New Music USA supports and empowers their community of performers, composers, and new music appreciators through direct funding, cohort learning, mentorship, and advocacy. Since 2011, they’ve awarded over $15,000,000 in grants to support new music creation and performance throughout the United States. They amplify voices that have not been sufficiently heard, and provide resources to help talented creators thrive.
New Music USA came to us with the support of the Bloomberg Digital Accelerator program. They had recently migrated from Kindful to Bloomerang, and wanted to consolidate several different software platforms to create a central hub for all of their data. We led a discovery process to learn more about their other platforms and needs, and found that the original plan of moving all contact data into Bloomerang wasn’t going to be the right solution for them, since their teams had workflows that were built around the strengths of the other platforms. For example, Bloomerang has email functionality, but it’s not as robust as Mailchimp. Also, Bloomerang was an awkward fit for grant applications, so it would not have fit their submission review workflows supported by SurveyMonkey Apply. Instead of pushing all contact data into Bloomerang, we recommended keeping their other platforms in use, and strategically building integrations to engage their audiences at a level that was relevant (and cost appropriate) to those individuals.
As we developed the integrations for their processes, we encountered the usual range of platform disconnects and disparities, which we resolved as we went. SurveyMonkey Apply, for example, only exports numeric IDs for their field values, and those numeric IDs change if you change the order of values in a field. We were able to determine evergreen questions related to contact data and then map these IDs to match data valid in Mailchimp and Bloomerang. We then worked with their team to develop reasonable workflows for replicating these sections in new grants and setup the automation so it would dynamically find the contact section in applications and apply the custom mapping to that data. Additionally, because SurveyMonkey Apply only offers webhook triggers related to application activity which tended to create duplicate contacts in Bloomerang, we documented regular import processes that would help maintain database integrity without tedious manual data entry for staff.
In addition to bridges between the systems, we provided cross-platform training. We worked with the communications team to improve their Mailchimp segmentation, to reduce unsubscribes from constituents who weren’t receiving the right volume of outreach for their level of engagement. We trained their grant programs team so they could connect new grant applications to existing n8n workflows for new seasons.
Throughout this work, the New Music USA team contributed greatly to the project’s success. Their project lead understood New Music USA from the program and operations side, working closely with us to evaluate the competing data structures in the different platforms, so we could make recommendations that were grounded in the details. There’s no substitute for clarity and pragmatism in a data project, and New Music USA brought both.
By the end of the project, the integrations were humming along, and we trained their team in both routine updates and changes to the integrations (reading the data out of SurveyMonkey Apply to map new fields as needed to Mailchimp or Bloomerang, etc.), and also in evaluating and responding to routine notifications from n8n.