Dale A. Petroskey may not have the best job in direct marketing, but he comes close.
As president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, he spends his entire working life thinking about baseball and meeting some of the greatest players of all time. It’s like a boyhood dream come true.
But he had his work cut out for him when he joined the Hall of Fame four years ago. For one thing, the living Hall of Famers didn’t seem to care much about it.
It also had a small membership base of roughly 3,700 enthusiasts. The reason was that people visited the Hall in Cooperstown, NY and then "never heard from us again," Petroskey said during a keynote speech during the Direct Marketing Association of Washington’s annual DM Days. "That was sad, and a huge lost opportunity.
In addition, the Hall was run like a mom-and-pop operation, strictly break-even, he continued.
Petroskey rubbed the stars out of his eyes and went to work. His first move was to hire talent from outside the Cooperstown area. He then reached out to the Hall of Fame players in an effort to turn them into a family.
He also and tried to build membership and cultivate the fans. That meant big increases in both prospecting and renewal direct mail.
The Hall mails membership offers to several lists, including the Baseball Weekly subscribers file, and to its own catalog list. (The Hall of Fame catalog is sent to 100,000 people three times a year, Petroskey said.)
The Hall has also started a national exhibition tour at which it shows baseball artifacts and recruits members. Petroskey noted that "350,000 people visited us in Cooperstown last year. The same number saw us in New York and Los Angeles because of the tour."
The Hall has also embraced online media. For example, it ran an online program tied to Black History Month. It drew 20 million students, making it "the biggest classroom in history," Petroskey said. A second program on the Women’s Professional League did even better—it drew 21 million youngsters.
And the Hall now has an e-mail newsletter titled Inside Pitch. Devoted to baseball history, it goes to 26,000 people a week.
Members also were treated better once they were on board. Responding to their taste as documented in surveys, he has upgraded the quarterly magazine, Memories and Dreams, and increased the live events.
He also has responded to the survey finding that members view the change to support baseball education as the greatest benefit of membership. The Hall has fielded an academic team to research the Negro Leagues, that "too little known" relic of a segregated society.
Finally, Petroskey has personally gone out of his way to right old wrongs. He had Roberto Clemente’s plaque restruck so that his name would appear in the proper Latin order, with his mother’s maiden name last.
Has all this worked? Yes: The Hall has tripled its membership to 12,000, and it has now much closer relations with the players and their families.
No wonder Petroskey sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" to the audience (in a fair baritone, too).
