Jo Johnson, senior marketing manager digital at London Symphony Orchestra, on the creation of Student Pulse, a new app managed by a consortium of organisations, that allows students across London to access cheap tickets to classical music concerts in the city
The idea for the app first came from a project that LSO and digital marketing agency Kodime had completed for the Arts Council England and Nesta Digital R&D Fund in 2011. We were given funding to create a piece of technology for our existing student scheme. We knew from past experience what the particular things were that students wanted from their concert attending experience: to come with friends; to be able to book easily at a time that suited them and through a channel they were familiar with; to be able to build up visits in exchange for rewards; and to easily share the experience among their friends.
So we set out to create a tool that exactly matched those aspirations and which used technology they all had in their hands on their mobiles or tablets. This would make attending a concert something they might do more often. LSO Pulse initially ran for a year as a trial.
Part of the R&D Fund’s remit was that we shared our findings from the project with other arts organisations and that they could benefit from them. From the start we had envisaged the app as a tool that could work for more than one organisation.
A year or two previously we had formed a consortium of London orchestras’ marketing departments to work together on creating a big picture of orchestral concert attendance in the capital, and it seemed to us that there might be a way of working collaboratively on developing the student audience that would benefit all of us in the long run.
Backed up by research that showed that loyalty to one orchestra in London was relatively low – and especially so amongst the student audience – it was decided that putting all of our student offers in one place would remove the multitude of messages they were bombarded with by each of us and make finding great concerts to attend, importantly at student prices, much simpler and cleaner. The original members of the consortium agreed to expand the LSO Pulse idea and tool into Student Pulse.
This is an extract from an article in Vol. 11 Issue 17. To read the full feature subscribe to IAM here.
