any concerts being held within the next few weeks. They also have a magazine, The Octagon, which comes out every three months, and there will be potential for us to be included in that as well as inserting our flyers for a fee.

ADeC also does a monthly mailing to all the villages and we have used this in the past, although we dropped it more recently because of the cost (£150 a time).

We also have our own short mailing list as well as the Friends, and we all know how brilliant Charlotte is at drumming up support from them, both by sending emails in advance of concerts and via her excellent newsletters.

  1. Advertising

We don’t do much paid advertising, but we do have reciprocal arrangements with Ely Choral Society and Ely Consort to advertise their concerts in our programmes in return for them doing the same with ours.

Our concert programme also include a full-page advert for our next concert – and it’s striking how effective this can be. We timed the sale of Craig Ogden tickets so it began immediately after the Beethoven concert, and we had a noticeable burst of sales at that time.

  1. Social media

For each concert we set up a separate Facebook page and Facebook event. We then use Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to get the details of the concert out to people and encourage them to come along. However, social media only works if it gets lots of shares – not just likes. So please, please can you follow Ely Sinfonia on Facebook and Twitter and then share its messages with your own contacts: it will widen our net significantly and, in any case, gives you an easy, quick way to spread the word – though please do also compose your own messages.

  1. The most effective publicity tools

But the single most important two items of publicity are word of mouth and the plentiful display of posters and flyers.

We did a survey at the Beethoven concert – and, in fact, ADeC did surveys for all the Isle of Ely Festival concert – and this came out loud and clear. People will travel huge distances if a concert appeals to them, and especially if they are supporting a friend or family member. My own parents have flown in from Mallorca several times to support me in concerts, so why not your friends and relatives?

  1. Posters

A great poster design is all important – it needs to be eye-catching and bring out the key information likely to attract people to the concert: the music and the venue, not forgetting the date so they put it into their diaries. We are very lucky to have a wonderful local designer in Geoff Shirley, who has been doing our posters and flyers for many years and never ceases to come up with something new. His poster for the Beethoven concert was especially eye-catching.

But then it’s down to getting the posters and flyers out there, and that’s where you come in.

Yes, we distribute them through the library service and we email the parish clerks of every single local village, and I personally deliver flyers to every hotel and B&B in the area, from the south of Cambridge up to Littleport. But it’s time-consuming and stressful: I often run out of time and I sometimes miss addresses for all sorts of reasons.

What we need is people to pace the streets and make sure that posters and flyers are displayed everywhere possible, on village noticeboards, in people’s windows, in shops, cafes, garden centres, churches and so on. I sent out a list of suggestions before the Beethoven concert and have put a copy on the website for you to look at.

  1. Word of mouth

And most important of all is word of mouth. The more people you tell about a concert the more you are likely to go, especially if you know somebody in it. I have been to concerts given by Ely Consort and Ely Choral Society, and it’s noticeable that they are absolutely brilliant at drumming up the support of their friends.

The thing is, even if somebody can’t come to a concert, you can still ask them to put up a poster and tell their friends, so you get, as it were, second degree supporters. So don’t think that, just because you live a long way away, you can’t help build the audience. You never know what the ripple effect of asking people will be.

  1. Programmes

I should like to thank Naomi Laredo for taking over responsibility for producing the programmes: she’s a professional copy editor, so they are in the best possible hands.

  1. Attracting audiences

Finally, just a quick word about why people come to our concerts. One day we hope people will come to hear the orchestra, but our surveys show that, at the moment, people still come mainly to hear specific music and/or to hear a concert in Ely Cathedral. Let’s work on that – we need to get people fired up to come and hear Ely Sinfonia, but that’s for another time.