HOW AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE CENTER ELEVATED THEIR PATRON EXPERIENCES AND UNIFIED THEIR TEAM WITH LEAP

The Cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo by October Grace Media.

About American Shakespeare Center

As the first ever re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre, the Blackfriars Playhouse at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, VA, is a must-see destination for every Shakespeare enthusiast and theatre lover. By 2023, it had put on 6,262 shows (a mixture of 231 Shakespearean and modern productions) to over two million people and continues to grow. It also has a robust educational program, including theater camps, lectures, and workshops. “We see ourselves as a hub for learning and growth,” said Database Manager Cori McDaniel, “We are inspired by Shakespeare’s staging conditions to have a conversation in our modern world.”

For more than a decade, the American Shakespeare Center has used Leap Event Technology’s patron management solution to run its ticketing, CRM, fundraising, and more. We met with Director of Marketing & Development Stephanie Cabacoy and Database Manager Cori McDaniel to discuss how they use Leap’s solutions.

The Cast of Pride and Prejudice. Photo by October Grace Media.

Photo by Lauren Rogers Parker.

The Power of Our Platform

From the start, Cabacoy emphasized how data-driven the American Shakespeare Center team is and how Leap empowers them by streamlining all their data, projects, and reports. According to her, it has been “very instrumental in us being able to grow as a team and as a company.” Leap's Salesforce CRM solution (formerly known as PatronManager) allows them to easily view historical data and discover emerging trends. Using these data-driven insights, the organization’s Executive Director, Vanessa Morosco, is refining their financial and artistic strategies. Doing so will help them achieve sustainable growth and enhance their programming in the years ahead.

When Cabacoy started with the organization ten years ago, all the data related to developments in their donor cultivation notes lived on separate Excel sheets, making it difficult to conduct the detailed analysis they can now. Since entering her current role, Cabacoy emphasized, “My top priority as Director of Marketing & Development is making sure that institutional memory now lives in Leap.”

Since McDaniel joined the team, she noted, “I love how we're able to bring all of [our teams] together by using this product. We're able to bring everybody into the conversation.” Since their entire organization can easily access and analyze the same data, she pointed out that using our solution “really unites us as a company.”

The Cast of King Lear. Photo by Alania Shefelton.

LEAP DELIVERS RESULTS

Increase in workshop attendance on Homeschool Days in 2023

Increase in patrons from their local radius in 2024

Increase in patrons from Virginia in 2024

To create and pull answers from a custom report

*Data collected from American Shakespeare Center in 2023 and 2024

The Importance of Community

During our conversation, McDaniel emphasized that “the biggest takeaway for me with Leap is … it's not just a product, it's a community.” In addition to Leap’s powerful technology, everyone who uses their arts platform gains access to a dedicated client community. On a forum-style platform, arts and culture organizations can share ideas with each other, ask questions, and express what additional features they’d like to see in the future. “It’s something that I think is pretty rare for systems like this,” McDaniel noted.

Bringing this community together even more, Leap hosted a Patron Management Community Meeting in 2024 for organizations using Leap’s solution for the arts to network, discuss industry trends, and optimize their use of Leap’s technology. From attending this conference, Cabacoy and McDaniel learned new ways to use our patron management solution (like how to level up their ticketing pages) and discovered new vendor partnerships like Vatic’s dynamic pricing services. Cabacoy stated, “I really love the exposure that you all have provided us [regarding] what else is out there and what else can help our lean team … expedite the revenue-generating process.” Since testing Vatic for their Christmas Carol show, McDaniel has saved significant amounts of time from adjusting dynamic pricing by hand.

Phoebe González as Ghost of Christmas Past and Ronald Román-Meléndez as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. Photo by October Grace Media.

The Patron Experience, Elevated

The ultimate goal for the American Shakespeare Center is getting its patrons to come back again and again. To do so effectively, their organization uses our Salesforce CRM to highly personalize its outreach based on a person’s preferences and their stage in the patron journey. From first-time ticket buyers to loyal donors, “using a lot of those different processes and features in Leap help us notify and identify who those folks are,” McDaniel noted. Here are some ways the American Shakespeare Center uses Leap’s patron management solution to enhance the experiences of all its patrons.

Thanking First-Time Patrons with Postcards & Discounts

When someone sees a show for the first time, the American Shakespeare Center uses our system to identify and give them a specialty postcard as a keepsake. Then, after the show, the team pulls a segmented list of first-time ticket buyers to send a second exclusive postcard that includes a steep discount code to an upcoming show. This may be a discount to any show of their choice or a highly personalized offer for a show they’ll enjoy based on the first one they attended.

Thanks to Leap Event Technology, they can track who’s redeeming these codes and make sure to deliberately thank them for coming back. McDaniel pointed out, “We have a very, very loyal fanbase of folks, but we're still seeing tons of new people, which is amazing!” In 2024, the American Shakespeare Center saw a 45.1% increase in patrons from Virginia, reaching a total of 32,240. Additionally, it experienced a 38% increase in patrons from their local radius, totaling 17,195. “It's incredible to witness this growth and the expanding reach of our productions,” added Cabacoy.

Building Loyalty through Member Accounts

As patrons attend more regularly and become donors, they can create an account on the theater’s website (through Leap!), where their membership allows them to easily buy tickets, make recurring donations, and even receive exclusive benefits. Cabacoy pointed out that they invested in this service because “we want to be able to build off the momentum of retention and funnel this pipeline of patron loyalty.”

Now, with their account, patrons can purchase online and take advantage of their membership benefits like early access to ticket sales, automatic discounts, member-only events, or special seating areas. To this, McDaniel added, “What we've generally found is once we get somebody through our doors – like I think, probably three times total – we have them pretty much forever.”

Aidan O'Reilly as Macduff and K.P. Powell as Macbeth in Macbeth. Photo by October Grace Media.

How Access Codes Boost Attendance & Introduce Shakespeare to Their Community

The American Shakespeare Center has found one specific feature of our arts solution to be extremely powerful: access codes! With this tool, the team can give select patrons exclusive access to tickets. Cabacoy noted, “It has been a valuable learning experience to offer this level of access, allowing people the autonomy to book their own tickets without cost, making the experience more inviting and accessible.” For example, they’ve partnered with local libraries to offer “culture passes” for their community to “check out” tickets and introduce more people to the world of Shakespeare’s plays. McDaniel added that access codes have helped patrons experience their theater “without having that barrier of a price tag.”

As they introduce more and more people to Shakespeare, Cabacoy said, “Access codes have been a huge game changer because they align with our mission, which is centered on accessibility and remains our primary focus and passion.” In addition to increasing attendance, these efforts intersect with the American Shakespeare Center’s grant funding. In light of this, McDaniel shared, “We're able to use a lot of Leap’s data from our programs and initiatives to help secure grant funding.”

Growing Their Homeschool Days

Previously, for their standard student matinees, their theater had a difficult time keeping track of payments for their dedicated “Homeschool Days” since these were smaller families attending rather than large groups from school trips. With access codes, the American Shakespeare Center could give homeschool families the best seats in the house on that homeschool day and still make room for some additional groups if needed. Additionally, it empowered homeschool families to book these spots themselves and simplified the process for the staff who managed these group sales.

Because of this, McDaniel pointed out that “we've seen a huge growth in our homeschool days.” While they used to only offer one homeschool day every season, they now regularly host 4-6 of these days each year “just because of how popular they are.”

As a result, they’re also experiencing larger attendance to their add-on workshops. In 2023, the first year they used access codes for their homeschool days, the American Shakespeare Center experienced a 235% growth in attendance to these workshops! This rose again by another 10% in 2024. As Cabacoy noted, “Because of the ease of what Cori has built, we are finding ourselves having to hire two instructors instead of just one instructor class.”

The Cast of Much Ado About Nothing. Photo by October Grace Media.

The Team’s Operations, Optimized

With Leap by their side, here are some other features that they found particularly powerful!

Scanning App

For the American Shakespeare Center, Cabacoy noted, “The first 30 minutes of a patron’s visit are crucial — it's during this time that they form their first impression, which often determines whether they'll return." Ensuring the admission lines are as smooth as possible is an important factor here. That’s where our mobile ticket scanning app comes in!

Thanks to the app, if they don’t have their tickets handy, the staff can still easily check them in by their last name and let them know where their seats are. This cuts down on long lines and makes it easy to handle their high volumes of group sales. McDaniel added, “It [is] so much cleaner with the new app.”

Donation Forms

Leap Event Technology helped the American Shakespeare Center streamline its separate donation forms into one master form, which “saves our patrons a lot of time and cleans up our website,” McDaniel commented. In fact, our donation forms are so customizable that their organization used them for more than just donations – they turned it into a registration form!

For instance, they used this tool to gather registrations for their semi-annual Blackfriars Conference. This is a large-scale event set over 3-4 days for Shakespearean and early modern theater scholars, professors, and students. Because this event requires more patron details than a standard ticket order, collecting the registrations through a donation form allowed them to get everything they needed and code these forms so all the data would match up for reporting in our patron management solution.

Customizable Reports

As a highly data-driven company, the American Shakespeare Center values the power of custom reports. Pulling reports with Leap Event Technology has saved McDaniel immense amounts of time, sharing that “I can get [my team] an answer within 30 minutes, even if it’s something that I don’t already have built or existing. It’s just so fast and intuitive.”

For whatever their data needs are, they can create super complex reports with cross filters, filter logic, and more. “With the ability to customize based on what we need, I can go in and build something, and it’s so quick and so easy. I’ve found it to be a really great experience just working on it in general,” McDaniel said. Even their team members with minimal experience in the system are empowered to easily make reports themselves too, taking simple data queries off their database manager’s plate.

Dashboards

In her role as Director of Marketing & Development, Cabacoy is responsible to present to their board. In this regard, she noted that “the efficiency of Leap's platform in delivering information, especially through dashboards, has been incredibly valuable.” Now, she can quickly provide a detailed snapshot of their organization’s performance in as close to real time as possible. She can also compare their dashboards year-over-year to spot trends, give various departments their own custom dashboards, and allow their executive director to find answers to frequently asked questions with ease as well.

While it may seem simple at first, McDaniel stressed how “our favorite thing on those dashboards are the little speedometers that show you where you’re at.” With the ability to customize what values are red, yellow, and green, this visualization has helped Cabacoy’s team explain to the board how the American Shakespeare Center is performing. In fact, their teams use these speedometers so much that one of their common internal phrases is to get their goals “in the green” of the dials! Cabacoy added, "It was incredibly convenient to quickly illustrate what the speedometer represented, allowing our board members to grasp the information without needing to be experts in the data."

A screenshot of the PatronManager dashboard

How Leap’s Team Supports The American Shakespeare Center

In addition to gaining a powerful CRM built entirely on Salesforce, the American Shakespeare Center has greatly benefited from working alongside the team at Leap Event Technology. McDaniel highlighted Leap’s team members are “all amazing, super fast to respond, will bend over backwards to help you … and are so great to work with.” This level of collaboration has allowed them to reach their goals and improve their operations alongside Leap, knowing their voices are being truly heard.

For instance, the American Shakespeare Center took part in a beta test of Leap’s ticket scanning app. As McDaniel’s first time participating in a beta, she noted how enjoyable the experience was and how the Leap team “made sure we were heard and listened to all of our thoughts, even our random ideas that weren't even necessarily part of what they initially were thinking.” As their theater worked with Leap on improvements to their ticket scanner, McDaniel said she could tell “they wanted to make it good for us, but they also wanted our opinion on what might be good for other folks.”

McDaniel also appreciated how clear the resources provided by the Leap team were to make the most out of our powerful arts solution. “The materials and the resources that you all have do a great job of walking step by step how to go through those things.” While there are still capabilities she’s still learning, McDaniel said, “Within a month, I felt proficient in the system.” While going through the training modules and studying to pass the certification exam (an optional way to ensure you’re using our platform to its fullest potential), she was able to strategize for an entire season of shows.

The Cast of Pride and Prejudice. Photo by October Grace Media.

“The biggest thing [is] it’s more than a product, it's more than a database. It truly is a community. You are getting access to so many different individuals, not only the ones that work for Leap, who are all amazing, super fast to respond, will bend over backwards to help you, …and they’re so great to work with. You also get access to pretty much everybody else who uses this product.”

Cori McDaniel

Database Manager of American Shakespeare Center

“I really love the exposure that you all have provided us [regarding] what else is out there and what else can help our lean team ease that ability and help expedite the revenue-generating process.”

Stephanie Cabacoy

Director of Marketing & Development of American Shakespeare Center

“My entire day is in Leap's platform. That is my job for our organization. I have greatly enjoyed using it.”

Cori McDaniel

Database Manager of American Shakespeare Center

How Arts Organizations Benefit from Partnering with Leap

The American Shakespeare Center’s partnership with Leap Event Technology has truly revolutionized how it runs its theater. Whether that means gaining data-driven insights, uniting their teams, or strengthening their patron relationships, their team has been empowered to grow, adapt, and deliver incredible experiences for years to come.

Looking for an event technology partner to take your arts and culture organization to the next level? Now is the perfect time to explore what Leap Event Technology can do for you, too! With Leap, you’ll gain powerful tools to manage ticketing, fundraising, and more — while joining a community of those using our system. Interested in finding out more? Reach out to us today!

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