It is always a good idea to periodically review how your front line points of contact are interacting with your patrons. Even if you think those supervising these people are on the same page as you, you may find that it is not the case. I know that some people call their own organizations and use an assumed identity to assess how patrons are being treated. Many times you can just walk in the room and keep an ear open, of course.

I bring this topic up because I came across a situation which dismayed me a little. For some reason we have been receiving many negative comments about our $2 handling fee lately. It is the only fee we assess in addition to the face value of the ticket. Some people have outright taken the ignorance is bliss approach and encouraged me to add it to the ticket price so it is invisible to them.

I have considered doing so except that next year I hope to become integrated into a centralized ticketing system which has a mandatory $2 handling fee. It would be even worse public relations to eliminate it for a season and then appear to be re-instituting it.

A number of people have accused the clerks of not informing them about the fee. The ticket office manager urged all the clerks to remember to inform people of the fee.

I was listening in recently and realized that the new approach the clerks were taking was actually encouraging people not to buy tickets. While I don’t encourage a hard sell approach of doing anything you can to keep someone on the phone until they buy something, I do expect that if someone calls with the intent of committing to attending a performance, our employees aren’t waving them off.

The first thing they were telling people was that if they bought tickets, they would be charged a handling fee. Most callers said they would call back or come the night of the show without buying. When I pointed out that the approach they were using was giving people the message that they shouldn’t buy, I was told that they wanted to make sure people knew about the handling fee. There was some sense in their response that it was unethical to wait until later in the transaction.

I told them there was nothing unethical about the standard procedure where they told people the price, cited the handling fee and then gave the total with the handling fee. (I suspected they may have departing from it a little which may have been the source of complaints.) I told them I had no problem with them going through the procedure before they took a person’s credit card number. The existence of the handling fee is a regular point of information just like the recitation of the no returns/exchanges and no recording devices policy and didn’t need special attention called to it prior to even finding out how many tickets a person wanted.

I was pretty amazed to then be subjected to rolling eyes and sighs of frustration as if I were asking them to hide a charge that appears in either 10 or 12 point type and no later than third on our list of policies in our brochure and web pages. As no one said they were going to refuse, I let the sighing go.

I have been keeping my ears open since then and as best I can tell everyone is generally keeping to the general procedure. Advanced ticket sales have increased. Though that may have more to do with the appeal of the upcoming artists than a less alarming approach to the existence of our handling fee.

We will see how things go as the rest of the season runs. At some point I think I will bring up the topic again and ask people if they feel more comfortable using the standard procedure. First I will listen a little closer to see if they are using the standard procedure or have strayed a little and also check if they sound comfortable and natural using it.

My audience is starting to see the writing on the wall. From one of the surveys we received after a performance this weekend, it seemed a patron looked around at the low attendance and started worrying. On the survey she wrote that if we brought the group back again along with a number of other prominent companies in the field, word of mouth would fill the seats.

The thing is, attendance to shows in that performing field have been dropping recently. One of the colleagues with whom I block book dropped out of this company’s tour because she is seeing lower attendance for these events. The irony is that the attendance that my patron thought was so low is actually what I expected. By reducing the number of these events I do each year I jacked attendance up from abysmal to low. I still lost a huge amount of money, but not as much as I would have had I presented more events from this genre.

Alas, name recognition and word of mouth doesn’t seem to do it any more for this field. We had a rude awakening last year when a group headed by a charismatic and fairly famous leader which had always attracted substantial crowds drew a minuscule audience.

It had been about 4 years since last they visited and neither the quality of their work or source of the leader’s fame had diminished. In fact, just last weekend a man approached me and said they had seen the group last year and was the group we were bringing in this week nearly as good. The company set a standard by which those who follow are judged. People eagerly flocked to workshops and master classes the company conducted last year.

Their wider appeal, and I fear that of their chosen genre, has apparently waned.

What was interesting about the survey form was that this is the first time in my experience an audience member has expressed concern that low attendance might mean the absence of a favored art form from future seasons. People have feared a venue will shut down due to low attendance, but never worried about the exclusion of a genre. I’m sure people are aware that it is a consequence. Television shows are canceled all the time because of lack of interest.

I am wondering if it might be beneficial to recruit her in the future to spread the word about events. By which I mean, I wonder how large her specific social circle is. I have had modest success in using word of mouth for ethnic events, but haven’t identified as good networks for performances that don’t have a specific ethnic appeal. I wonder if concern that an area of interest would disappear from programming provides a motivation similar to that of a person wishing to promote an event representing his/her ethnicity.

This raises an interesting question. Do you tell people that you are considering cutting back or eliminating a programming area? If you do it poorly it will come across as manipulative. Especially if you make an announcement from stage that because there are only 250 people in the audience, next year Shakespeare will cease to appear on your stage. Even if you find a way not to sound manipulative, there is a temptation to use such pronouncements to cause panic and fill the seats.

On the other hand, administrators often get up in front of their audience and get articles placed in the newspaper that tell the community without their help, the performance space will close. Surely you are asking much less of people if you tell them that you know they love Shakespeare, you love performing Shakespeare but without more interest, you can’t justify doing Shakespeare. You are willing to provide posters, brochures, talking points, photos, etc to the Shakespeare supporters if they would mention it to their friends and talk about how the Bard’s work isn’t as intimidating as it might first appear.

Yes, this is exactly what social networking sites like Myspace.com make it easy to do already. Most of your audience probably isn’t on Myspace and don’t quite realize the power of a quick email referral. On the positive side, once you mobilize them they will probably make more impassioned pleas for their friends to attend than “Zomg! This show rox! See it!”