I go to a lot of conferences every year, and this post is a public plea to anyone who produces events with name-badges. And, assuming you do events such as fundraisers, this is for you too. 

I was at a conference last week in which the name of the person was only on one side of the badge. I estimated that 50% of the time, the people I talked to were named "pocket guide."  

Please, if you use badges that hang around your neck, please print the name out twice and put it on both sides!  And, please make sure that whatever information is on there is printed in a large font. It's so hard to make a good first impression when you're squinting to read the name on the badge.

Thank you.  

As luck would have it, I was at the New York Philharmonic's concert last week when an unsuspecting long-term subscriber's new iPhone alarm starting playing a marimba tone over and over, during the most etherial ending section of Mahler's Ninth Symphony. I was no more than 10 rows away, and was dumbfounded as Alan Gilbert stopped the concert and had what seemed like a standoff with the patron who was in the front row. 

Now that the facts have gotten out, it turns out to be a profoundly unfortunate confluence of errors, which it so often seems is the case with situations like this. The subscriber had no idea it was his phone and had indeed turned it off before the concert started.

Over the weekend I was talking with some friends who have worked in the symphony business for decades, and most of them marveled at why this event got so much attention since this isn't so unusual. One friend recounted how at a Chicago Symphony concert  pre-concert dinner in 1991, 400 guests were given Tiffany alarm clocks as a gift on their way out from the dinner to the concert. During the concert, some of the clocks starting going off and they had to stop the concert to collect all 400 bags. The story is recounted in all its glory here by Henry Fogel, who was the CSO's executive director at the time. 

So, is this more recent event simply a brilliant litmus test of the power of social media, and the Internet to carry a relatively mundane situation into the PR stratosophere?  Or is it uncovering some pent-up anti-cell phone rage that concert-goers live with?  

Having seen this in person, I find it all the more intriguing since I assumed some people who were there would talk about it for years to come,  but not that it would end up on the evening news. What do you think?  

Since this column is all about "cloud"-based web services, here's on that epitomizes that: Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service that provides data storage in the cloud in such a seamless and intuitive way
that you'll almost forget that it's a cloud service. When you install Dropbox (after watching the excellent introductory video) you'll get a new folder nestled amongst the other folders on your computer. You can store anything you'd like (up to 2 gigabytes) for free, and you can use it like any other folder, even creating subfolders.

The difference here is that folder is then accessible anywhere you are - either from the Dropbox website, or on all your other computers. If you make a change on your laptop, Dropbox automatically updates that file on your other machines.

What's going on under the hood is that Dropbox actually saves a copy on your hard drives and on the web. So you always have access to your files, even if you're not logged on. 

What I'm finding is that describing this is harder than actually using it. So give it a try, the first 2 gigs are free and there are paid versions where, say 100 gigs is less than $20 a year. I should also mention that there are persistent tech industry rumors that Google is going soon introduce something called "G-drive" which will be similar. But for now, Dropbox is the "it" service in this realm.   

Twice a month I offer expansions on the themes and topics that Michelle Paul and I wrote about in our book, Breaking the Fifth Wall: Rethinking Arts Marketing for the 21st Century. If you like these, you can buy the book from us here, or on Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Nobles' Nook. 

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A few weeks ago we were preparing for our Fifth Wall seminars in Spain, and we were reviewing our PT Arts Patron Survey data. As you man know, we have surveyed arts patrons each winter for the last seven years, and thus we have a lot of trend data.

We discovered that while the overall frequency of checking e-mail has stayed about the same (just over 80% say they're checking multiple times a day), the locations where people who check their e-mail has changed a lot!  I’m going to pull out some very specific results to make a point. 

Here’s benchmark data from 2008 for the question, “Where do you check your e-mail?”
 
8% said they check e-mail in bed
3% at the beach
3% while driving
3% in the bathroom

Only three years later, here are the answers for the same question :
 
16% say they check e-mail in bed  -- a 100% increase
6% at the beach -–  a 100% increase
7% while driving –- a 133% increase (and a bit worrying)  
9% in the bathroom -- a 200% increase

Cleary the advent of the smartphone is driving these changes, making e-mail even more valuable than it was before. Over the years pundits have predicted the demise of e-mail to be be replaced by RSS, or text messages, or even Facebook’s messaging service.

So far, at least with regard to the patrons arts managers need to reach, e-mail is getting more mobile and therefore allowing you to stay on the minds of your patrons wherever they may be. 

I saw the film "The Artist" yesterday, an excellent retro-silent film that traces the clash of culture in Hollywood around the time of the stock market crash at the end of the era of silent film and the beginning of "talkies." It's amazing that they made a distinction between movies that had sound and those that did not by giving them different names. But not for long: Almost as soon the technology arrived, the silent film era was history.

It occurs to me that the same think is happening now on the web now. The first round of content sites on the web were silent - writers published, and people read. But then came Facebook and the era of social media. (That's not entirely true, as in the 1990's there was geocities and hometown AOL, and AOL message boards and chatrooms but with Facebook suddenly it caught on.) This year even the venerable The New York Times has relented and is about to allow its readers to comment much more freely.

Today, almost all new sites are "social," in some way, which means they enable a free-flowing two-way dialog. The notion of "social web" is transforming what it is to be a publisher. And in business the "social enterprise" is transforming what it means to enable your customers to talk back, and your staff to communicate with each other.

Looking back at the similarities, we've had our own stock market crash, and now I wonder how much longer the notion of "the social web" will be a distinction.

Since the holiday weekend is upon us, I figured I offer you a free webtool that might help with your holiday cooking. It's a free web service called E.gg Timer - and it is just that. When you go to the website, you type in an amount of time in seconds, minutes or hours, and it counts down and rings a loud bell when time runs out. That's it. No muss no fuss. 

The thing is that, notwithstanding the usefulness in the kitchen, I have found this to be very productive in business too. Often I'll allot myself 20 minutes to work on a particular task, and E.gg Timer keeps me from multi-tasking. Or, a staff member will come to me and say "can I have five minutes to talk with you" and I simply turn on E.gg Timer. You'd be amazed how effective it can be in keeping meetings short!

And, finally, for all you tea lovers, there's a variant called Steep.it which helps you make a perfect cup of tea. 

Happy holidays everyone!  

This week's staff post is by Justin Gallo, Client Services Representative here at Patron Technology.

I’ve been in your shoes. I know what it's like to wake up Monday morning to a day full of attending
meetings, writing grants, soliciting donations, and doing all the other tasks necessary to keep your organization up and running. For five years I worked for a small non-profit theater and found myself spending more time on administrative work and less on what I really wanted to do – creating art. There just weren’t enough hours in the day. Then when I started working at Patron Technology, I discovered the organization had a time machine!

Staff members in my old office had their own methods of tracking their data. The development department had their donor database, but that was hardware that was only available on their computers and wasn't accessible by anyone else. Our general manager kept a series of very complex Excel spreadsheets. My files were kept in the contact software that came with my computer and various spreadsheets and Word documents. Others in the office still relied on their trusty Rolodex. It was difficult to make sure all of these different sources of information matched each other, and updating was a fairly tedious process.

I remember sitting at my desk and watching our general manager and development associate sit down every week and compare their numbers – donations and board giving. One had a database, the other had spreadsheets... it took a while. If their numbers were different, it took even longer. It was an effective method of making sure everyone's information matched up, but it was really time consuming.

Here at Patron we use a customer relationship management system – it might as well be a time machine. What I’ve found is that tasks that were once a chore have become much more streamlined because all of the information I need is in one place, in our shared CRM system. A CRM system improves efficiency with administrative tasks to such a degree that you are actually able to save hours... hours that you can then devote to your art. 

Back at the theater, I would also spend hours trying to coordinate the schedules of everyone on my committee so we could meet. It irked me that I was never able to find a good way to keep track of the schedules – I used spreadsheets, calendars... I tried it all. It didn't make the process any easier. I knew there had to be a better way. 

Here at Patron we use Gmail and Google Calendar. We’re all on the same platform, and we can see each other’s schedules at a glance, even on our iPhones. Again, what a timesaver!

As you can see, I’ve been in your shoes. I understand what it takes to keep a non-profit arts organization able to create art – and it takes time. But I’ve come to learn how much time I could have saved over the years if I only had a time machine. 

I just never thought I’d find one in a CRM system. If all you want this holiday season is some extra time to focus on your craft –you might want to think about asking for a time machine.