City Lit Theater has been putting on engaging, challenging and exciting shows as a theater company in Chicago for 46 years. We use direct mail to reach our subscribers, audience, donors and friends out of an active list of over 5,000 people and organizations. The better the flyer, letter, leaflet, the better the response, invariably. We have, in recent years, upped our communications to our list and seen the results. In combination with better targeted emails we have seen an increase in audiences, subscribers and donors. And by co-ordinating the digital and print campaigns we have managed to engage our audiences better. We revamped our website and now use QR codes more extensively to track where our audience is coming from, where they saw us and thus help get back to them about what might interest them as well as learning more about what is the most effective communication for each audience member.

As a non-profit arts organization we are always living close to the bone in terms of resources but direct mail engages with our audience, provides tangible results in terms of audiences and donors. We have produced more targeted campaigns and more literature about our fundraising events as well as our stage shows and this is bringing results that we can measure. We have record audiences in the last 12 months and some of that is directly attributable to the work we've been doing with our printers but we can always do more.

We surveyed our audiences in the past year and discovered that a large proportion come from less than 5 miles to see our shows and that as much as 20% were first time visitors and hadn't known about us, which tells us that there is more to do in our immediate neighborhoods. Direct mail can help us with that by using lists we can get from fellow arts organizations in the area, from the Alders, from businesses to embed ourselves more visibly in the community. We can do this from mailing lists as well as postcard distribution and making sure we have season and show postcards around local schools, restaurants and other business.

We are now getting our programs professionally printed by Conquest Graphics which helps us to get advertisers from the local restaurants and businesses and the postcards we print are distributed far and wide across the city. We previously printed them in house using our laser printers, but this will give us a more professional edge and allow us to be more efficient with our time. We continue to believe that printed programs are a way to get information about our artists and our shows into people's hands, including local businesses it a way that digital programs don't. And it's also another way to get people off their phones into something physical which becomes a souvenir from their visit and can be passed on to other interested visitors.

We are happy to continue to work with the responsive team at Conquest Graphics and look forward to deepening our partnership this year.

We have ambitious plans to expand our reach and scope over the next few years and direct mailing is going to be key to this push.