Back when the earth was cooling, the occasion of myfirst entry was having a letter I wrote to The Artful Manager appear on the Artsjournal website.
The letter essentially talked about tapping into community leaders, among them church leaders, to help increase attendance at performances. I am doing well with leaders in other communities giving me a hand in getting the word out, but the church situation has me a little puzzled in some ways.
We have a church rent the theatre every Sunday and see very little cross over to our performances. We have posters with upcoming events plastered all over the building so it is hardly a mystery about what is coming up. Yet we get very few comments made to us or on our surveys saying they heard about the show because they come every Sunday.
Our programming is far from being offensive and is quite appropriate for the family. We just aren’t seeing the results one might expect and I don’t quite know why.
What gets me to thinking about this is that for the next three nights, we have an entirely different church having a worship conference in our space. Most of it will be a lot of praise and worship gospel singing and preaching. Tomorrow they kick the whole thing off with a half hour performances from one of the biggest gospel singers around.
In preparation for this half hour performance, the church has come in and painted our dressing rooms (we have a lot of classes during the year so the facility gets quite a bit of wear and tear) and when I left work tonight, they were carrying in leather sofas for her use.
That’s a heck of a lot of enthusiasm they are investing into making things right for a real short show.
It is also the type of energy I wish I could tap in to.
Next year we are looking at some gospel singers and that will certainly connect with the church audience. However, we are looking at these musicians because they are great musicians first and not to attract the churches.
I book with an eye to taking advantage of the opportunity to bring in great musicians that I think people will enjoy. If there are interested Latino groups available on an annual basis, I will happily grab them because I know people will buy tickets. But I am not looking to fill a Latino slot on my roster every year. Nor am I interested in discarding great opportunities because they don’t fit into gospel slots.
Smart thing to do though might be to co-produce similar events in the future. Promote the event in my brochure, run ticket sales through my box office, let the enthusiatic church members handle hospitality, security and technical equipment since that is where their strengths lay and then split the box office proceeds.
A partnership that plays to our individual strengths might be beneficial to both of us. I don’t know that we will ever generate a crossover interest from the audience, but what we are doing now isn’t meeting with much success. A partnership of this type might also not make economic sense since we experience little financial risk in renting to the group. But we would also realize less of a loss than if we had engaged an artist on that date ourselves since we aren’t bearing all the costs.
The question will be, if we do co-produce with them, is it replacing a show we would have done alone or are we doing it in addition to the shows we would have done and therefore are losing on the potential gains of a rental opportunity?
I will let you know how things shake out next season!