Sometimes its not the information you consume, it’s how you use it:

Fertile Ground Festival Project Lear’s Follies did a clever thing recently. They snagged a link that was much shared around #2amt circles (the Marie Claire article about theatre being behind only sex and exercise for creating happiness)and turned it into an irrefutable, ingenious pitch to attend theatre, ANY theatre, as a cure for Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Here’s their pitch, which arrived in my inbox as part of their email promotion for their festival project:

Scientific Proof- Theatre Makes You Happier!

Are the depths of the dark Pacific Northwest winter getting you down? Forget sunlamps and vitamins.
Try cheering yourself up by going to the theatre!

It is not just our opinion that theatre is a great way to make us feel better. It turns out there is science to back us up.

According to a new UK study involving Apple and the London School of Economics – reported by Hannah Thomas at Marie Claire – people are happiest when they are having sex, exercising, and visiting the theatre!

Why? Well it is not surprising when you consider that curiosity, social interaction, and creativity are known to increase happiness. And it turns out our brains have circuits called that are specifically designed to engage our empathy and make us feel better when we are around others who are engaged in creativity, curiosity and social interactions and feeling happy about it. These circuts are called Mirror Neurons and what we do in the theatre seems particularly designed to light them up.

So if you want to beat the Portland Winter Blues, “get thyself to a theatre!”

We invite you to get out, be social, enrich your lives and take part in the creativity that makes our region such a great place to live.

They continue on with a pitch to participate in the Festival, conveniently timed in the darkest days of Portland winter. But there’s absolutely no reason not to STEAL THIS IDEA and use it to tout your own ability to combat the winter doldrums in your area.

It’s not marketing, its SCIENCE.

As the founder and now social media manager for Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival, I have recently had the delightful and curious experience of being able to dip my finger daily into the stream of material our 100 plus world premiere projects have created to promote their shows. I asked myself, how can I harness this wealth of creative promotion in ways that can be of value to our national new play community? With that in mind, welcome to Post One of a multi-post series called “STEAL THIS IDEA.”

First, some quick background:

The Fertile Ground Festival attracts projects from literally all walks of life and all levels of professionalism- from a writer who successfully overcame homelessness and the sex trade to a writer whose last piece was for NPR and whose next piece might well be for film or television. It also attracts all scales of producing partners- Portland Center Stage and Whitebird Dance both have fully staged world premieres in the festival, while the PDX Playwrights collective has probably 20 plays that will receive bare bones staged readings over the course of the festival. The common link amongst all the projects is that they are all Portland generated, and they are all world premieres.

Every project is tackling the same problem that all new work faces: How do I overcome the “never heard of it” barrier?

Audiences want to get a sense of what the experience will be like before they take a risk on a new work. The challenge is that it is nearly impossible to have real performance footage of a new work before it premieres. So how do you help a prospective audience member glimpse the future of a work that is still in the process of creation?

Here are five incredibly different, very intriguing ways this year’s festival participants are using video to address that challenge:

Variation One: Go Graphic

Festival Project Waxwing, from tiny and brand new theater collective String House Theatre employed the talents of an illustrator to take audio recordings from their new work and create a whole world of atmosphere. Check it out:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Two: Showcase the Artists

The NW Children’s Theatre and School has participated in the festival three years in a row, contributing world premiere work for young audiences that often attracts some of the festival’s largest audiences. For this year’s project, Rapunzel- Uncut! created by local playwright James W. Moore, they focused their video efforts on a behind the scenes peek at the young rockers who create the ‘house band’ for this hip update on the Rapunzel story.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Three: Direct Address + F word = WIN

Portland’s LORT theater Portland Center Stage, brings a main stage world premiere of Jason Wells’ The North Plan to the festival, creating a video that feels like a direct address confessional from the character’s foul mouthed and hilarious lead character. None of the language in the trailer is directly from the show, but the result is a pretty good snapshot of the show’s key ideas.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Four: Inspire with the Mission

Playwrite, Inc. is a social service organization that utilizes playwrighting as a tool to help transform the lives of “youth on the edge” in Portland. Their project trailer takes a totally different tack, inspiring the viewer with the effect of the work on the young writers themselves rather than focusing on the pieces being performed (which are probably not even written yet!)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Five: Fake it… Artfully

Portland Playhouse, a mid-sized theater company that’s had three very successful festival projects, uses the real actors from their performance to create a trailer that feels like an artful fake of the real show. Particularly effective are the intercuts of slightly disgusting food closeups that create the same unsettling sense of everyday foods that feel suddenly, subtly WRONG that Dexter uses to great effect in their intro sequence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the things I find fascinating about these examples is that, with the new technology available for video creation, it is nearly impossible to identify these projects by budget size simply on the basis of their video trailers. Each is creative, each is polished and feels professionally produced, and each creates a very different set of expectations for the show being promoted.

What can you steal from this? And which approach works best with your mission and aesthetics? I invite you to share your own samples of newplay video in the comments below.

or, How Meta-Conversations are Taking Over Our Theatres

Photo illustration featuring members of American Theater Company. (William DeShazer/Tribune / July 2, 2011)

My friend Briana, a brilliant arts educator and visual artist, alerted me (via a tag on Facebook) to an article about the rising phenomenon of texting in the theater and asked me, as an enthusiastic social media proponent and arts administrator, what my thoughts were on the subject. The article quoted multiple sources that implied that the rise in smartphone use during performances, movies, and live events represented a new infantilization of adults- a sensory distraction that was addictive and destructive to the social fabric and to the performances themselves.

So what do I think about that?

I think that you can’t give hundreds of millions of people a device that fits into their pocket and gives them instant access to all the information ever gathered on the planet (and everyone they’ve ever met) and expect this not to transform the way we do everything (including experience live performance). Right now, we are about 2 years past an event horizon that we will later look back at and describe as being as truly transformative as the invention of the electric lightbulb. Right now we tend to only notice when it disrupts our social norms (like the expectation that the only conversation happening in a darkened theater is happening between the speaker/actor/performer and the audience as a silent, absorbent group).

Its a kind of social wild west right now, a lawless time where disruptive technology has arrived but the social agreements that integrate that technology into our lives successfully is still emerging. The new etiquette will emerge. But it will not be the same as before smartphones existed. And the social explosion definitely privileges the visual learners and fluent writers/communicators (whether they are introverts or extroverts) over the kinesthetic and auditory communicators. An extreme introvert who is a fluid writer has a better chance of finding strong community and rising to the top socially in this new world order than the extroverted verbal communicator or the athlete for whom words are not a strong suit.

To use a high school shorthand, watch out captain of the football team, the world popularity contest might just be won these days by the D&D nerd with a wry sense of humor and a good grasp of the english language .

This is  going to create new elites and make those (like teachers, politicians and stand-up comics) who are used to dominating a one way communication channel through primarily auditory cues, extremely uncomfortable.

But here’s the thing:

The ability to have a meta-conversation with an external community while you are experiencing a primary event (through texting, twitter, facebook, etc) is a hugely useful development (we are already seeing it transform how conferences are managed,  how politics gets done, anywhere where the work is about compiling or influencing consensus opinion). It’s too useful to be suppressed from all but the most necessary aspects of daily life. It provides a feedback loop, knowledge base, basis for social cohesion and opportunity for reflection/revelation while an event is in process, rather than in the car on the ride home.

Some of that feedback loop is “shallow.” But it serves the same ends toward relationship building and social cohesion as time honored practices like small talk and coffee meetings- light touches that pave the way for more meaningful network building. And some of that feedback loop can disrupt the primary conversation in useful ways… as Alli Houseworth recently demonstrated with her conference tweets heard round the world.

A paradigm shift is coming. As primary communicators (artists/performers/speakers) we will need to let go of the expectation that silence and eyes on the front of the room means attention successfully grabbed. Instead we should  look for active meta-conversations about the topic/performance to signal successful absorption and dissemination of the experience.

For the performers/speakers who successfully make the paradigm shift there are huge opportunities to gauge the relevance, impact, popularity and success of an event in a whole new way. There’s also huge risks- you will not be able to control the message if you bomb. You will need to work harder to be more interesting than the meta-conversations you have inspired. You will need to create work that allows space for meta-conversation to unfold. That will be an uncomfortable adjustment for most people.

And, just like our brains require the occasional absence of light in order to have downtime and recharge (thus we don’t keep our lightbulbs on all night) society will ultimately evolve  safe spaces where we will, by mutual agreement, turn off our devices and be whole and complete in the moment. Will the theater be one of those spaces? I’m not so sure. Perhaps.

I know that I, avid social user that I am, give myself 10 days in the desert each year, at a place where the local cell tower can only handle 24 calls at a time, where I am forced to be disconnected, unplugged, and engaged with “meatspace” full time for a week. But I understand that respite for what it is. Not a return to a non-connected “normal” but a momentary nap from which I will awake into the meta-conversation that is the new defining normal of our lives.

I did not get to go to the Americans for the Arts and Theater Communications Group conferences this year, but thanks to an NEA funded “pop up newsroom” called Engine28 (and the smart folks at #2amt who were at the conferences) I did get the opportunity to follow along from my office.

As a bonus, a Portland journalist pointed me to a contest Engine28 was running on the art of the PR Pitch. The winner of the contest would get direct feedback on what worked and what didn’t in their pitch from the newsroom’s quite impressive pack of national arts journalists.

A had a bit of time to spare that Friday, so I posted a recent pitch for Oregon Ballet Theatre’s season opening production to see what feedback I might be able to get. And I won the press jury award. My prize? Detailed feedback on the pitch from the journalists in the collective.

The feedback was fascinating, but since it lacked a space to communicate back to the evaluators about what was learned, I thought I might post the feedback (and my take on it) here, in case it would be of value to any arts folk looking to build their own press pitches.

First, here’s the pitch I entered into the contest (exactly as initially posted despite extreme temptation to retroactively fix all the glaring typos discovered as soon as I hit “publish”):

Subject line: Will Rebirthing a Classic Be Bloody (Good) Business?

2 years ago Oregon Ballet Theatre came within a razor’s edge of closing its doors forever.

Over a million dollars in emergency community support later, the companys wavers on the brink of a turnaround.

It would be understandable if decided to play it safe for a while.

Right?

Instead, Artistic Director Christopher Stowell has upped the stakes, inviting world-renowned choreographer Nicolo Fonte and 10 new dancers from around the world to collaborate on a world-premiere re-imagining of two bloody classics, Bizet’s Carmen and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka this October.

Their goal: to create new definitive ballet versions of these iconic stories that will restore the organization’s position in the vanguard of national ballet organizations and cement the company’s financial recovery.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, creatively or financially. Will he succeed? Or will the company’s fledgling turnaround end, like Carmen and Petrouchka themselves, in a bloodbath?

What are the lessons to be learned on behalf of the national arts community?

Will it be a new model to be shared? A cautionary tale? Either way it should be a helluva story for anyone interested in taking the current pulse of the arts in America.

Petrouchka/Carmen rehearses in August and world premieres Saturday, October 8th at the Keller Auditorium, Portland Oregon.

My rationale for this pitch and how it was framed: It’s a pitch contest, not a media release contest, so the focus should be on the “hook” (what gets them to open the link) and what journalists would call the “lede,” or the first sentence that frames the conflict/opportunity/newsworthiness of the story. Assumptions: Most readers would not be ballet experts, most readers would not be Portland-based. My goal: link an upcoming show to a topic of current relevance to the journalists.

So, how did that work out in the minds of the jury? And what did I learn that might be of value to others? Here’s their feedback and my responses, with the 10 Things I Learned in bold below. Would welcome your feedback and responses as well!

- What’s great: The pitch grabs me, like good theater, with really high stakes.
What’s missing: I hear very little about the art itself and why/how this piece is going to come together.

My take: Were this a full release, I would definitely have included paragraphs with the detail this writer is looking for. A bit tricky though, since the project is a world premiere and that means its hard to get juicy details out of artistic folk this far in advance. Always a challenge, that.

Lesson 1: Keep the pitch short. But don’t forget the links to more information for the folks who like to delve.

- Too much about how the company was nearly doomed, and how “playing it safe” could be a viable option. Should lead with how daring the show is, then go to the administrative stuff. Also, the more images from something like this, which words don’t seem to do justice to, the better.

My response: This is a very good point. Having the opportunity to include a few juicy design tidbits that help frame the artistic audacity of the project would have probably helped balance the “financial risk” angle with the “creative risk” angle.

- Professional! Grammatical! Winning!

My take: Gee. Thanks.

- It’s got a grabber lede, I was sucked in pretty quickly. Watch those typos! Attractive photo composite, I liked the cliffhanger in the type before scrolling down to continue reading. Does “world renowned” choreographer Nicolo Fonte have instant name recognition? Plant a contextual clue so we remember where we’ve seen his work. Evidently this company, despite budgetary woes, still has a sense of humor and hope.

My take: Providing context on the choreographer was a tricky one because it can be dangerous to digress from the main topic of your pitch to explain who or what an element of the pitch is (you can lose their attention pretty fast if you get all “paragraph-y”). I would normally handle this in an “about” paragraph later in the release (or a link to the cool video showing the hidden yoga poses in his recent OBT performance, which I totally could have done. Facepalm.)

Lesson 2: You have multimedia resources to support your show. Use them. In an online press pitch, just making the unfamiliar name a live link to an interesting post about that person could be the difference between story or no story.

- There was no other choice for me. Written like a feature story, the pitch’s lead was full of contradiction and had me at the words: “razor’s edge of closing its doors forever … ” The great picture sealed the deal.

My take: “Written like a feature story” is a really good piece of advice I have heard a lot from journalists about how to get a pitch noticed. Good takeaway.

Lesson 3: Write your release they way you would like to have the finished story written. If they chose to print your release verbatim, would you be happy with how it read?

- Bloodbath. Emergency. Razor’s edge. These 3 phrases are powerful, clear, intense. Placed near the top of this pitch I was drawn in to read more about Oregon. Ballet Theater’s risk taking techniques in wake of its financial crisis. Who doesn’t want to know how this game will end?

My take: I was leaning pretty heavily on the dramatic language, which was a risk (it could have ended up sounding SUPER corny). Glad that worked for this writer. For fans (and detractors) of my Kill the Adjective post, I would like to point out that each of the phrases this writer points to are NOUNS. Well, except for “razor’s.”

Lesson 4: Use specific, vivid language that creates the conflict or drama clearly in the mind of the reader. This is doubly true in press pitches as it is in other kinds of copy. You are writing for writers. Words are their passion. Use them carefully.

- Do a copy edit. The lead is missing a word: It would be understandable if [?????] decided to play it safe for a while. Send the message of professionalism.

My take: CURSE YOU TYPOSSSSSSS. Take away: it is so easy to distract a writer from your pitch by a missing or incorrectly spelled word. It matters, people. It really does.

Lesson 5: Writers make a living out of being very good with, and therefore very particular about, words and grammar. Typos are a slap in the face to them and a huge distraction. If you do absolutely nothing else, make sure your pitches are as typo-free as you can make them. Every time. Even in internet contests. The interwebz are forever.

- I love the bravery of taking risks in the face of–or even as an answer to–financial adversity in the arts. This pitch goes beyond the immediate show, asking some interesting questions and luring journalists to discover the answers.

My take: Was definitely trying to raise questions rather than answer them. Glad that worked for this writer.

Lesson 6: If you can connect your show to a topic of current regional or national relevance, do it. What’s there to talk about that’s bigger than the show itself? How can the show be used to illustrate a larger theme or concern?

- As a news story, this would interest me, but I’d need a bit more information about the ways that this performance could create a “new model” before I’d proceed to write about this. Also, use boldface sparingly, please!

My take: I admit to using a bit more boldface than strictly necessary out of an attempt to make a pitch easy to “scan.” But, duly noted- there’s a point at which leading the eyes to the “important bits” can become insulting.

- It’s a good pitch because it’s a good topic. But I would like to see more information. Are you saying the company IS playing it safe? Back that up — tell me what it is programming, compared with what it used to program.

My take: These all sound like excellent follow up questions to me. I would normally expect to address them once the writer expressed interest. Unless the lack of those immediate answers would keep a writer from following up?

Lesson 7: Be sure that the core point of your release will be clear, even to the non-careful reader. But don’t go overboard on leading the person who likes to “scan” through the release or you could insult the careful readers… and the careful readers are your best prospects.

- It’s a great hook – gives the context and background, sets the stakes and offers a window on an evolving solution. Like it a lot. BUT hate the headline. Doesn’t give an idea of what this is about. Language is overdramatic and reads like PR hype. And it’s not entirely grammatical. Can “rebirthing” be a business? And a bloody one at that? It would be much better if it were more specific. I would have skipped over this one because the headline was so bad.

My take: If you’ve given birth (which I have recently, so I guess it’s top of mind) you know that it is an inherently bloody process. As to whether it can be a business, I guess you’d have to ask a midwife. Also, the slightly mixed metaphor allowed for a pun on a British swear word. Who doesn’t like punny swear words? Perhaps it was just way too much. Metaphor deconstruction aside, what I get from this is that one person’s literary catnip can be another person’s exhaustingly corny PR hype.

Lesson 8: A subject line’s job is to be memorable and get them to open the email and read the thing. But beware you don’t cross the line and become memorable for the wrong reasons.

My main thought: the story idea is a good one, but the execution in the pitch does not match the quality of the idea. It needs to sound/look more professional: that means copy-editing it before sending it out; not bolding certain phrases, which has the effect of infantilizing the journalist reading it (Don’t worry—we’ll know what the important elements are); and not using slang like “helluva” (perhaps it’s just my personal preference, but feeling like a publicist is One of the Guys (or Girls) is not going to make me more likely to write a story—plus, this is a professional interaction). Choose your descriptors more wisely. I agree with Linda–if you need to call Nicolo Fonte “world-renowned,” he’s probably not world-renowned enough to have instant name recognition, so tell us more about what he’s done that’s great (I’m a dance writer and have not heard of him, so that says something). Is “bloody” the best way to describe Carmen and Petrouchka? I don’t think so–and I don’t think you need to resort to cheap thrills to attract a journalist to writing about this story.

My take: Carmen opens with the heroine slashing another girl in the face with a knife. And ends with a duel to the death. Petrouchka also ends with a duel to the death. Neither are, say, Dracula bloody. But the plot points definitely revolve around pointy things interacting in slippery ways with body parts. Not sure what standard of bloodiness would need to be achieved if these things don’t qualify? Hm. The “world-renowned” point is a good one, and a #fail on my part for disobeying my own rule about sloppy use of qualitative descriptors. Saying “world-renowned” was just BEGGING to have someone say “Oh yeah. Says WHO?” Perhaps I should have mentioned Nicolo’s work with Royal Danish Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Stuttgart Ballet, The Australian Ballet, The Göteborg Ballet, The Finnish National Ballet, etc. Or maybe I should have just hyperlinked to this.

As to the inclusion of the “helluva,” I have to say that I have also gotten feedback that a touch of irreverence and colloquial or casual language at the end of a pitch can help “personalize” the pitch, making it feel more like a conversation than a corporate release. But perhaps it is a tactic to be saved for writers with whom you already have an established relationship…

- The content piques my curiosity but I want to know what about these classic remixes will be new and compelling. What is Fonte’s angle and concept? Also the description of the project is vague-who are these 10 dancers, why them? Just a few more facts, please.

My take: I should absolutely have more juicy details about production concept. If only I had them! This is the tricky part about pitching a world premiere, especially when the artists are still very much in process and keeping things tightly under wraps. Many of these details would have automatically been included in a full media release, of course.

Lesson 9: Skip the aggrandizing descriptive words and focus on facts that provide interesting context. Which facts are relevant will vary depending on which arts writer you are pitching. A dance writer, for example, needs different reference points than a general arts writer might.

- Drama personified. Bravery brandished. Teetering on the edge of triumph or tragedy. Had I read this particular entry, it would have my vote, too. It deserved its landslide win and the company appears to deserve an audience, just based on its sheer nerve. But the play’s the thing, and how it plays, and how it connects and is received, will decide the company’s fate. I lived in Oregon for 7 years and never came close to going to see the ballet. And I’m on the periphery of ballet and open to it. If they didn’t reach me, who will they reach?

My take: Good questions. So, would you like me to arrange some interviews and some tickets to opening night so you can start digging up answers to these extremely excellent questions?

- A compelling headline, a hook, some tension: It’s a “helluva” pitch. One suggestion: a quick copy edit would polish it up (i.e. company, rather than companys).

- 1) something at stake, 2) someone to root for, 3) an outcome I (and readers) want to find out.

- The headline piques curiosity but I originally passed this over because of the first two lines. If you are on the brink of turnaround, is there really tension when there are still plenty of companies that teeter on bankruptcy? And I think the connection between mounting a specific production and the health of a company to be tenuous in terms of the interest to the typical reader. Reading it over now, I like the questions that finish up the pitch but, first time through, it lost me before I got to that point.

- Trisha’s pitch has three major things going for it: it gives the impression of transparency; it contains conflict; and it leaves the story unfinished. Pitches that don’t contain conflict are boring, and I delete them. Pitches that seem like they’re hiding something are deleted even faster. And pitches that contain a complete story leave me no work to do.

 

My take: Blushing. Thank you. Delighted to hear what worked.

Lesson 10: Ask for (and listen hard to) the criticism. But don’t forget to acknowledge and enjoy the successes too.

Taking your press pitches for your show from good to great is a process. A never ending process of testing, feedback and revision.  Anyone can benefit from  asking the experts for feedback. You might be surprised how happy they are to help you improve. After all, better pitches from you mean better stories for them.

So, here’s a challenge. Ask your local arts writer to coffee. Bring a copy of your most recent release. And a red pen. You’ll be amazed what you might discover.

Up here in the Northwest, the crisis du jour has been all about Intiman Theatre’s recent public cry for help… they need about $1 mil by summertime or they are going to need to close their doors.

Suddenly, Rocco Landesman’s provocative statements about the American theater being oversupplied had a poster child/test case. Was Intiman, in fact, one of the companies that should be allowed to fail in order to re-allocate their artistic and audience assets to other, suddenly better-resourced arts organizations? What was lost if Intiman were to fail? And what, exactly were the replacement costs?

Provocative questions. Particularly considering that there’s nothing hypothetical about it. Real, living, breathing artists and administrators would lose their livelihoods. A real living, breathing audience would lose its artistic home. But in theory the audience would relocate; the donors would give the same amount, just to another organization; and funders would be able to allocate their resources in larger (or at least different) chunks to other Seattle area organizations. The best of the administrators would land on their feet at other organizations that could use their skills. Some might decide to pursue other lines of work.

Plus, there is a strong economic argument to be made that the dot com boom of the nineties encouraged a non-profit bubble in Seattle… all that new Microsoft money looking for tax shelters and a place to do something meaningful with their wealth pushed all sorts of nascent arts organizations from hungry to huge, practically overnight. Back then there was a sense that there was just money, you know, lying around.

A lot of that money evaporated when the boom went bust. The young rich microsofties who remained started having kids, changing hometowns and generally using their wealth in different ways and in different geographic regions. When bubbles burst in any market there are casualties. Perhaps Intiman was just a decade late in feeling the effects of that *pop*.

Then there’s the issue of reputation. As someone who lives in the NW but not in Seattle, my knowledge of Intiman as a theater company is as much a function of the industry rumour mill as it is their official communications (or even the analysis of the official press). And through that rumour mill, I must admit, I had gotten the impression that Intiman has been helmed, for some time, by Artistic Directors of high quality who were, perhaps, a little cavalier in their relationship with their own Seattle-based audience. The story went that their eyes were on tonier climes, and Intiman was simply a wet mossy stepping stone on the march to Broadway, or at least Steppenwolf. I have no idea how accurate this last assessment is, and I feel absolutely un-qualified to assess its accuracy myself. But the fact remains that this has been said about Intiman. Many times. By many people. Of varying levels of credibility . In marketing terms, what many people “know” about your company is part of your brand, whether it is actually accurate or not. And this notion, that Intiman has not connected with Seattle well because of too much focus on the national scene, has been bandied as a key reason for its current troubles and a chief justification for allowing it to fail.

The argument from some Seattle artists circles has been, “They don’t care about us. Why should we care about them?”

So should they be allowed to fail? What (if anything) is ultimately lost if they do? Perhaps a Seattle without Intiman would have the space to organically grow a better arts institution that was more responsive to its own audience?

In search of my answer to that question, I find myself stepping away from the facts and figures of institutional economics and instead recalling a conversation I had with David Loehr on #2amt a year or so ago. We were discussing the barriers that new plays have to overcome in order to be read, produced, and ultimately shared with the world. Set aside quality, for a moment, which every play needs. Let’s assume we have two plays of equal quality. What factors determine whether a play gets produced and has a life in the American Theater?

These three came to the top in our reckoning:

1. Visibility (people had to have heard of it)
2. Recommendation (it needed to be recommended by someone of trusted reputation)
3. Relationship (a personal relationship the playwright has with the institution)

All three fell under the umbrella idea of “legitimacy.” A new theatrical work must be in some way legitimized if it has a chance to make it to first production and beyond. It’s an absolutely critical resource, and the trajectory of any new work can be measured by the legitimizing influences that speed it along its path. Have I heard of it? Do I know someone who recommends it? Do I know the creator him or herself? What other orgs have done the piece? Are they of the same quality as us?

Perhaps you can see where I am going with this.

Intiman, the Tony -Award winning regional theater with artistic directors who went on to direct on Broadway and a stellar reputation for stewarding plays and productions that have gone on to national prominence, is a hugely legitimizing force in the Northwest theatrical scene. It has arguably been a legitimizing force for the national scene, when you look at the plays (like Lynn Nottage’s Ruined) that have started there and gone on to national prominence. The relationships its artistic directors have cultivated, and the brand it has built for successful new work development are a critical resource for both the regional and national arts ecology.

And the tricky part about legitimacy as a resource is that it is not tranferrable like other organizational assets. Once a company is dissolved, the value of its advocacy on behalf of the art it champions can’t be passed down to new, smaller organizations (although any individual organization might ultimately claw its way up to the level of legitimizing influence that Intiman enjoyed). That lost legitimacy could take decades to recoup. In the mean time, both regional and national artists lose the visibility, resources, and access to national relationships that the Intiman has historically provided.

Plus, the failure of one legitimizer has unintended consequences for the whole field.  Intiman’s reputation helped burnish the reputation of the entire arts community in Seattle. It helped make the Pacific Northwest a more viable place to make a living in the arts. And its loss would potentially shake the confidence of the entire Seattle arts community; and the artists, funders and audiences it serves.

Let me tell you from personal experience what happens when an organization like Intiman reaches the brink of failure: the press and the public go digging under the floorboards of every other arts non-profit in the area, looking for bodies. If a Tony Award winning theater can fail, the thinking goes, then perhaps all of our arts organizations are more vulnerable than we imagined.

So quibble all you want over the hows and whys of the Intiman’s current precarious situation. But when you ask whether or not an organization like Intiman should be saved, be sure you are looking at the whole costs.

Ironically, the complaint that makes some resistant to assisting the Intiman in its time of need (that it has been more focused on national relationships and reputations than on cultivating its relationship with its own community) is paradoxically the exact reason it should ultimately be saved. Those national connections, that stellar reputation, are priceless intangible resources that Seattle can ill afford to lose.

Could those resources be put to better use in service of the community it calls home? Absolutely.

But you have to conserve those resources to be able to re-direct them effectively.

Don’t worry though: Any company that goes through a “dark night of the soul” like the Intiman is currently experiencing (and lives to tell the tale) steps into the future keenly aware of the deep debt it owes to audiences and community that helped to save it.

Mr. Landesman has responded personally on the NEA blog (did you know the NEA had a blog? I did not.) to the conversation/controversy regarding his statements about the supply and demand of the American theater. Its a great read, I highly recommend it, with much to agree with actually. After reading it, I have the following to say.

Dear Rocco,

Here’s what I like about you. You stirred the pot, poking at the survival instinct in every member of the audience you spoke to at our convening. You got the conversation going, and you stuck to your guns.

You were frank with us, and we didn’t have to agree with you to respect your point of view and the transparency with which you shared it. So thank you for that.

Thank you for this post, as well, in which I find much to agree. Yes, we can increase supply (by investing in young audience development, aligning our content with things of relevance to the general culture and being more proactive about allowing people to sample our art form in the time and manner that is most comfortable to them).

And yes, to say that we are over-supplied is not necessarily to say that the oversupply exclusively exists in the smaller end of the arts equation. For most of the theater community, that is the most reassuring statement that can be made- after all, as Kirk from the Rude Mechanicals pointed out, a $5000 grant for their small company can be tranformative in a way that an additional $5k to a larger institution may not be.

So thank you for addressing those key points, and for reminding us that, whether we agree about the ways, we are 100% aligned on the whys- that non-profit theater should exist for the good of the culture- that the arts in general are the “R&D arm” of our society, testing what it means to be human and reflecting back the concerns of the moment in ways that, to quote Meiyin Weng, can “move the body politic one room at a time.”

Here’s my challenge, however. If, as you say, the Fichandlers and Papps of the world created a non-profit regional theater system to escape the pressures of supply and demand… in order to create space for the “R&D arm” of our culture… then shouldn’t the question of how many “butts” are in “seats” at any given performance be purposefully un-linked from the arts organization’s “value” to its community or the culture as a whole? Seen in that context, the relative abundance of arts institutions compared to the audience they reach should be seen as a natural product of the “R&D” model- after all, you don’t tell the national science community to only do experiments that will have consequences that impact a lot of people, or else stop researching. It is in the nature of scientific inquiry that the “game changing” insights cannot be predicted in advance. You’ve got to do lots of experiments – large, small, weird, obvious, not-so-obvious, seemingly frivolous and accidentally essential – before you uncover the one that will transform everything we know about our world forever.

The nature of artistic inquiry is no different than scientific inquiry in this way.

Let’s say arts attendance is truly in decline (which is a statistic I question, since I am not clear on the methodology of how it was arrived at- who was included in the counting?) Wouldn’t Zelda and Joe have said that the impact per person (and the potential impact on the culture as a whole) of a given performance was un-correlated to the number of people who were in the room at the time? Wouldn’t they also say that the transformative impact of that performance was un-correlated to the number of other performances happening at the same time around the city or around the country?

Wouldn’t they have argued that the power of the arts to transform lives, communities and cultures is based, not on its universality, but on its specificity? A world transformed, one life at a time?

In which case, supply and demand is a fundamentally flawed model for looking at the non-profit arts ecology, since it implies that an arts experience is a commodity, like flour or oil, that can be quantified by the number of people who had one, rather than the quality and resonating impact of each experience.

Of course, a funding organization can’t measure the quality of an experience, or its transformative impact on a community the way it can measure “butts in seats.” So its understandable that the supply/demand model would feel more comfortable to a sector constantly in search of “metrics”. But I ask you whether the use of it to make funding decisions is actually at cross purposes with your core thesis… that art contributes something essentially different to our progress as a culture, something that should be protected, at least partially, from not only the dangerous impact of filthy lucre but the destructive reductions of economic language itself?

This week marks the third year of the city-wide new works festival I founded in Portland: The Fertile Ground Festival. It’s happening as I type this: 70 world premiere works of theater, dance, comedy and multimedia all over the Portland area for the next 10 days. And I will not be there. I will be on a plane racing towards a convening of 100 new play practitioners from around the country, thanks to Arena Stage and the National Endowment for the Arts.

It feels crazy to be leaving MY festival just as its getting in full swing. Yet it is a great point of pride to me that I was able to almost entirely give over the operation of the festival this year to my co-director (so that I could focus on preparing for the birth of my son Bailey). I’m happy to report that the festival is thriving without me.  It is a testament to the contagious nature of the festival’s core idea, and a further testament to the strong group of volunteers, artists and administrators who have stepped up to see the Fertile Ground Festival through the next phase of its development that this explosive growth is happening just as the generator of the seed idea is stepping away from the wheel. But that is as it should be. To me, the success of an enterprise is not how well it runs under your constant supervision but rather how robustly it thrives after the founders have moved on to other projects.

It is easy for we who create things to cling tightly to our creations, positive that it cannot live without our constant care and feeding. But it’s a trap.

To create we must renew. To renew we must release ourselves from the things we have created in the past. For our creations to have value they must be able to take the leap out of our arms into the world.

It doesn’t hurt this particular line of thought that my husband is currently cradling my two month old in his arms as we leap across the country to convene with 100 other new works professionals from around the country.

So, on the eve of this convening, I ask you to consider the following:

What great new work will we undertake as an outcome of the conversations we are about to have? What new seeds and structures will we plant? And how will we ensure that the seeds we germinate grow into trees that grace the landscape long after we who planted them have become plant food ourselves?

Gwydion, this one’s for YOU.

Recently, after having pored through a stack of theater brochures that hit my inbox, I put out a whimsical challenge to the #2amt twitter community:

Describe your next project in 140 characters without using a single adjective.

Gwydion remarked that he LIKED adjectives, and wasn’t sure eliminating them would make for stronger play descriptions. A fair point, and I like adjectives too. But today I would like to take a moment to make a case for why they should DIE… or at least be used as a very occasional spice rather than a main course.

Here’s the thing. We have probably all, when staring at a blank page and tasked with describing the next show to hit our stage (or to tumble out of our typewriter), resorted to a description that looked something like this:

Hamlet is a brooding, classic tale of a haunted prince whose life takes a horrifying turn when his regal but doomed mother shacks up with his conniving manipulative uncle… and tragedy of epic proportions ensues. Exhilarating, dramatic, and breathlessly intriguing, ABC Theatre Company’s intimate production of The Bard’s quintessential tragedy explores the horrifying consequences of indecisiveness in the face of epic events.

Okay, maybe you’ve never written anything quite so appalling. I certainly have. There are three kinds of bad behavior happening here, all of which are caused by over-reliance on saucy adjectives to do our descriptive heavy lifting.

1. Limp verbs. By spending our rhetorical energy saying how connivingly manipulative and regally doomed the characters are, we haven’t actually said what they DO. And in order to support that string of fancy descriptors we’ve had to use limp, useless verbs like “is” and “takes” and cliches like “explores.”

Which is a shame, because, when people ask what a play is about, they almost always ask “So, what happens ?” They hardly EVER ask, “So, what kind of people are in this play?”

These lovely vivid adjectives force all the action out of the verbs and into the static picture frame of character description. As my 9th grade english teacher used to say… every adjective is really a verb waiting to be put into action. So Claudius should “connive,” not be “conniving” and by “conniving,” Claudius then “dooms” Gertrude to horrors. Same underlying meaning, only now we see what they DO rather than how the ARE, clarifying the picture while simultaneously driving it forward, into action.

And speaking of 9th grade…

2. Your Audience Do Not Have Post-Grad Degrees. Well, some of them do, I’m guessing. But this pile of semantically impressive adjectives have helped push the “Flesh-Kincaid Reading Level” of this description up to a whopping Grade Level 18 (meaning the person most likely to understand every word of it probably has 18 years of formal schooling… a post-grad degree). As a young marketing director, I once had my own parents (college graduates both) pull me aside and  admit to me that they didn’t really understand about half the copy in my company’s most recent brochure. It was hard to read, they explained …too… “wordy.”

Wonder why performing arts audiences tend to have a disproportionately large percentage of  post-graduate degrees compared to the general public? Maybe it’s because they’re the only ones who can understand our marketing materials. Yes, we all laughed when it was pointed out that George W. Bush’s speeches averaged a 5th grade reading level, but perhaps there’s a happy middle ground?

As writers and marketing folk, we tend to be word people, by definition. And we are extremely well versed in the jargon of our industry… to the point that we often forget that it is jargon. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that much of the potential audience that might LOVE our work are picture people, or action people or feeling people, rather than word people.  And the research suggests that keeping the reading level of your marketing descriptions below the college graduate level makes them more accessible, and therefore more interesting, to the average non- “word-person” reader.

3. You Don’t Get To Decide How Good It is. Your Audience Does. There’s a certain number of adjectives that end up in our descriptive copy because we are afraid the reader won’t get how “GOOD” it is unless we tell them explicitly. So we throw in a string of heart-thumping adjectives… “exhilarating” “dramatic” “intimate” production of the “world’s greatest” play. I like to call these bits the “artistic director appeasement clause.” They often end up in your copy because, after crafting a clear and compelling description of what happens in the show, there will often be someone (frequently a director or artistic director) who will express a worry that the audience won’t know how GOOD it is unless you spell it out for them.

Here’s the problem. In today’s advertising and media soaked culture, your audience is warier than ever of self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing copy. You call yourself “exhilarating” and they smell a rat. A rat made out of flowery unsubstantiated claims of quality. Ironically, in your attempt to assure them how “good” it will be, you’ve actually made them more skeptical of the potential quality of the work. So unless you can actually quote an independent third party, i.e.  “In a production the World Weekly News calls ‘exhilarating and intriguing’ ABC Theater Company  dives deep beneath surface of…” it will serve you better to focus on making “exhilarating” copy rather than convincing them the show itself is “exhilarating”… just because you say so.

Even better, consider letting go of your reliance on the safe, anonymous 3rd person altogether and appeal directly to your audience in the 2nd person. Don’t tell them the play is exhilarating. Invite them to “come and be exhilarated by one man’s fight against….yada yada.” You get the picture.

Answer the question “what’s in it for me?” by helping them see how attending the performance will make them feel. What they will experience, not only through their eyes, but right there in their chair, down to the tingling tips of their little pinky toes.

I recently saw a campaign for a Queensland Ballet Company whose tagline was, “Need a Lift?”

Accompanying the tagline were startling images of dancers defying gravity with their partners. The image spoke volumes about the technical excellence and boundary-pushing nature of the performance. But the tagline shot straight to the heart of an audience member’s experience- inviting them to come away from an evening of ballet with spirits, mind and heart lifted. Now THAT’s exhilarating.

So am I arguing that you should literally cut every adjective you ever use?

Of course not. The sheer number of adjectives in this post would make me a hypocrite if I were.

But the next time you sit down to describe a show, consider taking your first draft and X-ing out every single adjective you’ve thrown in there. Is the copy that’s left active? Does it help the audience member feel what the experience will be like? Does it’s answer the question “So, What Happens?” Does it compel you to find out more about the show?

Then take a look at the adjectives you’ve discarded. Can some of them work harder for you as verbs or adverbs? Can the nouns you use be more precise, requiring fewer adjectives to make your meaning clear? Can your “qualitative”  adjectives be justified with a quote from a reputable source? And how many of them really add to the fundamental understanding of what happens in the show? How many of them make the show feel “worth seeing?” And how many are just proving the excellent quality of your own liberal arts education?

Make your adjectives EARN their place in  your descriptive copy. The ones that survive will be worth it. The ones that don’t won’t be missed. Trust me.

Ah, the way a conversation develops in today’s online media world. To track the current conversation happening within the theater blogosphere about the ethical ramifications of dynamic pricing on the missions and non-profit status of arts organizations, you’d have to start with a #2amt Twitter conversation from over a year ago (now largely lost to the internet thanks to Twitter’s lack of long term storage), then you might check out a series of posts I did in response to that conversation about different pricing strategies on this site.

You’d probably then want to check out a post on Parabasis calling Arena Stage to task for their use of dynamic pricing on a recent show that ended up spiking prices up above $100/ticket. That sparked a fresh #2amt Twitter conversation and this post from Gwydion Suilebahn about discussing prices in a civilized way. Which led to a lengthy (and highly readable) comment stream, which led to another post from Gwydion and then to a fresh post by Isaac Butler at Parabasis responding in kind.

For the purposes of brevity I will assume you’ve been following the conversation to date.
As one of the originators of this whole conversation who was name-checked in Isaac’s post, I started to respond with my two cents in the comments of his post… but evidently I had an unwieldy tin cup on the dresser full of change to contribute,  so here goes:

As Isaac points out, I am indeed the one that argued that an artificially set limit on all ticket prices in the theater industry would have the inevitable consequence of lowering the ability of theaters to provide artists a living wage. I should perhaps have said, all of the professionals who are employed by an arts organization.

And yes, I am a staff member at an organization (Portland Center Stage) that had to lay off its literary department (in addition to dozens of other staff positions from every department in the organization) a while back. Isaac and I both know the members of PCS’ former literary department personally and well, and I have a deep and abiding respect for their past work and endless hope for the success of their future endeavors. I bring this up because Isaac mentions in a couple of different places during his conversation about the ethics of ticket prices that certain large organizations have laid off whole literary departments. It  seems to be a bit of an elephant in the room of this conversation, I’d like to address it briefly.

Isaac, I  would suspect that we would both strongly prefer that the talented, fiercely dedicated staff members you are referring to currently had staff positions at an arts organization that would allow them to use their incredible skill sets towards the good of the larger theater world. You will get no argument from me on that. We would both agree that they should be well paid for that effort, as their skill sets merit a living wage. I can’t speak for every member of my organization, but I suspect that I wouldn’t find too many people who would disagree with that statement.

In fact, I suspect everyone reading this blog could name a dozen incredibly talented, fiercely dedicated, amazing artists and administrators whose livelihoods (and careers) have been threatened or eliminated by theater companies who found themselves having to suddenly shrink their budgets and lay off staff in the face of BOTH shrinking earned and contributed revenue in the last 3 years.

But I don’t understand how artificially limiting ticket prices at my institution (Portland Center Stage) or at any institution, would have protected those jobs, made it easier to create “mission pure” work or made it more likely that we would have received increased contributed income that would have protected those jobs or the high-risk work we would both like to see more large arts organizations undertake.

Trust me, if a magic bullet grant existed that said “keep your ticket prices below X dollar value and we’ll make up the difference in your budget, with some extra to increase the pay of your contract actors and designers,” every arts organization I know of would be doing backflips to try to secure it.

In fact, that’s part of what puzzles me about the implication that non-profit arts organizations should quit trying to increase earned revenue or else give up on claiming non-profit status entirely. You state yourself that the most obvious outcome of giving up non-profit status would be that “theater would largely disappear from many metro areas.”

Of course this is not quite accurate: most metro areas have a thriving sub-culture of fringe companies who make very minimal contributed revenue, whose actors work for free (often as both actor and administrator) and whose sole means of support is via their members’ personal income and a small amount generated through low price ticket sales. This model already exists, and for the artists who are willing to work at that (non-existent) pay scale, it seems to work well.

It would continue to work  well (or, at least as well as it does now) in a world where theater does not qualify as a non-profit… many of them are not large or organized enough to be 501(c)s as it is. These companies would continue to form, create work, grow, merge into other companies, fail and/or carry on, just because their artists would like them to.

But none of these companies are in a position to support people like our mutual friend or to pay actors and designers a wage worthy of the name.

In the hypothetical “stop calling yourself a nonprofit” scenario, the organizations that actually have a high likelihood of failing are the mid-size and larger non-profit organizations who have the means to have on staff literary departments (or staff at all). And yes, if run as a for-profit entity those organizations would either go under or become highly rarified boutique offerings available only to the few who are able and willing to pay the real cost per audience member of a theatrical performance.

Its important to point out here that opposite example is also true: drastically limit the earned revenue potential of arts organizations and force heavier reliance on contributed revenue sources and you would see a similarly dramatic elimination of arts organizations across the country, for the simple reason that the pool of contributed revenue available is finite and currently shrinking.

Neither scenario would restore the positions that we all lament have been lost by the dramatic economic downshifts of the last couple years, and neither scenario would increase artist opportunity or compensation.

So don’t think Isaac is actually arguing for a world in which all arts organizations subsist entirely on contributed income or live or die entirely by the whim of the market.

His point, if I am understanding him correctly, is that increasing reliance on (or employing strategies that allow for a greater possibility of) earned revenue carries the substantial risk that arts organizations will move towards the money and away from their missions.

Honestly this is a concern that every arts organization I know is fighting to address, day by day. How do we stay alive (even if bruised and smaller) so that we can continue to create social good for our communities (and, within that, create opportunities for the artists and staff members we value to make a living where they can do the most social good?) How do we avoid losing sight of our mission in the difficult drive to make ends meet?

And all of us are scared that increased reliance on earned revenue could ultimately hamper our ability to to take the big creative risks that move the art form forward (although most of us hope (and work) towards an increase in total revenue that allows us more cushion to do BOTH- increase artistic risk and minimize financial risk).

Yes, this situation would ABSOLUTELY be eliminated by a sudden increase in foundation, corporate and individual giving to the arts. And I don’t know an arts organization, large or small, who wouldn’t leap at the chance to secure the future of their organizations (and increase the accessibility of their performances) through a dramatic increase in contributed revenue.

That’s not the environment we’re currently in, however. Even internationally, government support for the arts is rapidly going out of favor (even in countries like England and Vietnam with long traditions of nearly full government subsidy of the arts). We must make hay, as someone pointed out in an earlier post “when [and where] the sun is shining.” And this problem is not confined to arts non-profits either. The entire non-profit community is looking for ways to balance the shrinking pool of contributed revenue available to them by finding new and increased earned revenue options that are consistent with their mission. Here’s one example.

So as much as I can agree that it may be an exaggeration to say it’s impossible to pay artists well without healthy earned revenue (because in a hypothetical perfect world contributed income and/or “the right priorities for who to pay” could balance out that shortfall),  I need to point out that even social service non-profits are seeking to balance their contributed revenue with increased earned revenue right now, because they realize that earned revenue allows them greater flexibility and long term stability with which to fulfill their mission. In fact, as the Freedom Trail Executive director points out in the above article, it is entirely possible, and indeed preferable to:

” earn revenue not only to support our educational mission but to fulfill it as well.”

One last point:

It is also a false dichotomy, unsupported by the actual research, that a dynamic pricing (or “right price for the right person at the right time” philosophy) automatically excludes “younger, hipper” audience members or requires an organization to only produce shows that are engineered to maximize that high end price point by targeting older, whiter, more affluent patrons to the exclusion of diverse audiences.

In fact, my own organization’s use of dynamic pricing has coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of under-40 patrons who have become regular attendees and donors. I don’t think the pricing caused that- I think other strategic efforts to communicate with, and be accessible to, a different generation are largely responsible. So I wouldn’t claim a corellation. Dynamic pricing did not equal younger audience.

But dynamic pricing has in no way suppressed the attendance of this new demographic either. The two (high prices and depressed Generation X/Y attendance) are only arguably correlated in situations where, as you point out, people “haven’t even heard of the show until the ticket prices are sky high.”

I can absolutely agree with Isaac that a communication strategy that allows new audiences to only discover the show when “ticket prices are sky high,” is a poor one indeed.

But I completely disagree that younger audiences stay away solely because of high ticket prices. I know too much about what friends and neighbors of my generation spend on nights seeing local music or tickets to Lady Gaga to think that price is the only (or even primary) barrier to younger arts attendance. I would instead say that younger audiences stay away because of poor perceived value- ie, will this performance be worth the money they are asking me to spend on it?

The perceived value of a $100 concert ticket is obvious to a rabid Lady Gaga fan. The perceived value of an unfamiliar theatrical performance, with performers I’ve never heard and a story line that doesn’t sound familiar is much harder for the uninitiated and unconverted potential young arts patron to feel confident in.

And yes, organizations that would like to try dynamic pricing need to work very hard to make sure the value proposition holds as the price increases on a popular show- is this going to be “worth it?”

But then, the point of the dynamic pricing system is that a theater wouldn’t raise the price until demand (created by other communications about the relevance, quality and “worthiness” of the production) had shown that people (of all ages) did find it “worth” what you were charging.

So unless we are trying to say that younger, hipper audiences are by definition financially incapable of paying for an evening’s entertainment (which is statistically untrue- being young does not equal being broke, nor does it equal only being willing to pay $10 for night out), then what we are actually saying is that younger audiences start out less sold on the “value proposition” that theater offers vs. other ways to spend the same amount of money.

And yes, if we want to grow a younger audience, we have a huge responsibility to prove that what we offer is as valuable as the latest rom-com on Netflix or a favorite band (and the accompanying beer tab). And it’s very easy to increase the “perceived value” of our work by lowering the price across the board, essentially lessening how “amazing” our experience has to be in order to be “worth it.”

To me, this tactic feels like side-stepping the question of what the performances we create are “worth” to a given audience member by refusing to even ask the question.

Having said that, there are companies whose work I respect who choose to keep their ticket prices set as low as they possibly think they can afford as part of their organizational philosophy, and that’s certainly a choice they can make. It’s not a choice that has lead, as far as I know, to a dramatic counterbalancing influx of contributed revenue for them. Nor has it lead to better pay for the artists and staff that they employ, as far as I’m aware.

So although I am completely supportive of organizations like this as one part of the overall theatrical ecosystem, I can see no way to be supportive of this as a blanket model constraining all people wishing to produce theater. My colleagues deserve to be paid better than this. And they deserve to be seen by audiences who feel their work was worth more than $10 a ticket (even if $10 is the price point that particular audience member paid that day).

And finally, I have seen no evidence that dynamic pricing has led funders to question the “value proposition” of funding theater… or that an increase in earned revenue streams has caused a decrease in funding for non-profits in general. The decrease in non-profit funding has been caused by the shrinking earned revenue of the funders themselves, due to the economy, and every funder I’ve spoken to understands that.

In fact, granting organizations seem to be more comfortable funding organizations who have proven they have a healthy (and growing) earned revenue balance sheet.

Why? Because granting organizations do not want to be in the position of covering your artists’ paychecks year in and year out. They want to help you get to the starting gate (or in some cases the finish line) on a certain goal or project, and along the way they want assurances that your organization has the resources and wherewithal to continue the good work they helped to start.

And nothing says that an organization is valued by a community like a large and healthy pool of patrons willing to pay (and donate) top dollar to participate in the work that you are creating. What constitutes “top dollar” might be different for each participant, based on their means and preferences. But it’s still a vote of confidence and a key measure that contributors (be they government, foundation, or individual donors) have learned to respect as a measure of the overall health of an organization.

Dynamic pricing is one way to help an organization reach a balanced budget. Cutting administrative and artistic staff is another. Pushing a shrinking donor pool to contribute more is another. Cutting the art you see on stage is another.

I know which choice I feel the most ethically comfortable with. What about you?

(This photo was taken with a fancy rented underwater camera rig by Portland Center Stage photographer Owen Carey. Pictured is Kevin Reed as Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard.)

Got your own great photo from your show? Don’t you want to see it EVERYWHERE? Read on.

Recently, The Royal Opera House sparked controversy by pitching a legal  fit when a blogger posted press images from their production on their blog without permission.

The reasoning? The images were the copyrighted intellectual property of the theater company and were not to be used, willy nilly, by non “official” sources.

The real subtext? A 30 year tradition of treating photos (and access to them) as one of the great un-spoken leverage points of traditional arts PR. “You want photos?” the PR person taunts, “You’ll have to run the gauntlet and go through me first.”

To be fair, much of this preciousness about photos starts with photographers and the theatrical unions, both of which have long-held contractual traditions relating to the copyright protections of an individual image, with rules and assumptions designed more for protecting artists and photographers’ rights than spreading the word about a show efficiently. Which makes sense, in a way. Until recently, a photo used to be an incredibly expensive thing to create, print and share.

They were precious commodities, and distributing them was a significant line item in an arts organization’s marketing budget.

These days, of course, it can be done free by any idiot with an iPhone.

But SHOULD it be done by any idiot with an iPhone?

Or do you risk seeing your precious work turned into a photoshopped nightmare on some dude’s poor taste comedy blog for the amusement of yokels who will never see your show?

And the truth is that for most smaller arts organizations, the lament is not, “why did this blogger use our photo without permission?” but rather, “WHY ISN’T ANYBODY USING OUR PHOTOS?”

We know that, while a picture may be worth 1000 words, when it comes to getting the word out about a show, a great photograph in the right place can be worth 1000 butts in seats- but only if the people writing about your work actually USE your photos. This is true whether its an article seen by thousands, a blog post seen by 100s or a Facebook post seen by an audience members 50 theater nerd friends- after all, those passionate Facebook friends can sometimes be your best WOM sales resource.

So is there a way to increase the use of your photos across all these media without compromising the intellectual property rights of your photographers and theater artists? Absolutely. It’s about having the right conversations with the right people and then using social media technology to your advantage- both in how your images get spread and how your artists copyrights get protected along the way.

Below please find a simple, 5 step strategy that even the smallest theater company can use to increase the amount of press their show gets by increasing the ease of access to their show photos.

Because the truth is, you can have it both ways: you can protect your photographers’ and artists’ rights (and the perceived image of your show) while getting the benefit of seeing your photos used more places and more effectively by simply:

1. Making better photos that are 2. easy to use (online and in print) and 3. hard to use badly.

“Ah, yes,” you say. “BUT HOW?”

1. Get Your Photographer on Board. You may have an existing contract with your photographer that spells out exactly what uses of your images are allowed. Or you may have no contract at all, because your ‘photographer’ is actually a staff member or ensemble member or friend of the “family.” To get better leverage out of your press photography, the first thing you need to do is sit down and get in agreement with your photographer that it will be in both of your interests to create images that are easier to distribute digitally. You’ll need your contract to specify that the images you purchase from them can be distributed digitally and used on social media sites- you may need to talk through a new cost structure for this, to ensure that your photographer doesn’t feel that the new system is lost revenue down the drain for them.

To balance out the new digital rights you’ll be requesting, build in assurances that you will do everything in your power to ensure that their photography credit will follow the image wherever it goes after it goes out in the world. If you have the capacity, explore options that allow your photographer to make more money off any prints of the photos, and create opportunities for them to market individual show prints to audience members and others, using your marketing materials as a starting point for them to advertise their services and work. Remind them that bloggers and Facebook fans are not a great potential revenue stream for them, but nostalgic audience members wanting a memento of the show very well can be.

Then, get this new agreement in writing so that no one gets a nasty surprise later when an image turns up someplace unexpected.

2. Create Images that Work in a Digital and Press Environment. Your pictures are useless to most  media outlets (online and in print) if they don’t:

- Have a resolution of at least 300 dpi at a print size of 5″ X 7″. Don’t have a camera (or a photographer) that can give you that resolution? Get a new one. You are wasting your time otherwise. It’s that simple.

- Don’t put any copy on the image, and DON’T send a poster image. You wouldn’t believe the number of “press photos” that get sent that are really just a pdf of the postcard with show name, dates, etc right over the image. They’re never ever going to print this. So don’t send it.

- Have all the captioning information for the photograph accompanying the photograph everywhere you distribute it. If they can’t tell immediately who took the photo, who is in it, and what it is of, they will pass over your image in favor of one that has that info readily available. This is the most common mistake I see small companies make.

Three Ways to Caption:

Good: Title each .jpeg file with the photographer’s name, production, and actors pictured. Makes for a long title but keeps that crucial info right with the picture. Then include a word doc with every press release that lists expanded photo captions for each image, matching the caption on the listing to the name of the jpeg.

Better: Embed a caption on the image itself by putting the image on a slightly larger canvas in Photoshop and writing the caption on the canvas, making the caption a permanent part of the image (that can still be cropped out easily by a designer).

Best: Do all of the above, and, as an added security, include the caption information in the “metadata” of the image. This can be done through photoshop as well, under the “file info” tab. That way, no matter how the image gets cropped, the file will still have the caption following it wherever the image goes.

Think about file size. The graphic designer wants BIG BIG BIG but the journalist will be massively annoyed if you overload her inbox with files that take up all the space on her hard drive. If your digital images are larger than 10 MB most e-mail servers will bounce them. I don’t actually recommend attaching photos (I’ll explain why in a minute) but if you must, be sure to keep the total size of all the photos you send under 10 MB.

Provide versions that are prepped to be easily thrown into a blog post, email, or Facebook post. The major paper might need giant files for print, but the online media (and the journalists responsible for re-posting their article to the paper’s online version) don’t- they need images that are sized right to pop onto a page with the click of a mouse. Yes, many bloggers know how to open the photo and edit it down to the size and resolution they need. But they’re more likely to use the photos if you go ahead and save them the 5 minutes per image that takes.

3.  Get Yourself a Flickr Account. This is hands down the easiest, most practical, most public way to share your press images. It’s also free (unless you want to spring for the small fee to have a Flickr Pro account). Why a Flickr account (vs. creating a page on your website to upload and download photos)? For starters, the technology is turn key (no testing your web designer’s technology on poor unsuspecting press folk), its robust, and most people already understand how to download a photo from Flickr. For each photo you post to your newfound Flickr account, do the following:

- Add the photo to a “set” you’ve created that is specific to the production, and put all the basic information about that production (cast, designers, run dates etc) in the description box for that set.

- Title the image with something simple and memorable to help people navigate quickly to the image they want.

- Put the full caption information in the description field for the photo (another place to make sure the artists and photographer credits stay with the photo!) and include any fine print about usage restrictions.

- Add “tags” that make the image more searchable- your company name, your community, the show title, actors who are in the show, etc.

4. Put a Link to Your Flickr Account on Your Website. Often bloggers, especially audience members with personal blogs, will go straight to your website for information without directly contacting you. If they can find your photos easily without having to pick up the phone you are much more likely to see those photos get used. You can place the link on your “home page,” your “newsroom” page, the show page or, for best results, in all three places.

5. Include the Link on EVERY Communication You Have with a Member of the Press. Don’t make them dig back through old emails to find the link to your photos. Include the link every time. Will they prefer a link to a series of photo attachments? Most writers I’ve talked to have said emphatically YES- it doesn’t junk up their inbox with a bunch of attachments they’re just going to forward to the art department anyway, and, crucially, it helps your email escape their automatic spam filters, which tend to reject emails with big attachments.

It  goes without saying that once you have this link available, you should also post it to your Facebook page, your Twitter profile, and include the link in your promotional email about the show (a link to photos is usually the most popular click through on an email… even more popular than the “buy now” link).

Of course, you can do all of this, but if your photos are pictures of actors in rehearsal togs staring at each other with their scripts in their hands, they won’t get used no matter HOW high res they are. But that… well that’s a topic for another post.

How do you currently distribute your press photos? Got any other quick and painless tips and tools for getting them created and distributed? Do tell.

Ah, Dynamic Pricing. The holy grail of entertainment earned revenue. Has worked for the airlines for YEARS. And yet we are still deeply afraid of it.

What am I talking about? Assumptions number 3, 4, and 5.

Let’s throw out the notion that two people sitting next to each other in the theater have any notion whatsoever what the other person paid for their ticket.

You might believe that, because you have posted your prices on a postcard or a brochure, that your audience has developed  a reasonable expectation of paying the same price as their neighbor.

But here’s what’s true- They will often expect to have the opportunity to select a seat at the lowest advertised price. They want to have the lowest advertised price AVAILABLE to them. But most of the time they don’t actually choose a ticket at that price point. And they hardly ever look at the top bracket price. Nor do they call and say “Can you please sell me your most expensive ticket?” So why do you tell them what it is in advance?

Instead, take a stab at dynamic pricing- a model being strenuously and successfully promoted by Target Resource Group, among other consulting groups. Under this model, you advertise your lowest regular adult price, with the phrase “Starts at $XX.” Then you make sure the lowest advertised price requires them to buy early, come to the least popular performance night and sit in the very visible but not very good seats right up front on the side.

If they want a better night, a better seat, or the chance to wait until the last minute, it will cost them more. And if you haven’t advertised your additional prices in advance, you can adjust these numbers on the fly, experimenting until you find the right price breaks for this audience for this particular show.

Choose an audience you want to be “accessible” to, and make them an offer they can’t refuse if they buy their tickets early. This helps get your houses looking full early in the game.

“But,” you say, “If I sell a bunch of tickets at a deep discount early on, aren’t I leaving money on the table? Wouldn’t some of those people have paid more?”

Possibly, yes. But as we discussed in Filthy Lucre #3: Through the Looking Glass you’ve just rewarded the people who are willing to commit early- before reviews, before rumors of sellouts, and most DEFINITELY before closing weekend. This is a pretty self-selecting bunch of deal hunters. So don’t worry about that.

How you’ll make your money is on the next round of patrons. The ones who call once a show starts to get good buzz or get full. Because you’ll set target dates and agree as a company that once an individual performance has sold a certain percentage of the house (say, 70%), you’ll raise the price $5 for the remaining tickets to that performance. When it hits 80% full, you’ll raise it again. And so on. (Have an average ticket price that’s closer to $10? Raise it $1 every time you get 10% closer to sold out. You’ll be shocked how quickly those dollars add up).

And that perpetually sold out closing weekend full of people who waited till the last minute? That becomes your most profitable weekend. The people who complain? They get told that the earlier they buy the cheaper their tickets would be. The next show, some of them won’t wait.

This can’t possibly work, your box office staff may tell you. People will KNOW that they are paying a different price today than they paid yesterday. They will COMPLAIN. They will REFUSE TO BUY.

Here’s the thing though. If you only raise prices on shows that are filling up quickly, you will discover that those people just want to see the show, and largely don’t care what it will cost to see the show on that night. If they DO care, you can always direct them to a night that is not selling as well, and is therefore cheaper.

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, nobody loses by this equation. The people anxious to get in to a nearly sold out performance feel lucky to get in, not stiffed on the price.

And the shows that don’t sell as fast start looking like a better and better deal.

The end result? Your hits can work harder for you, all without the expense of adding performances.

Yeah, but does it WORK?

Well, I was introduced to the idea by TRG at a Theater Bay Area conference. They cited examples from major ballets and symphony orchestras across the country, all of whom had seen major earned revenue increase with no additional cost. I was intrigued, but skeptical.

I brought it back for discussion at my current theater and our Marketing Director, who had also heard the concept, was game to try it. We omitted the price lists from our website. We worked with our IT staff to figure out how to build in stepped price increases into our ticketing system that could be activated when capacity hit certain key markers.

We crossed our fingers, squeezed our eyes shut tight, covered our ears and pulled the switch.

And to our amazement, our earned revenue and average ticket prices started to steadily climb, even as we were able to continue offering aggressive discounts to special groups and Facebook fans to reach our new audience and accessibility goals.

All with nary a peep of complaint from our patrons. Even the ones, who in some cases, paid as much as $15 more per ticket than the original price for their performances.

So yeah. It worked for us. When will you start making it work for you?

Again and again and again at the Theater Bay Area conference a few weeks ago I heard playwrights being given the cold, hard truth about why their work is not getting produced (and why it is).

Here’s the facts: The open submissions process is a lie. Work does not rise up from a pile of anonymous scripts and slap artistic directors upside the head saying “DIRECT ME!”

Playwrights get shows produced at theaters because of the relationships they have with those theaters (or with taste makers that those theaters respect and trust).

I heard this statement, or variations on it, so many times in the last few months as the Outrageous Fortune report made its national rounds that I got the overwhelming urge to make a T-shirt.

It’s the relationship, stupid.

We are told that “open submissions” piles are read by interns, destined for form letters (a particularly hilarious/heartbreaking send up of the form letter genre can be found here), and rarely rise into season consideration without a strong recommend from a nationally respected literary manager or a trusted voice within the artistic director’s inner circle.

Even agents, we are told, are next to useless in getting plays seen and seriously considered. These days, A.D.s want to discover the play themselves, contact the playwright directly with questions, and only involve the agent when there are contracts to be signed.

So, you want to get your plays produced? Develop relationships with the taste makers and companies you want to work with.

All fair enough.

Except that as I write this, I can literally see a thousand artistic directors across the country cringing at the thought of the number of phone calls, Facebook messages, blog post comments and emails that will now come flooding in from playwrights wanting to “develop a relationship” with them.

And from the playwrights point of view I hear a lot of: “Okay. So. Build Relationships. HOW DO I DO THAT?”

Today, the artistic director I currently work with received an email, a blog comment and a Facebook message requesting a meeting. From the same playwright. Whom he has never met and never heard of.

I can tell you this did not make him feel that a “relationship” was developing between them.

So what would? Are there appropriate alternatives to this hard-sell “telemarketing” approach that might help you discover which directors and artistic directors would be a great fit for your work? Are there less invasive, more effective ways you could go about cultivating a relationship with them?

It turns out, the panel discussion (and resulting conversations) that brought me to the Theater Bay Area conference yielded quite a few potentially helpful insights into exactly this question.

The panel was called “Advancing Your Career through Social Media.” It could have just as easily been called “Build Relationships that Matter through Social Media.”

Here are some insights that arose out of that panel, and how they might apply to playwrights in particular:

1. Know What They’re Already Saying about You.
Okay, so you send an email to an A.D. you’d like to work with and request a cup of coffee to talk about how you might work together. What’s the first thing that A.D. is going to do when she considers whether or not to say yes? Ask the people in the office if anyone knows you. And then Google you.

Let’s tackle the online portion first. So, do you know what is being said online about you and your work right now? If you did a vanity search (a search for your name) on Google would you find the last three rants you did about how the last director you worked with “ruined” your play? Would you find a review from a respected local blogger saying that your work had “promise”? Your inclusion in a local playwrighting festival? Or would you find nothing at all?

You have a huge amount of control over what’s available online about you (in particular, you have a control over what comes up as most recent and most relevant).  So your first step is to discover (and track) what is already being said online about you and your work. The easiest way to do this is by setting up a Google Alert for your name that emails you every time someone mentions your name online. This way you can share, post and repeat the positive things being said about you and respond to or correct any negative things being said about you and your work.

If there is not much conversation about your work online at all, or if the most recent things being said  are less than positive, then considering creating a blog post that highlights the recent criticism of your work and then discusses what your recent experience has taught you or inspired you to do next.

If you don’t have one already, consider creating a website specifically for your playwriting. That way you can consolidate good reviews, letters of recommend, short descriptions of the kind of work you do, all in a place that will be easy to find by a casual Google-searcher. Remember, to have a relationship with you, they have to have HEARD of you. Make it as easy as possible for them to find all the information you want them to have about you online.

The second part, “who knows this guy?“, is equally important. The real subtext of this question: “Is this stranger whose contacting me a crazy person?” So you need to think carefully about who at that organization you may have worked with, and the strength of your relationship with them. In this particular situation, think lateral, not hierarchical. A box office staffer (and talented young actor) who had a great experience working on your show at a smaller company in town may be a stronger reputation builder for you than an assistant lit manager who knows your name primarily from the mail merge rejection letters she sent for your last twelve unsolicited submissions. More on that in a bit.

2.  Praise in Public, Criticize in Private

This is good management practice and its GREAT social media strategy. Complimenting the people whose work you honestly admire (in a public  way through a blog post, tweet, or Facebook update) not only creates a positive impression on the person complimented (again, authenticity is important- give the compliments you can really mean), it also alerts the people within your current web of relationships about what kind of work you respond to and aspire to. Some times an authentic “I found your work really inspiring” can open doors in ways that a “let me tell you about my newest play” never will.

The criticize in private is EQUALLY important. We’ve all had nightmare situations where we’ve worked with people who were horrible or whose work we LOATHED. Its tempting to vent on Facebook or in a blog post about what’s WRONG with such and such artist or company (especially if they are a ‘big guy’ and you are a ‘little guy.’ ) But here’s the thing:

No matter who they are, you don’t know who their friends are, nor can you predict whether you might someday be in a position of needing to work with them again because of a good opportunity through a third party. I can’t tell you how many times I have ended up in meetings or interviews with someone who seemed great, who I later discovered was BEST FRIENDS with a person I disliked working with (and who it turns out was going through an awful divorce at the time). An ill-advised Facebook flame campaign could have burned that bridge with this (perfectly innocent) third party before it even began. Theater’s a very human business. Never forget that.

And more importantly, someone who doesn’t know either of you (and has simply Googled you or found you on Facebook) could very easily see your rant (or string of rants) and leap to the conclusion that you are a negative person to work with (rather than assuming that the person you were working with was nuts).

So rant away. In the bar. With your friends. And where appropriate, have direct face-to-face conversations with the people you have beefs with to discuss your concerns. You may be shocked at the great relationships that can arise out of being honest face-to-face with someone you’ve had difficulty with.

But focus your public discussions on what inspires you. What you liked. What you’d like to do next.  And trust that if that person is really that awful, people already know. Your Facebook rant won’t help (and it can definitely hurt).

3. Follow the 80/20 Rule.

80% of your conversations (online or in person) with someone you are hoping to develop a relationship with should be about mutual interests, inspiring or entertaining things, generous compliments about great work by others.

20% of it should be self-promoting. So definitely post and share those great reviews, the behind the scenes rehearsal posts from your staged reading or world premiere, and the requests for feedback of the first draft of your next piece. But make sure that the majority of your posts are about things you are interested in the world, useful information you’d like to share about your areas of expertise and things that invite people to share their own  perspective on something you are passionate about.Be of value to the people you are communicating with online. If possible, be of MORE value to them then they are to you.

4. Ask Questions. And Listen More than You Talk.

Again, this is just as true online as it is in person. If you do manage to score that informational interview with the director you’d love to work with, and you spend that interview talking non-stop about your project and what a great fit it would be for them, you will end the interview knowing just as much about your own project and absolutely NOTHING about what might draw them to working with you.

Same is true online- sharing of yourself is great; inviting others to share (and listening hard, and learning well) is way better. So listen hard for areas of mutual interest, for exciting ideas that take you new directions, and then use those as a starting point to build rapport. And if you can’t secure a meeting in person, listen online. Track the blogs and public conversations of the people whose work you respect (be they directors, actors, or other playwrights) – and chime in where appropriate. Everyone who is writing online (no matter how “big” they seem to you) is desperate for feedback. Thoughtful feedback about an artists’ online work can be a wonderful starting point for a relationship (as long as you can refrain from instantly pitching in the aftermath of that pleasant interaction). And a good online conversation can lay the groundwork so that when a face-to-face meeting does occur (at a conference, a networking event, or a coffee date), you both already have some idea what you might talk about. But be sure to ask more questions in person to confirm your hunch.

5. Look to Give Before You Get.

This returns back to that lateral relationship idea. The projects you are working on now, and the people you are working with, are connected laterally (through people they know) to the projects you will be working on 10 years from now. You absolutely can’t predict who among the group you are working with now might hold the key to an amazing new opportunity for you later. So give your all to each and every project you participate in (whether it’s your own play or not).

And before you get that thrilling “Yes we want to commission/world premiere/workshop” your script from that fantastic regional theater company with the great reputation for new work, you will  do a lot (a LOT) of work that feels thankless, helping smaller companies with their projects, creating projects of your own and inviting people to participate (knowing that only a few people might see the work). Remember that the bonds formed on these small projects are what open the doors to other, bigger relationships.

So get out of your ink-stained attic garret and get out into the community.

Volunteer at the local general auditions (and keep your eyes peeled for actors who would be great in the piece you’re looking to workshop next year). Participate in the discussions about the  new work happening in your town. Join (or create) a group of playwrights who will collaborate in producing each other’s work. See the work of other writers you admire (and write them personal fan letters with lots of questions afterwards). Be unstintingly generous with your time in helping to support the work of people you’d like to be working with. There are few things more memorable than generosity and hard work. And if you have worked hard for others, your own requests for assistance, introductions and advice will be met with equal levels of generosity. It’s the oldest rule in the book. But it works.

Yes, of course you need to reserve time (and creative energy) to create and hone your own work. But if you are not out there, contributing to the work of others in your community, then your own work, no matter how accomplished it might be, will stay in the place where it started:

Words on a page. Written by a stranger. Who may or may not be a crazy person.

I recently had the opportunity to meet up IRL (in real life) with @scottyiseri and @Chris_Ashworth, two gentlemen whose thoughts I have been following regularly through the #2amt hashtag on Twitter.

Each time I was astonished, once again, at the value of translating the “idea” of a person… the strange amalgam of avatar, blog thoughts and twitter musings that I had assigned to a certain “identity” in my mind… into a real living, breathing human being.

As I prepare to head down to the Theater Bay Area conference on Monday, to talk about “advancing your career through social media,” I find that it is these “meatspace” interactions that have crystallized the real value of the extensive cyberspace interactions that I have invested my professional energy in these last few years.

Why?

Well, here’s a secret I don’t tell many people.

I’m terrified of strangers with name badges.

I go to conferences and “networking events” scanning eyeballs and job titles desperate for something, anything, to latch onto that might be an excuse to start a conversation. But, what’s the right tone? The right opening line? How do I know I’ve found a useful connection? How do I know the nametag-attached-to-a-bundle-of-flesh I am currently talking to is not just standing there waiting for the next, more relevant person to talk to them?

I prefer to start my relationships in the middle. With the cameraderie, the inside jokes, skipping right ahead to the meaty idea-swapping, provocative question part of the conversation.

You know, the GOOD stuff.

And I realized suddenly, after two completely fascinating conversations with people who, by all accounts should have been COMPLETE STRANGERS, that, through the magic of this medium called social media, we were able to skip ahead. To the good stuff.

We had a frame of reference for understanding each other. A short hand, if you will. A pre-screened assurance that we were probably going to be worth each other’s time and energy. It was oddly reassuring to discover when I arrived for coffee, or for brunch, that the person I was meeting also “knew what they were getting into” by talking to me. They had, after all, a rich database of reference material to help point the way to what I might know that would be of value to them and just how we might get along.

Our conversations veered wildly from the topics we discuss on Twitter or through this blog. But the foundation was built on a core of shared perspective that made the each diversion a breeze. Right from the opening line. Boy, if only online dating sites were so effective, right?

So as I prepare for this panel discussion on “Professional Development through Social Media,” I find myself looking forward with anticipation to the San Franciscans I might meet in “meatspace” who have been following the work of this blog and the #2amt hashtag. I look forward to skipping ahead with you, my un-met band of #2amt brothers and sisters, to the good stuff.

In fact, feel free to introduce yourself, in these comments or on twitter (@trishamead) and let me know if you have time to meet up this weekend (I’ll be in San Fran from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday morning). Tell me what you’re excited about, what you’re working on.

And then, at the conference, throw a #2amt tag right on that scary scary nametag, along with your twitter handle. That way I’ll know that you, like me, are ready to skip to the good stuff.

Together we’ll chart the path to a smarter, more impassioned, more engaged theater community. One conversation at a time.

I can’t wait.

It popped up in my newsfeed again: another article about an opera/museum/symphony theater company’s new initiatives to attract a “younger audience.”

I open these articles with a combination of dread and excitement these days. Maybe this time, this new organization (that spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on a market research study) will announce a genuinely new idea- something that really addresses the interest gap between young pop culture enthusiasts and high culture curators.

Instead, it is the same five tired ideas that every other arts organization has tried. That did not work. The frustrating part? This company could have saved themselves the time and the money by just making  a few phone calls to their neighbor organizations who already tried these same ideas and asked them, “So, how did it work for you?”

You didn’t ask. So I’m going save us all some time and TELL you anyway. Here are the Top 5 things that have been tried at arts organizations large and small for the last decade to “build a younger audience” that DO NOT WORK.

5. Young Professionals Club.

How it’s supposed to work: You invite a committee of “young professionals” to organize parties and events related to your organization. These “influencers” invite their friends and like-aged colleagues to the events, after which they become delighted to have discovered your art form and develop into subscribers, donors, and board members.

What really happens: You spend an extraordinary amount of time and resources to find food, booze, etc. to repeatedly entertain this committee’s same group of 20 to 30 friends. In the best case scenario, these events become popular for the free booze and the meat market. Your art form is an afterthought. The percentage of new patrons gained in your target demographic does not even remotely compensate for the staff time, organizational energy and resource gathering it takes to carry this off.

Instead: Want to cultivate younger board members? Take them to lunch. Invite them to the theater. Don’t throw free parties for their ex-lovers and friends.

4. Regularly Scheduled “Young People’s subscription series” with catchy/hip sounding name. Probably with the word HIP or AFTER in the title.

How it’s supposed to work: You make people feel more comfortable coming to your otherwise uncomfortable venue by giving them a special night where they are promised other young people to hang out with while they see your work. You probably add enticements like pre-show wine tastings, post-show live bands in the lobby or on stage, and Wii competitions after the show.

What actually happens: You sell a few deeply discounted subscriptions to young people in this series. But it doesn’t fill, so you open up tickets to your regular audience. The pre-show wine tasting is a sea of cat-loving women of an age. The post-show band lets their friends and fans in through the backdoor once the show lets out- they don’t even know what the show WAS. Your building clean up staff hates you in the morning.

Instead: A young subscription series is like asking us to get married before we’ve been on a date. And our generation decides by cell phone where to meet up for dinner WHILE WE’RE IN THE CAR ON THE WAY. Your attempt to squeeze a year long commitment out of a new audience demographic is doomed. Accept it. Instead, create a standing offer for people below a certain age- one that’s available almost any time. And scrupulously examine and eliminate all of  your barriers to last minute ticket purchase (Do your box office phones close two hours before curtain? Are there ten clicks between your homepage and the actual moment you can purchase a ticket? Can you even PURCHASE a ticket through a mobile device?)

3. Your Student Ambassador Program.

How it’s supposed to work: You create volunteer positions for students at colleges and universities who agree to hang your posters and put your postcards in the student union in exchange for free tickets to the shows.

What really happens:The theater nerd you hired is ecstatic about the opportunity (and the tickets) at first. Then second semester slams them with a heavy course load, they get cast in the spring musical, and your postcards moulder in the trunk of their car.

Instead: How up to date is your contact list for the student newspaper? The “writers” there change every semester. But at least if you email them and invite them to the show, their opinion will be broadcast in print form throughout campus. Much more potentially influential than a coffee stained postcard in the student union. Also, how actively are you keeping in touch with the English and Humanities department heads? A regular invitation to them, with a reminder of how your art relates to their coursework is probably the single most efficient way to get college aged bodies into your building. Studies repeatedly show that people who are exposed to the arts as part of their college course work later go on to voluntarily participate in cultural events after they graduate (with a ten year lag, of course).

2. Starting a Facebook Page and Twitter Feed.

How it’s supposed to work:Everyone on Facebook is an overcaffeinated, multi-tasking 20-something dying to be “invited” to your performance series so they can later “tweet” about how awesome your show is and tell everyone to “#FF” you.

What really happens: You do know that the median age of Facebook is much closer to 40 than 20, right? And that over 70% of Americans have an account? Facebook is a fantastic tool to connect with your WHOLE audience. But if  you are mostly sending out endless “facebook invites” to your performances and then posting your press release and show poster with a “Don’t Miss this show, great under 30 discounts here” message, you are not only annoying that 20-something audience you are trying to cultivate , you are under-serving the rest of your audience to whom the discount does not apply.

Instead: Your audience should get the same high quality cultural experience from you on Facebook as they do when they show up at your venue. The difference? At a performance, they don’t get to talk to the artists. On Facebook, they should be encouraged to. So ask questions, encourage them to ask questions, tell stories, provide behind the scenes snapshots. To use the buzzword, ENGAGE. And make sure that “special offers to Facebook fans” are less than 20% of your overall communication on that medium. The same goes for Twitter- make sure you are entertaining/enlightening (and LISTENING) to your audience twice as much as you are “offering” to them. The young audiences on those mediums will notice (and appreciate) that you are “getting it right.”

1. Hire a “hip” Marketing Consultant to “freshen” up your materials and make them “speak” to a younger generation.

How it’s supposed to work: These people know the buzzwords to speak to that generation, and they know the cutting edge graphic styles that will make your Stravinsky concert look as thrilling as the latest “Passion Pit” concert poster.

What actually happens: They present you a proposal that suggests that you lower-case everything in your marketing materials, start a twitter feed, and have live bands play in your venue after hours. Then they charge you an exorbitant fee to “curate”  illustrations from the same illustrators  you could have found yourself if you had put out an RFP through any one of a number of design gig listservs.

Instead: Have a heart – to- heart with your core artistic staff. How willing are they to explore projects that have true cultural relevance to the under-40 generation? More importantly, who have they cultivated as a  resource to introduce them to artists and projects that connect with the current generation’s tastes and concerns? Is there, in fact, ANYONE in your artistic department under 40? This is where the real rubber meets the road. Just like you cannot expect to attract a diverse audience without a deep commitment to collaboration and programming that’s directly relevant to their concerns, you can’t introduce a younger audience to your art form if you aren’t presenting something that feels relevant to their lives and in touch with the world they live in.

Don’t put the onus entirely on the artistic department, however. It’s also time for you to have a heart-to-heart with your entire communications team, to comb through the language you use to promote your institution and rid it of double-speak, insider references to “legends” in your industry that people below 40 have probably never heard of, graduate level vocabulary and excessive, effusive adjectives intended to imply a critical approval of your art that may or may not exist (in other words, bullshit).

Ask yourself:

Does this description of our event connect the dots between the experience of the event and a familiar cultural phenomena of the last 10 years?

Does it smell like “corporate speak” to a generation raised in a media-saturated (and savvy) environment?

Does it imply a need to understand the entire context of modern theater/dance/music to get the references?

Does it assume familiarity with theater-going habits or ideas (subscription, exchange, orchestra,mezzanine, Tony Award, preview…) that may be entirely unfamiliar to someone who’s never bought a ticket to the theater before?

In fact, do that before you start a single new program, pricing plan or “committee.” And if you are not sure, take a great writer (who’s under 40 and not an insider to your art form) out to lunch and tell them to tear apart your copy. You’ll probably learn more about the audience you are trying to reach in that one lunch than anything else you could possibly do.

Speaking of just ASKING, what have you done to attract a younger audience that’s seen real results? I’d love to hear your success stories and any other ideas you’ve tried that weren’t what they were cracked up to be. Do TELL.

We price everything backwards in the theater.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You debate with your box office/marketing/artistic staff to find just the right price point that feels “accessible” (read, your friends tell you that this is what “they” will pay to see your work, despite the fact your friends are comped and rarely actually pay to see your shows). You create special discounts for young folk (because they’re poor, you theorize inaccurately) and old folk (fixed incomes! Plus they are the loudest complainers about price changes). Then you slap that price on everything you print.

And you wait. Some sales trickle in, from the usual suspects: people who see everything you do and subscribers who want to bring their friends. A week before opening you PANIC. Too many lightly sold houses! A special offer must be created!

You think of everyone who might be able to send out a 2 for 1 offer to their email list. You promise to give a curtain speech in their honor longer than the play itself and spam your own customers with offers from them just to get them to offer 2 for 1 tickets to their 300 email list members. You paper the first weekend’s houses with ANYONE who will be willing to show up.

A trickle of movement. Still not much though.

Then BAM! A great review hits. Now your Friday nights start filling up. Woo hoo! All those people who got offers are now racing to buy your Friday night tickets at that great deal you offered.

Saturday matinee is still dead. But that’s okay- you have a rush ticket program, so people start lining up on Saturday for $10 tickets and your house goes from 1/3 to 2/3 full in the last ten minutes. You didn’t make any money on those seats, but hey- they were just going to go empty. Right?

Closing weekend comes. The word of mouth has been great, so it sells out. All those people you made 2 for 1 offers to? They’re scrambling to get in. The people who always hit you up for comps? They’re desperate to see it closing night. And, you’ve got a line around the block of people trying to snag no-show seats for that amazing $10 rush deal. You turn half of them away. And smack your head, saying, “Let’s extend! We’re a huge hit!”

If you went back and did the math on this huge hit, you would discover that your average ticket price was APALLING. That carefully modulated perfect ticket price that you haggled out with your business manager and your artistic director? You didn’t even come close. A shockingly small percentage of your patrons paid anywhere NEAR your perfectly accessible-but-culturally appropriate price.

On top of that, look at the behaviors you’ve rewarded:

1. Wait till the review
2. Wait till the last minute
3. Wait till the last weekend

Let’s cull that down to the one behavior you’ve rewarded: WAIT.

Why do we do this? Our own egos, pure and simple.

First we are massive optimists. We assume that of course everyone will rush to buy tickets to opening weekend even though there’s been no reviews (our postcards in coffee shops are just THAT compelling).

When that doesn’t happen,the thought of a half-empty opening weekend fills us with dread of embarrassment- Those patrons who paid our idealized price early can’t be allowed to discover that they paid that price for something only a few people wanted to see!

So we throw out a deal or an offer to paper the house. The house fills, but some of our patrons who paid top dollar get that email and discover that, if they’d waited, they could have paid half price. Some of them call and demand a refund for the difference. So in the name of good customer service, we provide it. But hey- it was worth it.

Because a FULL HOUSE of $10 tickets is better than a half-full house of $60 tickets.

Right?

Then, when the closing weekend sells out and we’re all congratulating ourselves on our success, we make the stupidest decisions of all: we feel powerful by comping in important people to a sold out house. We plan a longer run for the next show (because, clearly, the audience wants more of us). And we feel compelled to honor the advertised cheap deals we sent out early in the run (that we failed to set any limits on) despite the fact that the next person in line would have paid full value or more to get in to this super popular show.

It’s all backwards. The people who commit BEFORE the reviews should get the best deal.

The people who wait till that perpetually sold out closing performance should pay the most money- because those seats are in the highest demand!

And if 10 performances that will sell out 5 minutes to curtain at $10 a ticket is good, then 4 performances that fill with truly committed and excited $60 buyers weeks in advance is BETTER.

Want longevity as a company? Build your audience one committed high-value patron at a time, rather than in batches of low commitment, procrastinating deal hunters.

And before you holler about new audiences, remember: New, young, hip, diverse audiences are not all poor and they’re not necessarily price sensitive. They’re just MASSIVELY UNIFORMED about your art. Informing and exciting a new audience member takes resources. Resources that will be provided much faster by a committed existing audience willing to pay top dollar for the experience you provide them.

So, how do you structure your marketing campaign reward early and committed, while leveraging those early adopters to help you reach sexy new audiences?

Here’s 5 Things You Could Do to Push Your Pricing Back Through the Looking Glass:

1. Stop Panicking. A half full house early in the run is not a failure. Price resistance in the box office is not a problem- if you are not getting 10 to 15% of your audience asking for a cheaper deal than your top ticket price, your prices are too low.

2. Think like a Bedouin. If you buy a rug in Morocco, the price you are first quoted is double the price that anyone actually expects you to actually pay for the rug. The list price is a starting point, a claim of value, and an assurance that the ultimate price you pay must be a WICKED GOOD DEAL. If you have developed a magic perfect price for your shows, you’re most popular night should be as much as 20% higher than that perfect price. The people who really don’t care about price will pay it, and the people looking for a deal (like those theater industry friends who complain about how expensive you’ve gotten) can be negotiated into an earlier show, a harder to fill time slot or a highly visible but less desirable seat.

Remember, it doesn’t matter if they think your tickets are EXPENSIVE. It matters that they think they got a GREAT DEAL on a normally expensive ticket.

2. Be a Boy Scout. Be prepared.Identify your usual problem houses (for many theaters, the Saturday after opening is a common culprit) and create early offers to your strongest supporters for just that performance. Not a blanket offer. A targeted offer for the early performance that’s a tough time or day. This takes research, to identify the right audience group for the offer. And it takes time and effort to give that group enough information about the show and a good enough offer to get them to bite early and help flesh out that troublesome house. Have these offers prepped weeks ahead of opening night.

This is also a great way to reach your accessibility goals (if price accessibility is important to your mission or donor pitch).Target specific groups you’d like to be accessible to (women’s shelters, treatment programs, under-served neighborhoods and children), and offer a trade: their contact information in exchange for a great deal on a difficult night. Then make sure they have the opportunity to advocate for your show by sharing their thoughts about the experience on Facebook, by e-mail, or on a board in your lobby. Their public goodwill becomes a reward for the donors who help pay to make seats accessible to that audience, completing the circle of value without giving away seats to people who can afford more.

3. Reward early and committed. They follow you on Facebook or Twitter? They get a great deal for buying early. They’re on your mailing list? They get the best price, two weeks before opening. These people have given you something precious- a cheap pipeline to communicate with them. Make it worth their while with great deals. Make sure that if they ever accidentally find out what the person is paying at the box office 5 minutes to curtain, they get to GLOAT about the deal they got instead of GRUMBLE about why they paid more than the uncommitted schmo who showed up off the street two minutes ago. Many of these people may choose not to take the deal. But they’ll still be thrilled to receive it, and they’ll rate the value of your communications higher because of it.

4.Make Procrastinators Pay for the Privilege. Last minute and closing night should cost more. Instead of advertising rush, make sure your audience knows that the price goes up the closer you get to curtain.

5. Turn people away. A triumphant sold out closing weekend is better for the future sales of your next show (“I guess I better buy my tickets sooner next time!”) than an anemic extension tacked on at the last minute because closing night sold out. People who didn’t get in to your last show will make more of an effort to get in early on your next show.

A word of warning: the first time you implement this strategy, it may feel REALLY WEIRD. After all, if you’ve been living backwards your whole life, moving forwards might really take getting used to.

And you might find resistance from pockets of your organization (and your audience). So make sure you track the results of your new efforts- from audience feedback to average price point and average house size. This will help you balance the reporting about the new strategy. Everyone will have heard about the two cranky patrons surprised to learn they would pay more for procrastinating. But unless you tell them, nobody will know the dividends earned from the many happy, higher paying patrons who bought earlier and felt great about the price they paid.

We do not make theater to make money.

I’ll say that again.

We do not make theater to make money. Our donors don’t contribute to us so we’ll make money. Our boards don’t support us to make money. We don’t sit up at night dreaming of how we can tweak our business models to bring more dollar signs into our realm.

(Note: Haven’t read Filthy Lucre part one? Read it first to get up to speed.)

“BUT- Broadway!” you say. To which I reply, most Broadway investors never see a return on their investment. Most Broadway shows close before “break even.” Don’t get me STARTED on the business illogic of Broadway.

We create theater for one reason:

To have our work seen by an audience. Period.

There may be goals that follow from that core mission, like influencing the culture, transforming lives, investigating the human condition… and a theater company may have a very tiny, super specific subset of “audience” that they wish to be seen by. But still, being seen is the point.

Which may explain why it is so common for theater companies to fall into the trap of “If we make it FREE, it will SELL OUT.”

Our core drive is full houses, not full wallets.

So it’s actually completely rational on one level to assert, “Well, money is not the reason we’re doing this anyway. So why not stop trying to make any?”

“And at least,” you tell yourself, “I’ll get an audience if it’s free.”

No. You’ll get an audience if you find your niche and expend the resources (money and/or time) to find the people attracted to that niche and make a compelling invitation to get them to attend.

Free is not a reason for people to see your show. Its an excuse you use to avoid taking a public stand on what your art is worth. Free can sometimes lower the barrier to get people to show up at your performance. But it is not the only, or even necessarily the best, way to do that.

Maybe you are grant funded or have a trust fund, so you don’t feel you have to charge. But grants end, trust funds run out (or walk away when their owners move on to other projects). And neither help your audience develop a deep sense of the VALUE of your work. Subsidized free theater trains audiences that all theater should be free. That somebody else is “responsible” for paying your artists, playwrights, designers. And that trickles down to the whole theater ecology, lowering the pay scale of every theater artist in your community.

Okay, so. We want sold out, and we don’t exist to make money. But we still want to create and encourage a sense of the VALUE of our work, to develop the habit in our audience of supporting art through their pocketbooks. What are some ways we can do that?

Here’s 5 Better than FREE pricing strategies.

We’ll start with the most common:

1. Pay What You Will or Sliding Scale. In this model, you ask people to decide at point of purchase how much they think their experience will be worth. You rely on social pressure to keep people from stiffing you. This technique is most commonly used as a way to get fellow theater folk into the theater without technically comping them.

The Challenge:It creates a socially awkward moment for each audience member- “How much should I pay? How much is too much? Did the box office person give me a dirty look because I paid too little?” Also, “Pay What You Will” nights are almost always cash based. So even if you DO get a new audience with this pricing strategy you have no easy way to capture contact information so that you can develop a relationship with them and invite them to return.

The Opportunity: It lowers the barrier of participation in the arts for people who literally can’t afford more than $X.

2. Pay What You Think Its Worth. Some companies are inverting the “Pay What You Will” model by only requesting money after the performance. The theory is that, in the glow of having a wonderful time, patrons may pay more than they would have at entry. Your upside revenue potential (if they loved the show) is higher, and if framed properly, this strategy makes the audience feel like they are directly rewarding the performers whose work they just saw. Social pressure to contribute is still there, while the barrier to entry is still lowered by the possibility that they could still end up getting the show for free if they choose not to contribute.

The Challenge: Unless you ask people to put their “contribution” in check form, you are still not collecting contact information that will allow you to develop on ongoing relationship with that new (presumably impressed) audience member. Also, there’s little to no incentive to reserve in advance, and your audience comes in with a very low commitment to the show. So from a planning point of view it could be feast or famine, making long term growth difficult.

The Opportunity: This is a much better strategy than “pay what you will” for discovering what other people think the experience you provide is worth. Could be a great launching point for a company who needs to build audience and name recognition. Later performances could have set prices with a note that says something like “Don’t trust us. Trust our audience- On average they paid $XX even though they could have seen us for free.”

3. Free Beer with Purchase. This strategy says, You’ll pay money in advance, but the experience includes a free beer (or three). Donated beer can make this an effective (and CHEAP) way to lower the barrier to participation (hey, at least I’ll get a beer out of it), while still enforcing a set value for admission.

A variant on this is the more common “free show with purchase” where you perform in a bar, patrons pay for the booze and get the show for free. Your company gets a flat fee or a cut of the bar. In my experience, however, this strategy yields patrons who are just there to drink and could care less about the show. Plus, most bars are unwilling to share a cut of the bar with entertainment.

The Challenge: Tipsy, distracted patrons. And obviously this strategy doesn’t work at all for family-centered shows. It can also be illegal in some states, depending on the alcohol laws. And it goes without saying that you’ll need a venue with a liquor license (or an event permit) to make this work.

The Opportunity: Many people who come to your show won’t even take you up on the free beer, though it may have been a reason that helped get them (or at least some of their guests) there. And, you can raise your prices as your popularity grows, keeping the beer benefit while shifting the mental value equation more in favor of the performance over time.

4. Moneyback Guarantee or Rebate Offer. Charge a set price but advertise that if they didn’t like the show, they get their money back. Some companies say “leave your ticket stub with your email address in this box and we’ll contact you to arrange a refund.” This allows for online advance sales, credit cards, and capturing contact information. The rebate variant says, “If you didn’t like this one, we’ll send you free tickets to the next one.”

The Challenge:Its hard to say whether this really lowers the barriers to attendance (or increases the perceived value of the show). It essentially asks the question, “did you get your money’s worth?” and relies on the fact that most patrons will love it, or not want to go through the hassle of applying for the refund and explaining what they didn’t like. The rebate offer is a bit counter-intuitive – “If I didn’t like THIS show,” you might ask, “Why will I want free tix to the NEXT show?”

The Opportunity: You often don’t get to hear the negative feedback from your patrons. An offer like this can create a dialogue between you and your most disgruntled patrons, potentially transforming their view of your company through good customer service and converting a bad experience into a great one.

5. Charge High. Offer Low. This strategy has so many variants that it really deserves its own post. So we’ll do that next. Stay tuned.

A while back on #2amt, an extremely provocative gauntlet was thrown, on the OH so touchy subject of money. Filthy lucre. We can’t live without it. Most of us got into the theater profession to avoid having to think about it too much.

Yet as some point we all are faced with the task of assigning an actual monetary value to our art. Worse, we must then publicly announce it.

And then EXPECT PEOPLE TO PAY IT.

This particular gauntlet was thrown over the subject of pricing.

NO theater, @TheNineChicago insisted, should ever charge more than $20 a ticket for their work.

The argument being that, in order to grow audiences and make theater more ubiquitous (thereby eventually TAKING OVER THE WORLD), we must first make it something the average non-theater goer would find affordable on a weekly basis. There’s some logic to this- it could be argued that movies became ubiquitous as creators of popular culture in part because a schoolkid could skip school once a week and spend their nickel allowance to escape into the latest John Wayne fantasy.

Of course you could also argue that movies have been subsidized by the fantastic global distribution system unique to that artistic medium. And that if, let’s say, the Academy-Award winning film Precious, based on the Novel Push were only to play for 6 weeks in one 150 seat theater, then the producers of that film would either GLEEFULLY charge a couple thousand dollars a ticket or not produce the thing at all. Would they sell any tickets doing that? Good question.

How do we decide what’s worth the money?

I’ll pay $200 for a center section Modest Mouse ticket but I wouldn’t go to a Taylor Swift concert if it was FREE. Every year I spend $1500 to go to the middle of a desert for a week and eat food out of a tin while staring at men in tutus. I won’t spend $30 to go to the dentist (despite the subsidy of my excellent dental insurance). And I have paid to see terrible shows my friends are in and insisted on comps to shows with Academy-Award winning stars in them. $100 in bourbon at the bar? Sure. Next round’s on me. Renew that $35 Theater Service org membership? Just not sure I can afford it.

Here’s the thing. Pricing is COMPLETELY ILLOGICAL. How we assign prices is illogical. And what people will pay for is also fairly illogical.

The truth is, the way we price our performances is more about our own emotions- our fears, our egos, our self worth, and our stereotypes about our imagined audience than it is about any kind of market value. Often our prices are primarily designed to keep our box office staff from having an uncomfortable conversation:

“Hello, sir. Will you please pay me more for this ticket I’m selling you than I will be paid for this entire day’s work? Thanks so much.”

“Ma’am, if you change your tickets from Tuesday to Friday night, I have to charge you $20 more.”

Or from knowing an uncomfortable fact:

“I’m sorry sir, if you’d called last week, these tickets would have been $10 cheaper.”

Or, my favorite, “If you just wait until one hour to curtain, I can give you these tickets at half-price.”

Here’s a small sampling of the ridiculous things we secretly believe about our ticket prices (do me a favor and make a note of which ones you subscribe to):

1. If the tickets were FREE we would sell out the house.

2. A half-full house of patrons who paid $60 each is less impressive than a full house of people who lined up around the corner to buy $10 tickets at ten minutes to showtime.

3. Our single ticket buyers keep track of what we charged for last year’s (or last month’s) shows, and will strenuously object if the ticket price for this show is different.

4. Our patrons are just like us- they value experiences and spend money the same way, and for the same reasons, our friends and colleagues do. (We better hope this is not true, because we all mostly get comped into shows, don’t we?)

5. Our house is too small for our patrons to care where they end up sitting (or to be willing to pay more for a better seat).

6. And my personal favorite: The patron I’m selling this ticket to will sit down in the theater and ask the person sitting next to them, “So. What did you pay for your tickets?” And then race to the box office to demand a refund if they paid more than their neighbor.

Every single one of these assumptions is demonstrably untrue. How many “free” performances have you been to with empty houses? How many $10 performances have had only your personal friends in the house? How many general admission shows in tiny houses have had people lining up for the same four “great” seats? How many people have paid nearly $100 to see a performance of The 39 Steps around the country, despite the fact that they could rent the original movie for about $3? And when have you EVER asked the person next to you what they paid for their seat?

So. Here’s an experiment. Choose the assumption from the above list that you are most firmly attached to/afraid of. Now throw it out the window, and approach the pricing of your next show without it.

What does that look like? What new freedom do you have to price things for maximum revenue (which, remember, will go to pay the artists who did all that hard creative work in the first place)?

I tell you what I’ll do. We’re going to tackle each one of those assumptions one blog post at a time. And explore some potential pricing strategies you could try if you weren’t bound by that assumption. You with me? Stay tuned.

One of the recent #newplay conversations focused on the questions of how we can create more diversity, both in our content, our playwright relationships, and in our audience.

Much of that conversation focused on the idea of “accessibility,” i.e. how we are not making theater “accessible” to minority groups through high ticket prices, or unfamiliar audience habits, or the difficulty of cultural minority playwrights to get access to the education or relationships that would help their work to get produced.

One of the threads that kept popping up in the conversation was was, if we wanted faces like these in our theaters:
we needed to be less “stuffy,” less “formal,” and overall more “inclusive.”

There was an assertion beneath this particular thread of the conversation that went un-spoken and was really bothering me. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Then I read this New York Times article about the ways that art museums are diversifying their audiences and donor bases. Here’s a quote:

“The Birmingham museum has also courted the city’s growing Indian population over the last two years, thanks in part to Sanjay Singh, a professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham’s business school and an entrepreneur.

“The museum for the longest time has been trying to build an outreach program to the Indian community, and they have not been very successful,” Mr. Singh said. “I thought I could help.”

Mr. Singh pledged to raise $250,000 to support Indian programming, and the museum recently invited donors to that effort and their families to go behind the scenes for a peek at Indian sculptures that were being reinstalled. So far, about 20 families have contributed $1,000 each to support such programming.

That helped the museum plan a lecture on Indian culture, with performances by a local Indian dance troupe that Mr. Singh’s group identified. “That’s something we wouldn’t have known how to put together, and it is really enriching to our programming,” Ms. Andrews said.”

AHA. That’s what’s been bugging me. Some (definitely not all, let me be clear) of the recent “diversity in the theater” conversations have assumed that diverse audiences are of a specific socio-economic class that requires cheap tickets, social informality and cultural training to access our art form. It assumes that cultivating diverse audiences is expensive to do and will have to be underwritten by public funds because it is unlikely to pay for itself through new revenue sources (like donors, corporations or granting organizations with culturally specific agendas). It treats diversity like civic broccoli- nutritious, but a burden.

In fact, nearly ALL our conversations about new audience development include some mention of the idea that new audiences can’t afford or are unwilling to afford our art form unless we keep the ticket prices down and encourage them to arrive in jeans with a Bud Lite in their hand (okay, that’s an exaggeration, but you get my drift).

It’s a fundamentally classist argument. Why do we assume that these coveted new audience groups can’t afford us (be they a culturally specific community, a young/hip community, or a Netflix-watching, Lady GaGa concert-going community)? Why do we assume that they don’t want to get dressed up or have an “upscale” experience? Why do we assume that wrapping our current programming with a pre- or post-show event (live music for the indie crowd, salsa dancing for the latino community,etc etc) will make our programming more culturally relevant to a group we have no relationship with?

What was incredibly refreshing about this museum article was that nowhere in the piece did any of the examples mention either

A. Creating a special cheap night for this new audience (with additional cultural “context” thrown in)

or

B. Putting up collateral material in culturally specific locations in order to draw in a “new” crowd to the existing offerings of the museum.

In fact, all of the examples specifically mention the whole new world of high-level donor participation that was opened up to the museum by engaging a culturally specific community. Okay let me be more blunt. They all talked about how much MONEY their culturally specific programming was drawing out of the Korean, or Indian, or African-American communities with whom they developed new relationships. They all also demonstrate that these new relationships were mutually beneficial, both financially and socially. They were filling a social need for a group who wanted a culturally relevant way to participate in their local arts institutions.

They were also a two-way street, with the new patron groups actively introducing new art, artists and cultural forms to the museum that proved beneficial to the curators and the overall museum audience.

And yes, there was an accessibility issue that these institutions were struggling with. But it wasn’t that a particular community couldn’t access the museum due to economic constraints. It was that the institution couldn’t access their targeted “new” community because of cultural and social restraints.

And many of these institutions describe having struggled with developing diverse audiences before this new breakthrough was developed. So, what did they suddenly get right?

And what can we learn (steal) from their success?

I see 5 key lessons to draw from our friends in the museum world:

1. Find an advocate from within the community. Someone who has both a love for your art form and established (preferably extensive) relationships within the community that you want to reach. Empower them to make introductions. Empower them to steer your choices of when and how you engage. Admit you don’t know the best way to tackle a specific community if you are not from that community. Ask questions. LEARN.

2. Meet them on their home turf. In the article, one museum connected first with the Korean consulate. The consulate invited them to parties and events where they had the opportunity to meet members of the community, learn about the cultural context, needs and concerns specific to that community. They didn’t just ask for a mailing list and send invitations to an event at the museum. They developed relationships first. On the community’s home turf.

3. Collaborate- both socially AND artistically. The Professor Singh example is especially pointed on this front. The events that were developed to serve his community were created out of an active artistic collaboration between the community and the museum- introducing artists that the museum would have otherwise been completely unfamiliar with. The flow of resources was two-way and had tangible benefits for both sides.

The conversation wasn’t “Here’s this programming we’ve created to serve your community.” It was “We’d like to create programming for your community. We have some ideas and we’d like to hear yours. Out of that, something cool could develop.”

4. Ask for support (and don’t assume they can’t afford it). In each case, an audience building exercise became a fundraising exercise (or vice versa) because the arts institution was not afraid to ask for the support of the community they were building a relationship with. They asked for introductions. They asked for invitations. They asked for checks. In some cases, the support started in party invitations and culminated in $2.5 mil endowments. In others, it generated new sources of artwork that would have been unavailable to the museum (and its audience) before.

5. Commit- over the long term. This is not about building a culturally specific audience for this season’s culturally specific show. This is asking how the institution as a whole can commit, over the long term, to a mutually beneficial relationship with a culturally specific audience. From season selection to lobby beverage selections.

And that means the organization’s whole culture changes. For good. No band-aids. No “diversity nights.” No separate invite list for the “black” show or the “indie” show or the “Asian” show that will be ignored until the next Lynn Nottage or Will Eno piece crosses our stages.

And remember: you are building a partnership with a community who may not share all the same values as you. In order for it to be mutually beneficial, your relationship will need to respect the values you don’t share as well as affirm the values that you DO share.

But then, that’s true of your relationship with ANY audience.

Right?

So, you’re opening a channel for your audience to talk to you about your company, your work and their experience of it.

It’s pretty much a guarantee that as SOON as you start talking about doing this, somebody in your organization is going to say,

“WAIT JUST A MINUTE.”

“This is all well and good,” they say, “when everybody loves us. But what about when they HATE US?? Aren’t we just making it easier for them to poison the well and tell everyone in the world how awful we are?”

This hypothetical situation has stopped many many theater companies from adopting social media into their audience building strategy.

If the objection is overcome, it is usually by a marketing director or PR person saying, “Don’t worry! We’ll moderate the comments. Nobody will ever see the bad ones!”

I understand the impulse. But here’s what’s true.

If they have something bad to say about you, they are ALREADY SAYING it. Choosing not to listen doesn’t suppress the conversation, it just leaves you helpless to do anything about it.

And if you filter your audience engagement so that only the good stuff gets shared, you are losing a huge opportunity- for revenue, for audience retention, for trust building, for looking like a rockstar.

This is a very smug thing for me (or anyone who writes about social media) to say. But go along for the ride with me for a minute.

In THEORY, absolute transparency in your engagement with the audience (publishing both the good and the bad feedback) does the following:

1. It makes you trustworthy. That negative comment posted on your blog or facebook page (and allowed to stand without defensiveness) just dramatically increased the reliability of every positive thing that’s ever been said about you in the same venue. It feels authentic. Your commentors feel that their voices will be heard, good or bad.

2. It gives your supporters an opportunity to go to bat for you. An unfairly critical, whiny or nasty comment posted (and left visible) in a public forum read by your fans and supporters often spurs an otherwise silent enthusiast to come to your “rescue,” engaging with the negative commentor and refuting whatever claims were made. The comments posted after an unfair negative attack are often SIGNIFICANTLY more committed and positive than the ones posted before. And that “loyalty” factor has a halo that holds over in your future conversations with those audience members (and their future participation with your organization).

3. It gives you the opportunity to engage with, and dramatically improve your relationship with the negative commentor. You can respond to that patron’s discomfort or concerns the same way you would in person at the box office, using the same techniques you would use to regain their trust, i.e.:
If their complaint is legitimate, you can point to the ways their feedback is going to help improve the organization.

If their complaint is inaccurate, you can correct their misperceptions.

If it is merely a difference of artistic opinion, you can reassure them that creative differences are what make for a vibrant creative community, and thank them for helping make the community more vibrant.

The best part is, your mature, considered, inclusive, helpful and accurate reaction to negative feedback is there for all the world to see. The watchers on the sidelines come away feeling that, whether they agree with the commentor or not, they at least like the way you handled the situation.

4. And this should probably not be last, but: An open channel for both positive and negative feedback helps you get honest information about whether your work is landing right with the audience, and whether you have found the right audience for your work.

All very well and good in theory. But in practice, does it work? I mean sure, it might make you look authentic and burnish your reputation for customer service, but can’t it still negatively impact sales? Excellent question. Here’s my answer.

My organization committed to 100% transparency in our social media dealings (a big commitment, considering that our website is itself a blog, and people can post comments right on the show sales page).

The vast majority of the comments received through our various channels are positive. But there have been some very instructive exceptions.

One exception was a world premiere piece we commissioned from a Portland artist who had a huge music following but was not well known as a playwright or an actor. The show was very personal, with some very dark and difficult material in it. There was a ton of positive audience response. It also sparked a comment on the show page that was extremely negative. Here’s an excerpt from that anonymous comment:

Dear Portland,

After having seen “Crazy Enough” and reading all of these blog posts boasting it, and purchasing and listening to her cd, and finding out that it has been extended for another month, I have to say to you this: have you no other entertainment in town?

Because I’m sorry but, story: rich chic from mass suburb turns slut, turns “drug addict” turns stripper turns “rock legend” just doesn’t cut it in the real world… congrats for kicking the dope, but reality is that a couple months of doing your boyfriends drugs really doesn’t count as drug addiction. When your heart stops, literally stops and you die, literally, clinically die, until you take more narcotics because it can’t beat without them, and you have to figure out how to survive with out them, then you can call yourself a recovered drug addict.

You want to see women empowerment? Go see Richard II at the shoebox…. Portland, really? This is what you all are feigning for? Read a book. Maybe Chekhov, he at least suffered. For real.

Ouch. Right?

Here are a couple of interesting responses to that comment:

“It’s understandable that this show doesn’t speak to you – it can’t possibly speak to everyone. It’s not understandable, however, for you to belittle the people it does speak to. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you can’t argue taste? And you definitely can’t argue with 8 sold-out shows a week.

So maybe let this go, and, I’m serious – write YOUR show! Show Storm and the world what it is to know “true” pain. We’ll watch for it.”

Another one continues the conversation:

“Yeah…. ‘anon’ is really hating. I saw it last night and thought it was great. Very courageous and entertaining. Someone else suggested that u should do your own show… u should, show us all how it should be done.”

and finally:

“She told my story (our stories, I’m sure) on-stage. She dramatized, verbalized, “humorized” and portrayed via movement and song experiences in my life that I didn’t think could be accurately expressed. It could be overwhelming at times because of the potential to bring up pain, but because of the humor, the music it wasn’t. It’s funny how art works that way, letting us receive truth isn’t it?”

Total comment stream ran to 57 comments. The takeaway? As the top grossing studio show in our history, that negative comment clearly did not take away from the project’s financial success. It did, however, spark a conversation about the role of art in healing that was quite interesting.

One last quick example. Our current run of Adam Bock’s The Receptionist has proven to be controversial with our audience, and they have shared their feelings on the show page The comments have been about 50/50 in terms of liking or not liking the play. Here’s a sample:

“This play is a must see! Tremendous acting and humor, setting up the audience to experience a jolt after a single chilling line is uttered. Wonderful and thought provoking. Sharonlee Maclean is outstanding!”

“It’s time to blow the whistle on this way overrated script…. This play wants to be 1984, but what is delivered is the Apple Superbowl commercial. It looks good, it’s well executed, but in the end it’s just trying to sell us something. “Did you get that boys and girls? If you’re only interested in your mundane jobs and romantic pursuits there’s going to be a bad person coming to take you away some day. Let me explain how this whole tyranny thing will come down.”

“Steve – are you sure you were watching ‘The Receptionist’? Based on your summary of the play’s theme, I’d have to say that you entirely missed the point. As for ‘not very funny comedy,’ you’re entitled to whatever suits you, humor-wise, but the audience with whom I attended laughed heartily. I laughed too, so I disagree with your completely subjective opinion on that count.”

My favorite part of that comment stream though, and the one that illustrates my whole point (I hope) is the following:

Mandy said in 2-16-2010 @ 16:55:36

“I’m looking forward to The Receptionist after these comments. The dueling critiques have made me curious.”

We’re halfway through the run of this production, and the ticket sales seems to have been more spurred than suppressed by the debate.

Trust your audience. Trust their feelings. Even the negative ones. There are rich rewards to be had (artistically, culturally and financially) for hearing them. LOUD AND CLEAR.

Chad Bauman on the Arts Marketing blog first threw a gauntlet to the arts community with a controversial post called “How Marketing Directors Kill New Work.” After some heady response, he acknowledged that his initial post identified problems without proposing solutions. He proffered some GREAT solutions in a follow up post, which I highly recommend you check out here.

There was one element that he didn’t get into, that I think is worth airing out, particularly in light of the recent Devised Work New Play convening at Arena Stage that 2amtheatre has been covering elsewhere on the blog.

He talks about what we need to do as marketing folk to help a specific new project succeed. My thought is:

What could we be doing, right now, BEFORE we have a new work project to present, to help acclimate our existing audience to the risks and rewards of new work in general? How can we be using our regular communications with our audience to pique their curiosity what’s going on nationally and locally in the arena of new work?

Here’s my theory- just like a marathon runner builds up the muscles, habits and skill sets required to make it to the finish line months before he shows up to the starting line, our audience could also be given the opportunity to build up their “new work” appreciating habits and skills so that when we do have that next extraordinary world premiere to present, they are prepped to make it to the finish line.

But how? Here’s a few starting ideas, and of course I’d love to hear more from you!

1.Introduce. If there are playwrights or groups whose work are on our radar, let’s introduce them to our audience through occasional “Did you know’ snippets in our e-newsletters, links on our Facebook pages and twitter feeds. We are highly informed about what’s going on nationally in the theater. They are not. If we keep it short and fun, we can raise their awareness and help them stay up to date on playwrights and projects we’ve got our eye on.

2. Inspire. Inspire our audience to build their potential appetite for new work by asking them in quick fun ways (Facebook quizzes, Twitter questions, blog call and response) what they issues or ideas they’d love to see a show about. If there’s a new work out there that matches themes to their response, draw their attention to it. This becomes an ongoing community engagement exercise, as well as a great sounding board for what the audience is intrigued or pre-occupied by.

Include opportunities to vote on which of the newest works on our radar they think sound interesting, based on short funny character or theme descriptions.

Ask them to guess the name of a new work being produced elsewhere based on clues, and send them googling the company or playwright (and learning about them as they go).

3. Sample. Let’s build routine, inexpensive opportunities for audiences to sample potential new work as part of their existing play-going practices. Is it a pre-show podcast with a snippets of a few new pieces we’re interested in, available by borrowed iPod Touch in the lobby? Is it a curtain raiser using the teen acting council? A producer’s lunch that comes with face time with the A.D and a pre-lunch scene from the work of a playwright we’re interested in commissioning?

Most importantly reward their participation in any of these sampling opportunities- if they listen to the podcast and take a quick survey afterward, they earn a drink at the bar, or a discount on their next show.

4. Encourage appreciation for interesting failures. The devised work convening this weekend talked a lot about the importance of an audience willing to see an “unfinished” piece that may be interesting but flawed.

One theater company in Portland during the Fertile Ground Festival does this with a beer sponsorship. Their ticket price included a free beer. Their show ended up being excellent, but before you went, you figured- either way I’ll get a beer out of the deal.

Another rewarded people who took the time to share their opinion of the new work online (positive or negative) with a 2 for 1 coupon to the next well known piece on their radar.

5. And last but not least in my list so far, THANK THEM PROFUSELY for any successes. If a new work does well, gets great audience response, and/or goes on to succeed in another market, let’s make sure our audience knows that their participation and feedback helped create the success. Let them hear from playwrights, performers, etc how much it meant to them to see the piece premiere, to see people turn out for it, to see the piece succeed. Give our audience ownership of successful new work, and once they have ownership, keep them apprised of where “their” play is off to next.

What else…? What do you already do, or would like to begin, that would help your audience be more comfortable with and curious about the world of new work?