2011 was quite a year for travel, as my online travel diary shows! I think I’d like a rather more settled 2012. Happy new year to you and yours, if you’re celebrating it at this time of year.

Just last month, Croydon Minster was packed out for an evening concert which included Carmina Burana.   It was very pleasing for everyone who had worked hard on the concert to see the Minster so full. After the concert, I reflected on why it had been particularly popular – even on a dark winter evening.

To my mind, we overcame the iffy problem – the barrier which prevents people who enjoy going to concerts from attending events which take place in church because, to them, church feels somehow iffy. A bit suspicious. Unknown. Possibly even slightly threatening.

Churches with active concert and event programmes need to:

• Overcome iffy every time they promote an event
• Reward people for turning up, with a great event
• Build a relationship, gradually increasing the size and loyalty of audiences
• Avoid proselytising unless the event-goer expressly opens a door

Overcoming iffy

How had the Minster overcome iffy this time?

First was the programme itself – excellent music, performed to a high standard. Without this, there was no chance of success.

Next, we put a lot of effort in to promoting the event – this began at a silent movie show earlier in the year where we asked the audience to give the Minster their email address.  The email addresses were entered in to our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database – CiviCRM.

As we promoted the event to this audience, and wider, the copy was written assuming, without patronising, that the audience would be strangers to this type of event. This is crucial in reaching beyond your wonderful stalwarts (who should be treasured) who ‘always come‘.

It was important to let people know exactly what to expect. To many, music titles are meaningless. The web page included a short YouTube excerpt from Carmina Burana, the instantly recognisable O Fortuna. Would there be refreshments? Yes. So we said so. Would the church be a comfortable temperature? Yes. We said so. The only thing we really didn’t do – and should have done – was to indicate an end time for the event.

Be welcoming

Next, a sense of welcome. Many churches are guilty of going to little effort to encourage people to attend events, so we put the welcome right at the top of every major communication, in bold:

All are welcome to this concert contrasting rousing favourites with intimate contemporary songs of love and joy. This is an evening which promises to delight and surprise, bringing light to a winter evening.

We amplified this sense of welcome by using social media (principally Twitter and Facebook) to build momentum around the event, and ensure audience members would know they were not alone. These tweets were typical:

Today, 10 more ppl bought £5 tickets for Carmina Burana on Saturday, join them! All welcome #Croydon http://t.co/LUopltum

November 14, 2011 8:14 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@croydonminster

Croydon Minster

Last day to join 70 others who’ve booked to see Carmina Burana for £5! Prices go up Friday http://t.co/LUopltum #Croydon

November 17, 2011 8:41 am via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@croydonminster

Croydon Minster

The tweets are automatically pulled in to the Minster homepage, so people didn’t have to be on Twitter to see the messages. However, I dropped in the hashtag ‘#Croydon’ so the tweet would be picked up and passed on by services which tweet news about Croydon.

Posters. Churches serve local and global communities, and posters are still an excellent way of engaging the local community – getting your poster in key newsagents and other meeting points can rapidly boost ticket sales.

Be professional

We made it easy to book – you could buy an e-ticket online (using CiviCRM, mentioned above, so that we can market future events more selectively to those who have attended events in the plast) or by calling the office, or by buying in cash on the door.

The price point was within reach of the community. At just £5 a ticket if booked in advance, £10 on the door, we put the event within reach of an impulse purchase for many, or an affordable luxury for some. We encouraged word of mouth – if someone had just bought a ticket for £5, and wasn’t sure they would know anyone at the concert, the easiest way to fix that was for them to persuade someone else to come.

Respect the audience

Finally (crucially) we respected the reason the audience had come, and gave everyone a warm welcome on the night. There were enough volunteers on the doors, and all of them smiling, warm, troopers.

We had advertised an evening’s concert, not a sunday service. I have attended too many church concerts which have been opened by a ten-minute mini-sermon from the curate. Don’t do it!  The clergy are the face of the church, and if they are engaged with the music programme and want to welcome the audience, that’s brilliant. The welcome must be friendly, focused on the event, informative (even educational), and preferably brief.

It is also important that clergy be there for any concert-goers who do want a deeper or more personal conversation, and it is entirely appropriate through follow-up communications or messages to educate the audience on the wider mission of the church.

Close the loop

There was so much positive feedback on and after the evening, we didn’t do what we should have done – and closed the loop with a short post-concert survey of the audience experience. This is very important to improving the concert experience time after time.

None of this is rocket science, but it’s important to get the basics right if you are to overcome iffy - otherwise a great evening could be under-attended because your audience just don’t feel quite comfortable “going to church.”

We hold a huge, global, annual competition each year at CIMA called the Global Business Challenge. There are several rounds of the competition, culminating in country finals, and then the global final.

This year’s global final is in Chengdu, China. Our team on the ground have been providing a constant stream of social media updates, which my team and I have been gathering, editing, and adding to over the weekend in a Cover it Live embedded on our website and on Facebook.

Back here in Britain, I realised that we were in danger of swamping new readers with a torrent of updates, and that’s where Storify is brilliant. In less than an hour I was able to drag and drop video, tweets, and Facebook updates in to an easy to read edited highlights telling the story of the event. I *heart* Storify.

I’ve written a piece commenting on university marketing operations, which you can find over at Dale and Company.

“Every time someone is interviewed on the news about universities, it’s always that guy from Buckingham or Bedford or wherever” – so said a consultant to me during my time as Director of Communications at the University of Westminster.

Though she didn’t know it she was referring to Professor Les Ebdon, Vice Chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire. Professor Ebdon is a capable media performer, and an asset to the sector. But why is he alone so prominent?

First, he is chairman of the Million+ mission group of ‘new’, widening participation Universities. Second, he’s within an hour’s taxi of most news studios. Third, he delivers the goods – he has a clear message from his mission group, and sells it well.

Individual universities are often happy to trumpet their own academic or civic achievements, while leaving the messy debate about higher education itself to the missions groups. But there’s a problem. Virtually no-one out here in the real world has heard of the Russell Group. Fewer still Million+ or the 1994 group. Hamstrung in penetrating the consciousness of a frenetic public by their obscure names, the University Alliance at least does what it says on the tin. But with their intrinsically sedate pace and safe messaging, are the mission groups safe guardians of the HE message?

I would argue that they are not. Right now, thanks to the new fees settlement, the public are confused. They don’t know what a university education stands for any more. They’re unsure as to the benefits. In setting fees at or close to the new cap, and failing to collectively explain why, they even appear greedy. High fees intrinsically set high expectations – star lecturers, the latest facilities, enough contact time for extensive teaching, and the a decline in supported self learning. If a student commits to repay £27k for a three year degree, and fails to leave with a first, they will feel – perhaps not always unjustly – that for that sum of money, the lecturers must bear at least some of the responsibility of failure.

It’s time for universities to be clear. To be honest about the service they offer, the experience you can have, and your financial return on investment as a student. It’s time for universities to stand up and champion the virtue of developing yourself as a critical thinker. When it comes to communications, that needs two things – collective action, and academic personalities.

Collective action is about universities speaking boldly, with one voice. I would be excited to see as many universities as possible break mission group and competitive boundaries, to prepare a new creed. A clear, unambiguous statement as to what Higher Education is FOR. The mission groups could make themselves useful by paying for that creed to be run as a full page advert in every national newspaper.

Academic personalities are about individual, media friendly, senior academics (particularly Vice-Chancellors) stepping out from behind the mission groups and building up a personal profile. There are V-Cs in British Higher Education which the media would lap up – combative, entertaining, charming, engaging. They may feel don’t have a mandate to speak on the future of Higher Education. They’re wrong.

So let’s have a National Decleration, and let a thousand (V-C penned) Op Eds bloom. Higher Education is kicked and down, who will help to put it back on its feet again?

Croydon Minster are a lovely community, and it’s always fun to work with those who are passionate about the organisation they belong to and support, so I was pleased to launch croydonminster.org with their support earlier this month.

Video

I particularly enjoyed filming the two-hour long Minster Making service, though condensing it down to a 15 minute highlights video was tricky! Here’s that video:

Technical gubbins

The site runs on a Drupal 7 core, and is a departure from the Parish Church’s site, which was more static. I’ve tried to take across the concise copy and really good navigation from the old site in to the new, while adding new features like online ticket sales, fundraising, and an integrated CRM (CiviCRM).

In its first two weeks the site raised £106 in event ticket sales, which is great for a small site, and has offset the hosting charges (£19 per month VPS from myhosting.com). For the first time the Minster has a Twitter feed, YouTube channel and Audioboo channel, and their established Facebook page is being used more actively. We’re also using Posterous to make things like uploading the weekly newsletter as easy as sending an email.

Moving to Drupal 7 has not been without some pain – important CiviCRM modules like GiftAid and the Theme switching module aren’t yet Drupal 7 compatible. But it’s good to be very future proof at the earliest stage.

Next steps

The Minster community have been involved in supplying ideas and content, and the next step is to hand it back to the community to own it and run it themselves.

All in all it’s been a great project to work on, and there’s one last challenge to overcome – because the VPS is based in the US, it’s natural SEO for UK searchers isn’t strong. So it’s no coincidence you find me blogging about Croydon Minster, yes, that’s Croydon Minster, at croydonminster.org.

It was great to be asked to make a return visit to the Association for Cultural Enterprises Annual Convention earlier this year. ACE is the UK’s largest network of heritage commerce professionals – the people who make money for the museums, galleries and other institutions which we enjoy like churches and even parliament.

ACE asked me to speak to the session title “social media hysteria” – now a few months have passed I can share my presentation from the day, and it’s really pleasing to see my big prediction – search is changing and becoming social – really starting to come true in the last few months.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts, a CD and DVD is about to released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini - the little beans. It contains, among other things, two pieces of music for a phenomenal forty separate voices* (hence my attempt to get the #phenomenal40 hashtag off the ground – help!). One is called Spem in Alium (a well known piece to music boffs and people who generally don’t see enough sunlight), and the other is called the Missa Ecco sì beato giorno / ecce beatam lucem.

This is such a crazy, big, groundbreaking recording, I’ve gone out and bought a surround sound DVD system just to hear it at its best.

Composed around 450 years ago, there is a real connection through this music to an age long past, but which fascinates us still – the age of Tudor England, and our intoxication then and now with the elevated lives of royals and high society.

If you’ve seen the first of these two videos, you’ll know that last weekend I was lucky enough to grab a couple of hours with the man who has made this recording happen – Robert Hollingworth. In this video there’s a tantalising extract of the recording, you get a sense of what it is like to stand in the middle of these ethereal voices – choral and instrumental – and how it feels to be totally enveloped by Striggio’s mighty, long lost Mass.

If, like me, you learned a new word while watching the video. You’ll find the definition of “bifurcated” here. A day without learning, ey?

Because this recording is unlike anything so many people will have heard before, I really want to encourage you to share this video and blog post, to get news of the recording out there. If you’re excited by this recording I’d love you to share this blog post, Facebook ‘like’ it (up there at the top!) and if you tweet it, it’d be great if you could use the hashtag #phenomenal40.

Thanks!

• MUCH MORE about the recording available on the official site at www.ifagiolini.com/striggio

More from me:

• Video: Introducing the recording
• Buying a surround sound system off eBay, just for this.
• A ten minute radio recording on the history of the piece and the recording

* It gets even better – at one point the ‘new’ Striggio piece goes up to sixty separate voice lines. Incredible.

On Monday, a CD and DVD is released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini – or the little beans.

It contains, among other things, two recordings of giant scale. They are two pieces of choral music composed around four hundred and fifty years ago. One – Spem in Alium – is well known to music boffs. The other – Missa Ecco sì beato giorno - has rested in a dark corner of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, undiscovered, for most of that time.

Both pieces are, in their own way, phenomenal. Both are for forty separate voices, seemingly doing their own thing, but wrapped around one another to construct the extraordinary whole. This is music the like of which you may have never heard. There is nothing in modern music to compare it with. Despite that, it’s not up there on a pedestal, it’s not the preserve of the posh. It’s coming out on CD and DVD on Monday, and you can pre-order it now for £9.99. I urge you to do so.

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to grab a couple of hours with the man who has made this recording happen – Robert Hollingworth, Director of I Fagiolini. We met in the stunning church of St John the Evangelist, Upper Norwood, South London. Standing in the middle of a set of surround sound speakers, won on eBay for £60, convinced me I have to share more about this recording with you. So here’s the first of two videos which we recorded that day in which he talks about the recording – where he was surrounded by performers – and how that was transferred to CD and DVD.

I hope this will go some way to persuading you to get this recording, and perhaps even to do as I did – and spend a few quid on a surround-sound system in the process. If you’re excited by this recording I’d love you to share this blog post, and if you tweet it, it’d be great if you could use the hashtag #phenomenal40. I’ll be posting the second video – which goes more deeply in to the music – later today.

Thanks!

• MUCH MORE about the recording available at www.ifagiolini.com/striggio
• Video: NEW: A first glimpse of the recording, in surround sound
• Buying a surround sound system off eBay, just for this.

Two weeks ago my car inched its way through the rain-soaked streets of a run down corner of Ipswich, to pick up a particularly special set of eBay winnings – a surround sound DVD system, won for £60.

One week tomorrow, a spectacular CD and DVD by the vocal group I Fagiolini will be released. It is the first recording of a complex, vast, and yet somehow intimate piece for forty – and then finally sixty – separate voices.  A huge choir. The piece is a mass entitled Ecco sì beato giorno (that blessed day), it was composed 445 years ago, but only very recently rediscovered – there is a Spectator article on the discovery here. I heard its first modern performance at the Proms a couple of years ago, and on the strength of that performance, I am filled with anticipation.

The piece was recorded in the round – with the listener completely surrounded by a circle of singers. That is why this lost jewel of a composition is worth buying a surround sound system for. In eight days from now, I will be able to be surrounded by this magnificent sound, hearing it travel the room around me. The only way, in my opinion, to listen to what should be a ground-breaking recording.

As an introduction to the piece, here is a video from the academic who rediscovered the score: