I am sick and tired of hearing that marketing is to blame when subscriptions fall. We need to be honest with ourselves, if someone is already in a seat in our hall, then if they don’t come back it’s not because of the paper thickness of the season brochure! For whatever reason we are not engaging them by what we are doing or not doing on stage. We can’t blame snow or parking either, if we meet someone we are really into, even if they live on Everest, we will find a way to get there! Free valet parking on a clear warm day wont make them come if they are just not into us! One of our strategies here is to turn passive listeners into active participants in the programming process.
We decided to turn audience requests from being a gimmick into being a policy……..