Nicole Wetzell speaks at arts, culture, and nonprofit conferences focused on marketing, audience development, ticketing strategy, and behavioral science. She's particularly suited to sessions for performing arts organizations, cultural institutions, and nonprofit leaders working on audience growth, subscription retention, and community building. Both keynote and breakout session formats are available.

Nicole's speaking topics focus on the intersection of behavioral science, audience development, and community building for arts and cultural organizations. Common session themes include how to turn one-time ticket buyers into loyal patrons, applying behavioral science principles like Pre-Suasion and the endowment effect to arts marketing, building community-based loyalty in a time of widespread loneliness, and aligning marketing, ticketing, and customer experience into what she calls the Trifecta. Custom topics are available for conferences with a specific theme or audience focus.

This session is designed for arts and culture leaders — marketing directors, executive directors, CMOs, VPs of Marketing, and CEOs — at performing arts organizations, museums, and cultural institutions. It's especially valuable for teams working on audience retention, subscription growth, community building, or reversing the audience decline many arts organizations have experienced post-pandemic.

Nicole spent 14 years inside a major performing arts institution — the Auditorium Theatre — before founding NEW Marketing Solutions. Her sessions are grounded in the operational realities arts marketing directors and executive directors actually face, not theoretical frameworks disconnected from the day-to-day work. Every session blends peer-reviewed behavioral science research with practical, immediately applicable takeaways — often including a hands-on activity or discussion attendees can bring back to their season planning.

Conference organizers can reach out through the NEW Marketing Solutions contact page to start a conversation about speaking opportunities. Nicole is open to a range of arrangements — including honorariums, travel coverage, and waived conference fees in exchange for speaking. She's particularly interested in conferences that value substantive, research-backed content and want to bring genuine expertise to their attendees rather than pay-to-play sponsor sessions.

Pre-Suasion is a behavioral science concept developed by researcher Robert Cialdini, focused on how the moment before a message is delivered shapes how it's received. For arts organizations, Pre-Suasion techniques influence whether someone even considers buying a ticket, subscribing, or returning for a second visit. Small shifts in what audiences see, hear, and feel in the lead-up to a purchase decision can dramatically increase both urgency and long-term connection to your organization.

Building community means shifting from a transactional relationship with ticket buyers to an identity-based relationship with audience members who feel like they belong to something. Practical elements include creating consistent gathering spaces beyond ticketed performances, developing shared rituals and traditions, giving audiences low-friction ways to interact with each other, and treating audience members as contributors rather than just consumers. This is especially important now — research consistently shows loneliness is one of the biggest public health issues facing modern society, and arts organizations are uniquely positioned to be part of the solution.