Indianapolis Symphonic Choir
Visibility, Capacity, and Economic Growth
A Communication Strategy for Building Audience and Revenue
For nearly 90 years, the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir (ISC) has brought people together through choral music. By 2024, the organization was ready to grow. It had ambitious programming, an established audience, and a powerful legacy, but no dedicated internal marketing or communication professional to consistently turn those strengths into visibility, engagement, and ticket sales.
Polished Strategic Communications joined ISC ahead of its 2024–2025 performance season to provide that capacity.
Two seasons later, the impact extends well beyond individual campaigns. ISC has earned national media attention, expanded its community and media relationships, strengthened its digital presence, and built a more coordinated approach to audience development and ticket sales.
During the 2025–2026 season, overall ticket sales increased 11.63% over the previous season, and ticket revenue reached 102.57% of budget.
Now, as ISC begins its 90th season, it enters this milestone year with something it did not have two years ago: a communications strategy, systems, relationships, and visual foundation designed to support its next chapter of growth.
Results at a Glance
11.63% increase in overall ticket sales during the 2025–2026 season.
102.57% of budgeted ticket revenue achieved during the 2025–2026 season.
164.6M+ potential earned media reach in 2025.
$1.98M estimated earned media value in 2025.
6.36% increase in Festival of Carols ticket sales.
7.22% increase in audience and 31.77% increase in income for Voices of the Spirit.
Established long-term media and community relationships to extend ISC's reach.
First comprehensive visual identity developed ahead of ISC's 90th season.
The Problem
Ready to Grow Without the Capacity to Market that Growth
ISC didn't have a story problem. It had a capacity problem.
A lean staff managed the organization, supported its singers, led development, and advanced an ambitious artistic vision, leaving limited capacity for sustained media outreach, year-round audience engagement, and the consistent promotion required to reach beyond existing ticket buyers.
ISC didn't need to reinvent the organization. It needed the communication infrastructure to support its growth.
The challenge reflects a larger reality across the arts. SMU DataArts found that 44% of nonprofit arts and culture organizations operated at a deficit in 2024, while average revenue and expenses remained below pre-pandemic levels. For arts organizations balancing ambitious missions with lean teams and constrained resources, marketing can't become one more responsibility for an already full staff. It has to support the organization's work.
Enter Polished
Turning the Strategic Plan Into Action
Polished stepped in as ISC's external strategic communication and marketing partner, providing both the strategy and execution the organization lacked internally.
The work began with ISC's strategic priorities: increase visibility, deepen audience engagement, expand and diversify audiences, distinguish the brand, and build relationships that broaden the Choir's reach. Rather than treating communications as a separate marketing function, Polished integrated it into how ISC pursued those goals.
Bi-weekly team meetings connected communication directly to organizational priorities and upcoming programming. Public relations, social media, original photo and video content, paid media, email, ticket-sales campaigns, community partnerships, and website content worked together rather than as individual tactics. Campaign decisions were informed by ticket-sales performance, allowing the team to evaluate where additional communication or promotion could support sales throughout each campaign.
The approach also complemented ISC's internal expertise. Polished did not replace the knowledge of the organization's staff and artistic leadership; it created the communications capacity and infrastructure to translate that expertise into stronger audience engagement.
For the first time, ISC had a coordinated communication strategy built around where the organization wanted to go.
The Results
Finding New Ways Into the ISC Story
That strategy also changed how ISC approached individual performances.
Rather than simply promoting what was being performed, Polished looked for the larger stories that could help audiences understand why the work mattered.
Voices of the Spirit, ISC's October 2025 performance of Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard, became a strong example. Polished centered the campaign on the work's themes of empathy, inclusion, hope, and belonging, creating opportunities to connect the performance to a larger community conversation.
WISH-TV, WRTV, and the Indianapolis Recorder covered the performance locally, while MSN and Yahoo! News carried syndicated coverage nationally. During the 30-day campaign, six social posts reached more than 15,000 people, and Instagram video generated more than 10,000 views. Local Facebook coverage received more than 4,700 reactions and nearly 400 comments.
The results extended to the box office. Voices of the Spirit drew an audience of 485, representing a 7.22% increase in attendance over the prior year, while income increased 31.77%.
Polished paired performance-specific storytelling with a longer-term effort to strengthen ISC's media and community relationships. Collaborations with Mirror Indy, EMBOSS Network, Through2Eyes Indiana, and CityMoms created additional ways to introduce ISC to community members who might not already consider themselves choral-music audiences.
Those relationships were developed for the long term rather than treated as one-time promotional opportunities. Polished looked for meaningful connections between ISC's programming and the audiences each partner already served, giving people a more relevant and trusted introduction to the Choir.
Across 2025, ISC generated approximately 164.6 million in potential earned-media reach and nearly $1.98 million in estimated media value. National syndication accounted for a significant share of that reach, but the growing local presence mattered, too. ISC's Assistant Artistic Director heard from choir members who encountered promotions for upcoming performances on local radio, building excitement and pride around the Choir's growing presence in Indianapolis.
ISC wasn't simply appearing in more places. It was becoming more consistently visible throughout the community it had served for nearly 90 years.
When Communication Meets the Box Office
Festival of Carols demonstrated how that integrated approach could work across one of ISC's most important annual programs.
Throughout the sales cycle, Polished coordinated email, organic and paid digital strategy, public relations, partner amplification, and ticket-sales promotion. Just as importantly, marketing activity did not operate independently from sales performance. Polished and ISC regularly reviewed ticket-sales trends and adjusted campaign activity based on what the data showed.
Festival of Carols ultimately recorded a 6.36% increase in ticket sales over the previous season.
But the stronger measure of progress emerged across ISC's entire 2025–2026 season.
Overall ticket sales increased 11.63% year over year, while ticket revenue finished at 102.57% of budget expectations.
No single campaign, channel, or tactic produced those results. ISC's artistic leadership, singers, staff, board, partners, and audiences all contributed. What changed was the infrastructure surrounding that work: communications became more coordinated, more responsive to performance, and more directly connected to the organization's audience and revenue goals.
Beyond Marketing: Building Organizational Capacity
The impact extended beyond individual campaigns. Polished helped ISC establish repeatable communications processes, strengthen internal coordination around marketing and ticket sales, and create a clearer connection between programming, storytelling, audience development, and revenue.
Strategy and execution were integrated, not separated. Bi-weekly collaboration kept communications tied to organizational priorities. Storytelling focused on why the work mattered, not simply what was being performed. Media and community relationships were cultivated with a long-term view. Campaign decisions were informed by ticket-sales performance. And the entire approach was designed to complement, rather than duplicate, the expertise already inside ISC.
Instead of relying on one-off promotional pushes leading into each concert, ISC now has a framework for communicating throughout the year and across an increasingly diverse range of programming.
That distinction matters for a lean organization. Capacity is not simply having more people available to complete marketing tasks. It is having the strategy, processes, relationships, data, and decision-making structure necessary to make communication more effective.
For ISC, communications became more than a way to promote performances. It became part of the infrastructure supporting audience engagement, visibility, and organizational growth.
Building for the Next 90: Then, Now, and Always
With greater visibility came another opportunity: Make ISC more recognizable wherever audiences encountered it.
As the Choir prepared to enter its 90th season in August 2026, Polished developed the first comprehensive visual identity in ISC's history. ISC already had valuable brand equity in its logo, signature blue, and anniversary theme. Rather than replace those assets, Polished built a flexible visual system around them.
The new identity expands ISC's color palette and typography, establishes consistent photography and logo treatments, and introduces a graphic element inspired by the musical staff lines in the existing logo. Individual performances can now carry their own visual character while remaining unmistakably part of ISC and its 90th season.
The work gives ISC a visual language that can stretch across a season of very different performances, strengthen recognition across audience touchpoints, and create greater consistency as its reach grows.
For an organization celebrating 90 years, the goal wasn't to look like someone new. It was to show audiences more clearly and consistently who ISC has become and where it is going next.
ISC enters its 90th year with something it didn't have two years ago: a communications strategy, systems, relationships, and visual foundation to support the next chapter of its growth.
“Polished came alongside our team at a moment when the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir was ready to grow, but we didn't have the internal capacity to support that growth through marketing and communication,” said Dr. Jennifer Cooper, Executive Director, Indianapolis Symphonic Choir. “They quickly became an extension of our team, bringing both the strategy and the execution to help us reach audiences more consistently, strengthen our visibility, and connect our communication directly to our organizational goals. As we enter our 90th season, we aren't simply doing more marketing. We have a stronger foundation for how we tell our story and invite people to be part of what comes next.”
Your Organization May Already Have the Story. Does It Have the Capacity?
For nonprofit and educational organizations, growth doesn't always require another campaign. Sometimes it requires stronger infrastructure behind the work already happening.
Your organization may already have the mission, programming, expertise, and stories people need to hear. The challenge is building the communications capacity to turn those strengths into greater visibility, deeper engagement, stronger audience response, and measurable growth.
Polished Strategic Communications serves as a strategic communication and marketing partner for organizations that need senior-level strategy and the team to execute it. We connect public relations, digital marketing, paid media, content, visual communication, and audience strategy directly to organizational priorities — so communication doesn't simply create more activity. It helps move the organization forward.
