A Standing Ovation for our MSBA Practicum Project

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As the cornerstone of the UC Davis Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) curriculum, students team up on a year-long practicum project—a real-world data analytics consulting project with a corporate or nonprofit partner.

Our team partnered with the UC Davis Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, a world-class performing arts facility just across from the UC Davis Graduate School of Management’s campus home, Gallagher Hall.

When our MSBA team travelled from San Francisco to visit the Mondavi Center for the first time last August, we weren't exactly sure how our data analytics skills would translate into helping such an entertainment venue.

We met with Sarah Herrera, the assistant director of business intelligence, and the Mondavi Center team. They gave us access to data and spreadsheets, answered our questions and shared their ultimate goal to boost audience engagement and fill more seats.

The Analytics Challenge: Increasing Mondavi Center Attendance

Early on, our biggest challenge was understanding exactly why some visitors returned while others didn’t.

We sifted through 14 years of ticket purchase history, breaking down patterns and behaviours to answer the question: “Who was visiting the Mondavi Center?”

Were attendees mostly students looking for affordable entertainment? Families out for a weekend event? Or regular patrons who supported the arts?

We split audiences into four groups: students, first-timers, long-term subscribers and donors. Then we built three dashboards:

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1. A big-picture dashboard showed trends like popular genres, recurring attendance, and donation patterns.
2. A performance-specific dashboard broke down each show's ticket pricing, who attended and donor engagement.
3. Digging deeper, we also designed a third dashboard identifying individuals or households for targeted outreach.

However, our project wasn't just about dashboards. We developed comprehensive email marketing campaigns to put our data insights into direct action:

• Welcome emails for first timers that were warm and to the point, encouraging return visits.
• Reminders with incentives for one-timers that encouraged them back with clear calls to action.
• Thank-you and update emails for subscribers and donors showing appreciation without fluff.

We built each email strategy and tailored it specifically to engage and prompt action from distinct audience segments. Our goal was clear: to foster meaningful interactions that would genuinely resonate and lead to increased attendance.

Ten months after our first visit to the Mondavi Center, we presented our recommendations to their team in late May.

We presented clear, usable tools. We turned an academic exercise into a strategic marketing toolkit.

The Mondavi Center team shared that the dashboards we developed will be a valuable tool in guiding their decisions, offering clarity on audience trends and engagement patterns.

They appreciated the depth of the customer journey analysis, noting how it uncovers meaningful insights into patron behaviour.

The proposed email strategies, they said, will help them focus their marketing efforts with greater precision and impact.

Win-win for Partners and Students

The practicum project is a win-win opportunity that delivers measurable value to both students and partner organizations.

Practicum partners receive well-developed solutions to their business analytics challenges, along with actionable tools, usable insights and fresh perspectives from a team of MSBA students with a faculty advisor. MSBA students gain hands-on experience, mentorship and the chance to make a visible impact.

This experience showed us clearly that data isn't just numbers, it's a practical tool that organizations can use to achieve real goals.