Remember, You Have A Date With Us

Okay, a topic seemed to beg me to write on it today– Keeping connected with those who purchase tickets in advance. There were a couple of incidents today that demanded I give some thought to the topic. We always bemoan the fact that so few people purchase tickets more than a few days, if not a few hours/minutes, in advance of a performance. Question is- are you doing anything to show your appreciation and concern for those who actually do purchase in advance.

Recently, I have been thinking about doing a better job of serving those who purchase tickets in advance. This was instigated by an unusually large number of will call tickets going unclaimed last year. Most years, we might have one or two groups of tickets that went unclaimed every other performance or so. Last year, there were at least one group of tickets unclaimed every show and near the end of the season, there were 4-5 groups.

Upon review, we generally discovered that the tickets had been order months in advance and surmised that the people may have forgotten they ordered the tickets and hadn’t set up a reminder. Most of these were also tickets that had been ordered over the internet and the person didn’t request mailing. Not having physical tickets laying around the house, it could easily be a case of out of sight and out of mind. I strongly suspect even those who do have their tickets mailed may end up burying them in a drawer or dressers over the course of months and also forget to attend.

I have been considering changing our approach when asking for people’s email addresses so that we can take a more active role in reminding them about the upcoming show. Currently, we ask if people want to be on our email list for our monthly news letter. A fair number of people decline to provide it. I think we can honestly move to saying we want it so we can send people reminders as we see so many people forgetting to attend. Those who purchase over the internet are already getting a reminder in the form of our newsletter a week or so before a performance, but they may not be opening the email and need a subject line indicating it is a reminder that they purchased tickets.

What has made this topic beg me to cover it today is that the director of another arts organization we are partnering with on two performances this Spring contacted me about emailing reminders for those events. So I know I am not the only one thinking this way.

And… today I swung by to pick up my will call tickets for the Hawaii International Film Festival. While I was there, I purchased an additional ticket for a movie two Saturdays hence. Even though I have the ticket in hand, I received an email when I got home thanking me for purchasing the ticket and noting that it had been added to my online itinerary.

I thought this was a good customer service touch. But it also struck me as a possible solution for a problem we face at the theatre. Our customers can actually go online through our system and review their ticket orders as well. The problem we face is that people often create new accounts every time they make a purchase. When people call to ask about their tickets, we often have to look under 3-4 different account numbers to find their orders. Most of the time the account with the highest number has the most recent activity, but that isn’t always the case if they have remembered old usernames and passwords.

What I am thinking is that regardless of whether a person makes a purchase on or offline, we should arrange to have a follow up message sent that emphasizes using their account to review their itinerary. If people think about their account in the context of assisting them with arranging their lives and are getting more frequent reminders about what their account number is, they may use the same account more consistently.

Now to talk to the powers that be about whether we can activate something like that…

The Little Things Are More Engaging Than You Think

If you are like me, the changes in the economy and people’s expectations about their interactions with the arts probably has you avidly watching for the new theories, techniques and technologies that may be relevant to your operations. Faced with uncertainty and rapid change, it is easy to forget that there are simple little gestures which we repeat over and over whose performance our audiences value. The explicit, big gestures using the newest techniques may pique interest and get them in the door, but it is going to be the small, mundane things that help keep them.

Some of these are passive things that are part of the organizational culture which we barely recognize we do. They don’t require a lot of time and energy but result in constructive activity. It can be something as easy as just leaving the door open as an invitation for something to happen.

I met today with one of the architects working on our facility renovation. I am anticipate we will be having a lot of these sort of meetings which cover small changes that will have a significant impact on the way audiences experience our facility.

One thing I talked to him about was putting more outlets in our scene shop. This isn’t to accommodate more power tools, but rather to accommodate the gathering of students and others. At the moment, the table area we typically use for meetings, lunch and effecting repairs has started to turn into a learning commons. Students are plugging in so many computers and other devices that they have extension cords crossing in front of the staircase to my office which I subsequently trip over.

I realized this afternoon that this gathering is actually the result of a decision I made three years ago to make the area more welcoming. Prior to that, on days we didn’t have classes or activities in the shop, I would leave the shop door locked and the lights off. All the better to show how ecologically responsible we were by keeping our energy usage to a minimum. Students were theoretically supposed to enter through another door to attend classes but often passed through the shop if the door was open.

As enrollment grew over the last few years and I saw exterior gathering areas becoming more crowded, I started to leave the lights on and the door open on a regular basis. Over that time, the number of people seeking a place to study or chat grew (granted, a little strange given that scene shops are noisy places, but there you are.)

Now we have faculty from visual arts and music who don’t normally teach in our building coming in to eat their lunch. The area has become something of a learning commons and collaborative space for students and faculty. I have students designing a poster and postcard for the show next month running up to my office with their thumb drives to get feedback on their work. Before the hammering started this afternoon, one of the music teachers was pounding on the meeting tables to teach a percussion sequence to a student.

I don’t know how long this may last. I can definitely attribute some of this activity to the dynamics between specific students and that may disappear when they graduate.

I can’t directly link any increase in attendance to this gathering of students so leaving the door open hasn’t helped my revenue situation much in a time when that is increasingly becoming a concern. However, since no one on staff has to design a poster or postcard for the next show, we are able to spend that time in other pursuits. When it comes time to distribute the materials, I bet the students will be interested in helping given their ownership of the piece. This afternoon, the students helped populate areas of the theatre during a photo shoot we were doing in support of a space naming campaign we hope to launch fairly soon. Potentially, their presence might yield income if those images are used in the campaign.

I know this sounds a little vague and hard to quantify. What I am advocating for is basically not forgetting about the assets you have to offer to your community and making them available for use by your constituencies. Some activities may take a little more effort than just leaving doors unlocked and lights on. For example, even though you want to go home, you leave the concession stand open, the lobby lights on and the restrooms open while people stand around chatting and chatting and chatting because the welcoming environment creates an intangible, but valuable positive impression of the organization even though it isn’t as effortless as it may appear.

In some cases you may be able turn a weakness and inaction into a strength. Don’t have money for landscaping? Plant wild flowers that attract butterflies. The front area won’t seem as much a rambling mess with butterflies flitting around.

What you do may not even be connected with your physical plant. Maybe the diner everyone on staff eats at all the time can turn into the site of an impromptu consultation session on how to create haunted houses and wire up holiday displays. That sort of thing reminds everyone that 1) Your organization contributes to the economy by patronizing area business; 2) Enhances the value of the diner in the community; 3) Makes people aware of the knowledge and expertise represented by your organization. I am sure there are fourth, fifth and beyond reasons, but note none of these have anything to do with specifically trying to attract people to your shows. Yet they engage your community at the cost of making a little extra effort at a place you were going to anyway.

It is key that you treat these sort of activities like giving someone a gift– you can’t have an expectation of something in return. If there are positive results, it may take years for it to manifest in a manner you can attribute to your efforts but it may not do so in the way you anticipated. Just as in personal relationships, what you value and want from your friendship with someone may not be the same as what your friend perceives as the valuable aspects of their relationship with you.

Criticizing The Performance, Not The Audience That Enjoyed It

This weekend I went to see a show with some friends. I enjoyed most of it, except for the lead actor. It was clear to me that while the rest of the actors were invested in the reality of the play, his character knew he was the hero. Where everyone else had to react to the unexpected changes in the universe, he anticipated what was coming and manipulated the universe. Some of it may have been the director’s choice, but given the other actors were invested and he wasn’t, I believed most of it was the actor’s choices.

As the show ended, it was clear my friends enjoyed every moment of the show and didn’t perceive the things I did. I knew they were going to ask me what I thought. My immediate worry was, how am I going to talk about this show which they clearly enjoyed without implying they shouldn’t have. And how can I explain what I thought was wrong without suggesting that they lacked the intelligence or perception to notice it.

Basically, how can I talk about my experience without sounding like the stereotypical intellectual snob associated with the arts. My friends won’t take much offense, but whatever approach I used would essentially be practice for dealing with the general public. If I was talking about a show in my theatre, I am really never going to have this sort of conversation because few people would ask what I thought about my own show. (I also realized how many arts experiences I have by myself or with other arts people where conversations can be a little more frank.)

One of those who accompanied me is a landscape architect so I decided to use his profession to provide context for my comments. I would explain my problems with the lead actor as I did in the first paragraph expounding on what I mean by investment in reality and why that is important. Since the show was a comedy, I used the example of the candy wrapping episode in I Love Lucy, where regardless of how bizarre a situation got, we were rooting for Lucy and Ethel because they believed in the reality of the run away assembly line and their need to succeed.

I explained that because I had experience in the performing arts, the problems were apparent to me where it might not be to them. If they enjoyed the show, that is great. Being able to recognize these thing is a mixed blessing- It is helpful if you are in a position to fix the problem, but a hinders one’s enjoyment of many performances where one isn’t in control.

I mentioned how it was possible for me to walk through a garden and admire the flowers while my landscape architect friend noticed all the problems with drainage and general appropriateness with the design. None of this means the flowers are any less attractive just as nothing I perceived invalidates the experience they had at the show.

Now yes, among ourselves as arts people we can, and do, have long discussions about how audiences attribute more value to their experience than is warranted and give standing ovations to barely mediocre work. But that isn’t a conversation we can have with the general public without causing a lot of resentment.

Given that I was dealing with my friends who had the capacity to forgive any offense I might offer, I can’t say the general approach I used in this situation will work in most cases. I have to imagine though that it can be effective to offer an honest, snark free, appraisal of your own experience which acknowledges that one’s insight and perception, while highly informed, isn’t necessary for others to share.

I felt my explanation was successful because I was able to be honest and provide some education about acting and directing choices without coming across as if I were lecturing the ignorant. It was helpful to be able to be able to draw a parallel between the abilities we both developed as a result of our professions to illustrate how artistic criticism is no more intellectually inaccessible than any other form of discernment that is cultivated over time.

The same parallels can be drawn for pretty much any profession or avocation that a person has been involved for many years to create a common frame of reference. No one gets overly concerned that their accountant feels superior to them because they can’t spot mistakes on a balance sheet with a glance. They can be worried about how it might look if they don’t understand a performance or painting, though.

As I write this, I recall my post from Friday in which I quote Stephen Tepper and George Kuh talking about the training creatives receive. I occurs to me that while anyone may develop a discernment related to their profession and avocation, the resulting abilities are not necessarily equal. Those in the arts are specifically trained to look at things with a critical and deliver and receive critiques. Those seeking accounting degrees aren’t regularly asked to look at their classmates’ work and discuss whether it adheres to the generally accepted accounting practices. In that respect, it is understandable that people may experience a little anxiety at the ease with which creatives (which includes landscape architects) can and will discuss perceived problems.

Brains, Rather Than Butts, In The Seats

Ever since it was announced back in July, I have been waiting for Arts MidWest to post their video from the talk given by Andrew McIntyre provocatively titled, Arts Marketing is Dead: Long Live The Audience. The video was posted last week (or at least they tweeted that it was posted then) so I got right to watching.

McIntyre is a founder of Morris Hargreaves McIntyre which has developed a system of audience segmentation being used in Europe and a number of the British Commonwealth nations. The talk, while an hour long, is broken up into segments itself so you can view parts of it and then easily return to it and continue if you can’t view it all in one sitting.

What McIntyre says is dead, or rather needs to be dead, is the underlying idea espoused by Danny Newman in Subscribe Now that vilified the single ticket buyer for not allowing the arts organization to illuminate their life. McIntyre says that while ticketing philosophy has changed, the underlying philosophy underpinning that idea remains. Most arts organizations view those who are not attending as having a deficiency in their cultural diet that their product can fulfill.

McIntyre says that the focus of most marketing is on people who are immediately loyal, not on those who haven’t been to a show in a number of years. The practice of cleaning a database doesn’t recognize that the cycle of attendance for most people is actually one that skips a couple years. He speaks of conducting focus groups with audience members who speak enthusiastically about the arts organization but whose previous attendance was four years prior. These people have a long history of being associated with the organization, it is just at 2-3 year intervals. According to McIntyre, these people are apparently just as likely to support an organization over the course of decades as someone who attends annually.

McIntyre doesn’t mention what an ideal period for retaining contact information with what appears to be former supporters might be. I suspect that it may be specific to each community based on various factors including the transient nature of the population. As he was talking about this, my first thought was that you should be clearing your mailing list of people who didn’t seem to want a relationship with you so you weren’t sending them unwanted mail.

That said, I basically use attendees from the previous 5 seasons as the basis of my annual mailing list. I occasionally get a call from people who are concerned that they didn’t know about a show because they know they are on our mailing list and have always gotten our brochure. But if we haven’t captured their name in the last five years either because they haven’t attended or made a purchase at the door when it wasn’t practical to collect their contact information, they eventually get excluded from our list.

McIntyre cautions against relying too much on technology noting that Facebook didn’t invent community and Twitter didn’t invent word of mouth. The arts are about connecting people with people so more direct and personal contact is needed to maintain your relationship. The typical practice has been push marketing where you push empty seats on the community rather than pull marketing where you try to engage people to become involved with you.

He makes some rather humorous observations about why audience development as a concept is on the way out. He says audience development has never been clearly defined as an organizational activity. For marketing it is a euphemism for marketing staff, for education people it is euphemism for outreach, for finance it is a euphemism for box office development and for artistic directors, it is a less objectionable term than marketing.

It has been about how many people you can get involved rather than how deeply you can get them involved. McIntyre says in the UK until recently audience development has been out going out to get people who don’t want to come. The task, however, is not to rescue stranded audiences. They are quite happy with the cultural experiences they have, thank you very much. It is the arts organizations who are stranded and so audience development is really about making the organizations relevant to audiences.

He is clear to point out that audience focus doesn’t mean audience led. Everything is still artistically lead. He gives the example of a theatre in Toronto, Pass Muraille, that has a program called the Buzz Festival where they have audiences view 10 minute segments of shows in development and then pass out surveys asking people to answer specific questions about whether the choices were working – “Did you believe the motivation/relationships of X characters in this moment?” By the time the full show reaches the stage, there is such a buzz and audiences have such an investment in the show, that they sell very well.

The playwrights and directors are still making the decisions, but they are getting the feedback they need to inform these decisions. McIntyre says that in the past this sort of engagement with the audience was viewed as dumbing down the product and so maintaining a high degree of isolation was sought. Audiences are more intelligent and creative than they are given credit for and don’t deserve this level of disdain.

McIntyre says we need to treat people as brains in seats, not butts in seats. (Erk, maybe I need to change the name of this blog. I can see how it is complicit in this mindset.)

It is a little too long to cover here, but in the 6th segment of the video, McIntyre covers the Seven Pillars of Audience Focus that they feel are embodied by those most successful at engaging with their audiences.

Among the changes McIntyre says that need to be made: An organization must be vision lead. It can’t exist only to make enough money to continue to exist. Organizations need to stop fearing audiences and feel the need for peer approval because it holds them back. Stop trying to build brand loyalty in favor of building brand equity where people feel they have a stake in the organization. Need to know more about our audiences than the average income people in their zip code. Everyone in the organization must be involved in the marketing. What each person does needs to grow the organization and its brand.

McIntyre talks about a self evaluation tool they developed so you can arrive at a score for your organization and then use it again multiple times to chart your progress. He says he is less interested in the score than in the discussion the score and test generate. I thought maybe it was online, but I couldn’t seem to find it on their website.