The Myrna Loy Center maintains a daily updated web page that provides timely information to the community on the Center's films, live performances, and educational offerings, as well as summaries of its most recent happenings. The web page also provides its visitors with streaming audio and video previews of the Center's upcoming live performances.

In May 2000, as a part of the renewal fundraising campaign that raised over $275,000, the Myrna Loy Center launched an aggressive outreach and marketing strategy that incorporated, as one of its major components, the Internet. The use of the Internet provided the Myrna Loy Center with the ability to communicate with its patrons in an efficient manner. Based on its early success in applying the Internet for outreach and marketing activities, the Myrna Loy Center, in November 2000, expanded its use of the Internet by providing its patrons with Internet Ticketing and streaming audio and video previews of the Center's upcoming live performances.

As part of its audience development strategy for its performances, the Myrna Loy offers its patrons the opportunity to use the most up-to-date Internet technology for their listening and watching pleasure. The Myrna Loy Center's web page has experienced a steady growth in the use of streaming audio and video. For the convenience of its patrons, both RealPlayer and Microsoft Media Player formats are provided to web site visitors. The application of streaming audio and video on our web page allows our patrons to preview live performance events, as well as performing artists to demonstrate their talents to our local audience and web site visitors around the world. The Myrna Loy's Multimedia Center web page is a very popular area on our web site. In addition to providing audio and video preview materials in its Upcoming Performances and Multimedia Center web pages, we have supplemented our multimedia offerings by providing links to the official films web pages. These pages offer audio trailers that allow our film patrons to preview movies in our Films web page. In addition, the Myrna Loy Center provides a separate Multimedia Programming section on its web page; the page provides references to both live and archived performances at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Millennium Stage and Storytime on Line) and archived performances of Prairie Home Companion and Saint Paul Sunday.

Since May 2000, the Myrna Loy Center's patrons have continued to increase their use of

the web page. The Films, Upcoming Performances, Gallery of Photos, Multimedia Center, Education, Our Proud Sponsors, Ticketing, and News at the Myrna Loy are among the most popular web pages on our site. In June 2005, there were 17,620 visits to the Myrna Loy Center's web page.

In 2003, the Myrna Loy Center expanded its use of the Internet by creating electronic Program Evaluation Forms that allow our patrons to comment on our Artists in the Schools programs and our Live Performances. These forms provide the Center with the ability to receive timely responses from our patrons. Our electronic Program Evaluation Forms have become an important feedback mechanisms for allowing our patrons to communicate with the Center.

The Myrna Loy Center is excited about using the Internet in implementing part of its outreach/marketing program. The design strategy of the web pages is highly focused on keeping the information up to date, as well as organizing the pages so that the information can be easily accessed. Our volunteer webmaster, Dr. Allen Lefohn, uses very sophisticated computer programming languages (e.g., javascript, java, and Flash) in implementing our web site. Conscious decisions are made to limit the use of these technologies so that most of our web site visitors, including those who use telephone modems and older browser versions, can efficiently access the information on our site. Streaming audio and video are optimized for 56K modems. The Myrna Loy Center is collecting quantitative information concerning the number of visitors, most popular web pages, and other helpful data so that the web site is optimized for its patrons. As broadband use expands over the next few years, we will be expanding our use of streaming audio and video options.

We use our quantitative statistical information to identify the strengths and weaknesses associated with the use of the Internet for our audience development activities. We are excited about the progress we have made in utilizing the Internet. We welcome your suggestions for ways to improve our use of the Internet. Please email us with your suggestions.

Myrna Loy Center 15 North Ewing Helena, Montana 59601