Data Driven Concert Planning for Voter Mobilization Organizations
New report from the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and the Maryland Democracy Initiative provides an overview of best practices for talent and venue booking in voter mobilization campaigns.
As part of our work mobilizing the whole UMD community to strengthen democracy, we often appoint visiting fellows whose deep experience in the field complements the tools of academic inquiry we have at our university. This year, it has been our incredible privilege to welcome Emily White to the CDCE and UMD communities.
Emily is a veteran of the music and entertainment industries. She’s an Amazon #1 best selling author of How to Build a Sustainable Music Career & Collect All Revenue Streams and has managed global tours for countless top acts. She is the founder of #iVoted Concerts which increases voter participation by activating entertainment venues to let fans in who show a selfie from outside their polling place or at home with a blank & unmarked ballot.
Throughout her time at UMD, Emily has been struck by how many organizations working to strengthen democracy try to plan concerts or other similar events without being aware of the industry best practices for organizing them and data organizers can use to target their efforts. In her new report “Using Data to Build a Culture of Voting” Emily lays out the four common costly mistakes that voter mobilization organizations make when engaging with the music industry. She also provides three practical solutions that anyone working at the intersection of music and voting can apply in their work. We hope this report can inform important efforts to mobilize voters all across America this fall and beyond!
Best,
Sam Novey
Chief Strategist, UMD Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement
Using Data to Build a Culture of Voting
An Overview of Best Practices for Talent and Venue Booking in Voter Mobilization Campaigns
By: Emily White
The music industry can play a powerful role in building a stronger democracy. Musicians have deep relationships with their fan communities that give context and meaning to fans’ experiences of life and society. They also have ongoing opportunities to direct their audience’s attention to key civic actions both online and through concerts and live events.
In 2016, I read that voter turnout was down in my home city of Milwaukee. With my background in the music industry I thought, “Why don’t we find venues, fill them, and tie in a non-partisan get out the vote effort?” So, I founded #iVoted Concerts shortly after and assembled a board and team of music and concert industry leaders. We then activated hundreds of concerts, and artists via webcast during the pandemic, to allow anyone who showed a selfie from outside their polling place to see these shows for free on election night.1
Four Common Costly Mistakes:
Since entering the voting space seven years ago, I’ve seen many groups who have envisioned or produced events that attempted to use music to inspire civic action. The strategy has enormous promise but I have observed that in practice these events often lead to mixed results. There are four common mistakes that cause these events to fail to achieve their potential:
1) Starting too late: Concert venues, as well as major talent, are booked roughly a year in advance. As live events have returned since the pandemic, there is now a bottleneck of traffic in the touring industry with venues and major artists often getting booked upwards of 18 months in advance. If you start too late, a lot of options are already out of the picture.
2) Booking bad venues: Voter mobilization groups often ask “why bother with booking a concert venue when there are other spaces available, such as a school gym or campus event space that can also be potentially utilized for a new purpose?” Because the community knows where concert venues are and they are familiar with attending concerts at these trusted and beloved rooms. They know where to park, eat and what to do. Hosting an event in a venue that is not usually used for concerts - even if it is a known community space - adds significant logistical and marketing challenges that organizers are often not prepared to overcome.
Pointing this out to fellow civic leaders has been eye opening to them as a reason why their past events might not have garnered the attendance they had hoped for. This is why many college bookings of artists also fail. I remember being on tour once and the band I was tour managing had a well paid gig at a university. I think we had more students on hand to volunteer and help out with the event than public attendance, despite the band generally being able to sell well over 2,000 tickets at “normal” concert venues in the same market. The few non-campus fans who did attend told me they wandered around campus trying to find the location and had to park in a lot that felt miles away.
3) Uninformed talent choices: It can be attractive to see high social media numbers for a “major” celebrity. But that doesn’t necessarily mean folks are listening to or engaging with that act in the areas you’re targeting.
4) Disorganized engagement with talent: All too often nonprofits and well-intended organizations book talent but then make requests for press engagement, live streaming, social media posts and more after they’ve confirmed the booking and are disappointed when they are turned down.
The concert industry might look glamorous from the outside. But it’s ultimately a business of logistics and ensuring the public has a great, safe and smooth experience. This often boils down to providing short lines and clean bathrooms. Civic organizers often book a random space, overpay for talent that might not be the right fit for their target market and then are disappointed with the results. They put immense stress on themselves and their organization in trying to produce an event that sounds “fun.”
There are music industry professionals who produce concerts for a living and are available to take this stress off your plate. As for what can happen when people with little to no concert experience try to produce these kinds of events, see multiple Fyre Fest documentaries on what can go wrong. Members of the public, rarely, but sometimes die at concerts and festivals. Booking a random venue for a large show and doing so without any concert industry professionals involved can be a dangerous mistake.
I say that not to intimidate or dissuade you from using music to inspire civic action! But please engage with the music industry expertise you need to be successful. When non-concert industry folks take on events beyond their professional experience it wastes time, wastes money, and creates unnecessary stress and risk for all involved.
Three Practical Solutions:
Whether you choose to work with a concert industry professional on your voting related event or organize it in-house, there are three practical and inexpensive solutions that you can use to avoid the four common mistakes.
1) Lock Down Free “Holds” for Venues on Key Election Dates: We have a major advantage in the voting space when producing events to increase civic engagement. We know when registration deadlines and election dates are far in advance. I’ve been actively preaching this to partner organizations for years with the analogy of, “If you know your wedding date - secure the venue!”
The response from even well-established voting groups is completely understandable – “We don’t have our funding in place yet to put a deposit down on a venue.” But you don’t need to put a deposit down to “hold” a beloved concert venue.
Here’s how booking venues in the concert industry works and how to make “holds” part of your work to boost civic engagement:
Engage the venue EARLY: An artist or their agent reaches out to the Talent Buyer or Promoter (these titles are interchangeable) at the venue as far in advance of their target date as possible.
Secure a “hold” for your event: If the Talent Buyer / Promoter for the venue feels the artist is a fit for the venue (i.e. we’d all like to play UMD’s 50,000+ capacity SECU Stadium, but not everyone is at the point of selling that many tickets yet), they’ll respond letting the artist or agent know they are “X hold.” If you reach out early enough you might be “1st hold!” or “1H,” which means you have the right of first refusal for that night. If you’re contacting venues closer to the date and they haven’t confirmed an event for that night yet you might be sitting pretty at “25th hold.” Additionally, keep the night of the week in mind when booking a concert venue. An event earlier in the week will have significantly fewer “holds” in front of you than a day later in the week or a weekend date.
Prepare your budget and funding and “challenge” when ready: If you aren't 1st hold and you’d like to move forward with your event at any point, say, you now have your talent budgets and funding ready to go, let the venue know you’d like to “challenge” for the date. “Challenge” is another concert industry term that means the promoter is now going to reach out to the holds ahead of you, starting with the first hold, to let them know they have 24-72 hours or so to confirm. If the 1st hold doesn’t confirm the date, it will then be offered to the second hold and so on until they make their way to you, in which case the date is yours. Note that many booking agents often hold multiple dates. So, by “challenging,” you're forcing the holds ahead of you to make a decision and “clear” the other dates they're holding.
Confirm your event: If the venue accepts your offer, then they will move forward to lock in a contract. At this point you have booked your venue and date.
2) Use data to book talent that your target audience is interested in. I highly recommend using Chartmetric to view the top trending artists in and from each location. What people are listening to in Milwaukee is much different from Madison, which is different from Grand Rapids, despite the fact that these locations are not far apart geographically.
Utilizing data for talent bookings also exposes classism, racism and sexism that unfortunately still exists in the music industry. For instance, when I first viewed the top trending artists from Milwaukee, the artists that get a lot of press, buzz and even radio play didn’t really have any fans in the data. These artists know how to build local media and music industry relationships and can take a great press shot with a piano in a river. But it’s artists like the Latin hip-hop group Kinto Sol and rapper Certified Trapper that sit atop the data of the top trending artists from Milwaukee based on what folks are actually listening to. I’ve very rarely seen Kinto Sol covered in Wisconsin’s music press. Utilizing Chartmetric’s data makes the preferences of our target audiences clear. At #iVoted, we’ve also optimized this data further to show which of the top trending artists per Chartmetric’s data increase civic impact the most by comparing their unique fan demographics with local voter files to determine which artists have the most historically low turnout fans. We’re actively sharing this data optimization with partner non-profits and please contact us if that is something you’re interested in.
3) Make all your asks of talent upfront: Artists are humans too. Interviews take time away from their families, lives and other projects. Live streaming might involve rights holders in the form of the artists’ label and music publisher. Social media is prime real estate for artists. And beyond that their teams are really busy. So make all of your asks upfront when booking an artist to streamline this process for both you as well as the artist and their team. That is, come out and say you’re hoping for a performance of x length, one social media post on each platform, a mention on the artist’s text and email list, that you’d like to know if the artist is interested / available for interviews and media requests as well as if they’re ok with the event being live-streamed and if they’re up for a “meet & greet” with your organization’s key folks.
The upshot? Use music industry best practices to inspire civic action!
Knowledge is power. Hopefully you now feel a little more informed on how to book beloved venues and talent, as far out from your target date as possible, to achieve maximum success for your goals, initiatives and all involved. I can’t wait to see what you do next!
Appendix: What if the venue treats your civic event like a “private event” or rental? Funding and deposits come into play depending on the nature of your event. I’m going to get into the concert industry weeds a bit to give you options on this so bear with me. Particularly if you are not working with someone with concert industry experience, the venue might immediately assume you and your organization are looking for a “rental” for a “private” event. The New Yorker recently profiled how lucrative rentals are to venues for private events ranging from weddings to corporate parties. If your event is private, or free to the public, you are going to fall into this category. And although these are often set rates, if you are throwing a free civic event, see if you can get the rental rate reduced if there is a cash bar because the revenue will be going directly to the venue, which is different from a corporate party that might be paying for an open bar.
Another option is to work with venues and give attendees the choice of purchasing a ticket. This is how we set up #iVoted Concerts as it gives the public the opportunity to secure their seat for the show in case the event reaches capacity (a good problem). It also allows you to point out to the venue that the event isn’t “private” or a “rental.” It’s a normal show. See if they’re up for what’s called a “door deal” in which the venue will keep a share of the ticket sales to recoup staff costs and expenses. Additionally, depending on what night of the week your show is on, you can point out that you’re driving folks into the venue to drink / eat / spend money on an otherwise slow night of the week. For instance a show on national election nights is an even more historically slow Tuesday night than most Tuesdays for the concert industry.
Whether it’s a public or private event, know that you don’t need to put a deposit down when holding a venue. Hopefully the above steps illuminate how to bring the civic events you’re envisioning to life. As it does in any field, relationships help this process.
But don’t be intimidated by this either. You can often look up who the Talent Buyer / Promoter is at any venue of your choice and maybe see if you have any mutual contacts on LinkedIn who can connect you. Or feel free to ask myself or anyone on the #iVoted team for an introduction. We’re currently holding over 130 of the most beloved venues nationwide for election night 2024 for events that seek to increase voter turnout in a non-partisan way. We would like to partner with you. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be lighting up every entertainment venue nationwide to increase civic impact, as we’re all in this together.
Emily White is a Senior Fellow at the UMD Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and Founder of #iVoted Concerts. Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the UMD Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.
Or at home with their blank and unmarked ballot. Future voters attend #iVoted events by sharing what election they will be 18 for. Non-citizens and those ineligible to vote enter by sharing which artist they’re most excited to see, ensuring #iVoted events are inclusive and open to all.
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