CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival: Music to Build Community

Feature they can’t live without: Email tracking and reporting

“I’ve used other email marketing tools, and I just don’t think that there’s anything that exists that is as user-friendly and reliable as Constant Contact.”

Amanda Antinore, Communications Director, CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival

Sometimes all you need to develop a good idea is a bowl of pasta and a couple of bottles of wine. That’s the story behind how Marc Iacona, Executive Director, and John Nugent, Artistic Director, decided to team up to produce the first CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival in 2002. What started as a six-day festival with 50 artists is now a nine-day event with multiple venues. This year, the festival occurred from June 23 to July 1, 2023. It included 1750 artists from 14 countries to provide entertainment and instruction to event attendees with a lineup of 300 shows, 100 of which were free performances. 

An event as massive as the CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival requires a ton of communication and marketing to coordinate and publicize the event. To make sure the festival team is reaching each of their target audiences effectively, they use Constant Contact to centralize their efforts.

Founding the festival

No strangers to performing, the founders both have a background in music. As a professional saxophonist, John toured with the Woody Herman Orchestra in the 1980s, and Marc knows his way around playing the trumpet. So naturally, when it came time to build their festival, the two selected jazz as the genre to showcase.  

Built on a “desire to bring a quality event to my hometown, Rochester, New York,” and “to bring some vitality into the city, musically-oriented,” said Marc, the festival features “emerging artists as well as well-known artists” to expose the community to new and exciting music while ensuring established crowd-pleasers are also present. “We started the festival in 2002 with some little-known artists like Norah Jones and Aretha Franklin and Dr. John and Sonny Rollins,” John joked. This year, the lineup included performances from Samara Joy, the Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra, and Tatiana Eva-Marie. 

Consistency is key

Putting together an event is a complicated process — venue booking, artist coordination, ticket sales, merchandising, sponsorship deals, and much more goes into making an event successful — and that doesn’t include everything that goes into publicizing and marketing the event. An email list has to be grown, segmented, and managed. Emails have to be drafted, designed, scheduled, and sent. 

The festival team relies on Constant Contact to centralize their efforts and promote consistency. “I’ve used other email marketing tools, and I just don’t think that there’s anything that exists that is as user-friendly and reliable as Constant Contact,” said Amanda Antinore, CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival’s communications director. “The fact that my entire job– and almost every single one of my clients– uses it is a testament to how great it is.” 

This centralization is proof of the platform’s power and positive impact on the festival team’s communication efforts. “The ease of use and the fact that we can preview an email and send it off to get approved. Share it with the right people and be able to schedule something in advance — that is really important to us,” said Amanda. 

Informing their audience

Initially, the team had an email server that they ended up outgrowing, so in 2014 they switched to Constant Contact. Changing platforms made it easier for the team to communicate with event attendees and stakeholders like sponsors, staff, and the press. 

“We’re marketing the jazz festival all year round; it’s a full-time job even when it’s not June,” said Amanda. “We have our major lineup announcement every year in March, and we have to synchronize all of our communication so that it gets to the right people at the right time. We’ve never had one single issue with using Constant Contact to make sure that it gets in the inbox of our customers and the media before it actually needs to. So that is just such peace of mind that you can’t replace.”

In addition to announcements, the team crafts a regular newsletter to keep their audience informed. “Constant Contact has been wonderful for us with our newsletters, letting them [the audience] know if there are any changes or there’s something special or cool that we’re going to do,” said John.

One of the features the jazz festival team uses to keep their email marketing organized is list segmentation. Communicating with multiple groups can be difficult when they require different messages from your business. The festival team creates individual lists to cater to their audiences, whether they are event attendees or people working behind the scenes. “We’ve just been able to use all of those different lists to target exactly what message we need to get out to the right people, and that’s extremely useful,” said Amanda. 

Event Registration 

As an event company, registration tools are essential to ensure the team can adequately prepare for the number of attendees they need to support. While the festival happens once a year and requires large-scale registration, the team also organizes private events throughout the year and supports those registrations with Constant Contact. “The events tool we use for several different private events that we have throughout the year,” said Amanda. “One being our press conference in March, and the other is a sponsor recognition party that we have right before the festival starts. It’s a way for us to gather RSVPs and know where our registrants are going to be beforehand, put together the guest list, and essentially know who is going to be there,” said Amanda.

Reporting 

The key to maintaining a successful event year after year is to continue the marketing practices that are working and to improve upon the ones that are not. To ensure the festival team is on its way to achieving its goals, they use the reporting feature to track their audience’s engagement with their email communications. “The report with Constant Contact is very useful because we’re able to see the messages that are received the most, and we can adjust an email that’s going to go out in the future based on what the response is from a previous message. So we’re analyzing that data and adjusting from there,” said Amanda. “It’s something that I think is incredibly useful when you’re talking about online communications. It’s because if you don’t have the information right there in front of you to be able to go back and say, well, is this working — is this not working, otherwise you can’t really tweak what you need to in order for it to work the way that you want it to.”

Progressing and preserving Rochester

The event does more than support musicians and provide a novel experience to attendees; the CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival also helps support the community year-round. “What I love about the jazz festival is that we have helped sustain certain businesses surrounding the area,” said Marc. He noted the importance of small businesses, calling them an engine for America and saying: “Small business is really what drives opportunities here, especially here in Rochester, New York.” 

The event receives sponsorships from local businesses and, in turn, drives people towards local businesses to shop, eat, host meetings, and lodge during the festival. “All the businesses around here depend on the jazz festival, and they’ve come to depend on it for a large source of their revenue,” said John. In fact, since its inception, the festival has been responsible for almost $200 million invested into the local economy. “Our goals for this year in 2023 would be, again, to sustain and bring to the community what they’ve come to expect for the last 20 years. That doesn’t happen by accident,” said Marc. “From our programming to our planning and our great sponsors. It has to be consistent. There has to always be something different, a little twist — that’s the creative part of it, just like music. But our goal is to be consistent. Not to be the biggest but to be the best in class at what we do.”  

Communications and community

CGI Rochester International Jazz Festival is no stranger to building up its community through the power of good music — that’s how they have continued to host and grow their festival for the last 20 years. To ensure they communicate successfully with event attendees, vendors, sponsors, and everyone else on their email list, they use Constant Contact to segment their audiences, schedule communications, access reporting, and collect registration information. One centralized platform helps them keep everything about pre- and post-festival as smooth as jazz.