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Secure those Tickets

October 12, 2004

by:

Joe Patti

Well I have been really busy the last couple days and have met with some limited success in my objectives. One of my projects for the last few months has been to get secure online for patrons that didn’t require paying a large service fee for the luxury like Ticketmaster charges. Despite being a part of a university, the many IT offices I contacted all said they couldn’t support my modest needs.

I have been exploring many options from outside vendors. Many of them were dead ends and those that weren’t, were rather expensive solutions. Finally I found a local provider that had a store front as part of their offerings and the monthly fee was really quite reasonable.

Of course, it was too good to be true. The storefront they had was not really customizable at all. I would have had to list all my shows with no way to differentiate between them or link directly to specific listings. And what was worse, I couldn’t have 2 prices for the same product, in this case a show.

So, I upgraded to the next package which was essentially double the price, but did allow a bit more control. The solution was equally disappointing though. I still couldn’t have two prices for the same product, even if I had separate sizes or colors (two aspects I could customize with my own terms)

I worked around this by having separate catalogs, each with 2 “products” for each event–in this case, adult and student tickets. This works a little better, but is still unwieldly since people have to add adult tickets and then click the back button to add student tickets.

Another good thing is that I can link directly to the event in my online store from my website so patrons only have to deal with navigating the show they are interested in.

But as I said, the utility is limited. I can’t redirect people back to my webpage or to my thank you page. I can’t change font sizes so the titles of the shows are really tiny and in the left hand corner. If anyone has a suggestion for a provider with good storefront packages or good software I might get my provider to load on my account for me, I would love to hear about it.

The interface was unwieldy and frustrating to use properly so the whole process was extremely time consuming.

However, I definitely think this is something people want. Even without really promoting the fact we offer this service to our audience base, we have already started doing a fair bit of business averaging about 20-30 ticket sales a day the last three business days.

If you are interested in seeing how I set it up, you can go to here

Believe me, it is incredibly rough and basic. If I wasn’t desperate to offer the service, I was really tempted to keep looking. Obviously, I am not satisfied and will continue to seek alternatives, even given the fact I may only need the service for less than a year while I wait for the university to integrate me in their centralized ticketing.

Audience Relations

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Planning for Next Season

October 4, 2004

by:

Joe Patti

So I haven’t started my current season yet and I am already deeply involved in planning the next one. Given that I am new to the position and don’t even know how people will react to the upcoming shows, I am going to be making a lot of assumptions about what people like.

Having looked over the materials from my visit to Spokane, I have to submit a list of names of people I would like to present to the president of the booking consortium tomorrow.

Tonight I went over the house of one of my co-workers and I showed them the DVDs and publicity materials for the performers I am thinking of booking. The reason for this was two-fold- One, they have a better sense of what sells than I do. Even though they may be unfamiliar with some of the genres I am looking at introducing to the theatre, they do provide educated viewpoints in a number of areas.

Another reasons is an attempt at the open book management that I mentioned way back in February. I hope to involve/inform the staff about the elements that go into the decisionmaking and budgeting processes in the hopes that they will become invested in improving matters and controlling costs.

It occurs to me though that open book management may not work too well in organizations where people don’t have anything to gain or lose. Being part of a state institution, there is no opportunity for profit sharing, bonuses, extra vacation, etc. Turning a profit could result in the ability to buy new equipment or perhaps hiring more people to help out. Or those things could occur if we don’t.

Because of collective bargaining agreements, I am reminded that it would take one of them killing someone in broad daylight in front of 10 unimpugniable witnesses and a guy with a camera and yelling “At last my 6 months of meticiously planning has come to fruition” to actually cause them to be fired. So there is nothing much too lose either.

On still another hand, the folks I work with do have pride in their work and are glad I am here with a vision so there is plenty of opportunity to rally their support to cut costs and work more effectively and effect improvements. So I am optimistic.

Management Philosophy

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Art, by Mob

September 30, 2004

by:

Joe Patti

I came across and article from Slate I was reading way back when I started my move–Art Mobs. The author, Clive Thompson explores the power mobs have had recently, especially in relation to the arts.

While many artists draw influences from many sources, the common wisdom is that art created by committee, rather than by a unified single vision (albeit sometimes shared by 2-3 collaborators) is usually crap. Thompson’s article shows that in some cases, that isn’t necessarily so.

Witness Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written by grace of contributions of the masses, which in three years has exceeded the size of the venerable Encyclopedia Brittanica. (It has nearly triple the number of articles and double the number of words)

Thompson also cites the generally successful mob creation of letters via voting whether a pixel should be white or black. On the other hand, when faced with less concrete concepts like creating a face or a goat, by voting pixels black or white, the mob had a hard time creating anything that resembled..well..anything.

Likewise, the person who intitiated Wikipedia has tried to get mobs to write textbooks. Some projects are doing okay, but most are not because of the lack of a unified vision and voice.

These are really intriguing experiments and results. But the application for the arts manager can be fairly simple in some respects. You can solicit all the feedback about programming a season you want from as many sources as you want, but in the end, one central vision must make the determination regarding what will appear on stage. If you try to please everyone or as many people as possible, you end up with an utter mess.

Andrew Taylor said something similar in his Simple Truth 1 posting and a follow up when he says of a presenter who put out a call for programming ideas that would work in his performance space.

“Given the simple truth that audiences buy expectation rather than performances, and given that consumers can’t really say what they want until they have it, and often not even after that, Law is looking in the wrong place for inspiration.”

General Musings

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Eek! Cancelled!

September 27, 2004

by:

Joe Patti

Okay, by now folks are probably tired of me evoking what I learned at the WAA conference in every entry. However, I forgot this one last bit until I sorted through my papers last week. I had attended a forum on cancellations sponsored by NAPAMA (North American Performing Arts Managers and Presenters) on cancellations.

I hadn’t known cancellations was such a hot topic until I attended this forum. NAPAMA has a whole section in their code of ethics devoted to avoiding cancellations and attempting to preserve a good will relationship between agent and presenter if a cancellation has to occur.

There are a number of reasons why cancellations occur according to Patty Milch who lead the discussion,–Force Majeure, tours or funding fall through, directors of presenting organizations change and the next person doesn’t honor the contract, less experienced presenting organizations think it is acceptable for them to cancel.

It was actually these last two points that caused the most discussion and relation of anecdotes. Apparently amateur presenters don’t know if they ask for a contract, they have essentially orally said they have every intent of presenting this person, save some minor alterations to allow the presenter to accomodate the performer.

According to some stories, people are asking for contracts so they can pass them around a committee table and contract 2 of the twenty they asked for. The agent on the other hand is already preparing an artist’s itinerary and working out routing with other presenters based on the issuance of that contract.

These instances turn out badly for all involved because the agent stands to lose face and money, but he will enforce the contract. The presenter gets a bad rep and has the agent/manager glaring and threatening him with legal action.

The other instance is again due to inexperienced people who believe that the decisions of predecessors doesn’t bind the organization if the leadership simply changes. If only it were that simple, eh?

The point of the forum was to discuss how the rancor could be avoided and how a better operating environment might be created. Not surprisingly, we didn’t really get past the discussion of the problem and no one really had any suggestions for a solution.

Management Philosophy

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