This is the second article in a series about why the strategies that used to work don’t work the same way anymore—and what that means for every decision you’re making right now. If you missed the first article about the current reality most arts leaders are experiencing (and not talking about), you can read it here.

You didn’t need me to tell you things aren’t working the way they used to. You already know.

What you might not know yet is that it’s not because you’re not trying hard enough.

The Five Jobs You’re Doing at Once

Here is what I see when I work with arts organizations. Let me know if this sounds familiar.

Your marketing director opens their laptop each morning to face five completely different jobs—each requiring different expertise, different strategies, different metrics of success:

Job 1: Broadcasting Creating awareness. Getting your name and your upcoming shows in front of as many people as possible. This is the traditional advertising work—ads, social media posts, press releases, brochures. It’s about reach and impressions.

Job 2: Persuading Once people know you exist, convincing them you’re worth their time and money. This is copywriting, testimonials, reviews, competitive positioning. It’s about converting interest into intention.

Job 3: Facilitating Making it easy for people to say yes. This is the transactional work—website functionality, ticket purchasing, customer service, accessibility information. It’s about removing friction.

Job 4: Nurturing Building relationships that last beyond a single transaction. This is email cultivation, loyalty programs, donor stewardship, community building. It’s about retention and lifetime value.

Job 5: Activating Turning satisfied customers into advocates who bring others along. This is the referral and word-of-mouth work—social sharing, testimonial collection, ambassador programs. It’s about organic growth.

Each of these jobs requires different content, different channels, different timing, different measurement. Each serves a different stage of the customer journey.

And your marketing director is supposed to do all five simultaneously, with diminishing budget and staff.

But wait—this is just the audience-facing work. This list doesn’t include the internal organizational work that fills the rest of their days: analyst (providing data and ROI projections), administrative partner (managing budgets, coordinating with every other department, attending lots of meetings), and people leader (managing and developing their team).

And they’re doing all of this with:

• Smaller budgets (or flat budgets that don’t account for inflation)
• Fewer staff members (or the same staff expected to do more)
• More platforms to manage
• More data to analyze
• More stakeholders to satisfy
• More competition for attention

And your marketing director is supposed to do all five simultaneously, with diminishing budget and staff.

Everything You’ve Already Tried

You’ve watched your marketing team attempt to optimize email campaigns—but you’ve also sat in meetings where every department wants to add “just one more thing” to the email because it’s “free.” You’ve seen how those drafts circulate through five levels of approval, how the focused message gets diluted with community events, fundraiser information, pre- and post-performance event details. You approved some of those additions yourself, because they seemed important at the time.

You’ve watched them double down on social media content. The engagement numbers look good in their reports—lots of likes, shares, comments. But when you check the box office dashboard, those social media wins aren’t translating to ticket sales. You’ve started to wonder if social media is just an echo chamber of people who already know and love you, while the audience you need to reach scrolls right past.

You championed the move to dynamic pricing and revenue optimization. The consultants showed you data proving it would increase revenue, and it did—a little. But you’ve also noticed that fewer people are buying overall, and the newest customers seem to be paying the highest prices because they’re buying latest in the sales cycle. You wonder, late at night when you can’t sleep for worrying about next quarter’s numbers, whether you’re inadvertently training new customers not to come back.

You’ve approved programs to stem new customer attrition. They run like clockwork—the postcards go out, the discount codes are generated, the tracking spreadsheets get updated. Maybe 5% of lapsed buyers respond, if that. You keep approving these programs because stopping them feels like giving up, but you’re not sure they’re actually working.

You’ve tried to facilitate corporate partnerships, bringing together your marketing and development teams. Instead, you’ve mediated territorial disputes about who “owns” corporate relationships and watched as your development team insists that complimentary tickets are the only benefit corporations want—despite the sea of empty seats you see in the sponsor section at every performance.

You’ve explored media partnerships, but the landscape is so fragmented now that any meaningful promotional partnership requires exclusivity and significant spend. You don’t have enough budget to go deep with one partner, but spreading it thin across multiple media outlets means your message gets lost in the noise.

Some of these efforts produced short-term gains. But nothing has been sustained. And you’re starting to feel like you’re asking your team to run faster and faster on a treadmill that keeps speeding up while they’re already exhausted.

The question that keeps you up at 2 a.m. is this: If everyone is working this hard, why isn’t it working?

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What resonated as you read this? What exhausted you? What tactics have you tried that aren’t on this list? Comment below or send me a message—I reply to every note I receive.

Next in this series: We’ll look at where all this effort is actually landing. Because before we can understand why it’s not working, we need to see clearly what’s happening when your message reaches your audience.