SOR 016: How To Delegate Theatre Marketing Tasks
iTunes
StitcherThe only thing worse than trying to handle all of the promotion for a show yourself, is to delegate it to other people – only to see the ball get dropped. Selecting talented people is only part of a successful delegation. You also need to have them working on the right things with the right set of expectations.
When I originally started preparing this episode, it was going to be a comprehensive overview of strategies to cope with the overwhelming prospect of promoting a show. There are so many things you can and should be doing, trying to keep it all straight can easily send your mind reeling.
I realized that if you are feeling overwhelmed right now, dumping all of these strategies on you at once may not be the kindest thing I could do. Instead I decided to just address on one item you can focus on to reclaim a little bit of your time: delegation.
In this episode:
- the skills you need – marketing requires more than just warm bodies, there are specific skills that you need someone on your team to provide
- subject matter expert – the unique role on your marketing team of someone who is a member of a community that you want to reach out to
- enjoying delegated tasks – if you delegate tasks to someone who isn’t excited to tackle them, you are setting them up for failure
- developing a team you take with you – there are benefits to effectiveness and efficiency when you keep working with the same people across mutliple productions
- the five levels of delegation – you may not want to micromanage, but there are degrees of freedom and responsibility for a delegate and you need to be intentional about establishing them up front
- how training can be encouraging – the light at the end of the tunnel when delegation doesn’t seem to be saving you much time
Items mentioned:
- The Open Book Project – a new project where you look over my shoulder as I promote a theatre production in real time
- Who Do You Need On Your Theatre Marketing Team? – an old post where I talked about the skills you need on your team (I expand on these with additional skills in this episode)
- The Five Levels of Delegation – an explanation of the five levels from Michael Hyatt’s blog
I have been using two different types of formats for the podcast up to this point. In some episodes I bring on a guest to share their experience and perspective. In other episodes like this one it’s just me sharing my thoughts on a topic. Do you like one format better than the other? What would you like to see more of? (If you’d like to suggest another format, too, please do so in the comments.)
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