Bruised Orange's production of 'DeTermination' began last week, and I house managed the preview. I had intended to blog about that, and a half dozen other things, but I then went away to the forest to meditate and get my head straight.
I don't know if it worked. I still want to do arts administration.
The title of this blog is really stupid and pretentious. It was done without thinking, and was more a reaction to the blogs that want to show you 'behind the scenes' of whatever group the poster is part of. The show itself is dramatic and glamorous, but whatever's going on behind the scenes is always so much more amazing and awesome somehow. Maybe it's the hint of exclusivity. What do the pretty people get up to?
None of these blogs talk about the room.
There's always a room. The room can be a series of cubicles inside a theatre complex. It can be a trailer at a faire. In my case, it's a laptop wherever I can find a quiet place.
This room is full of telephone numbers, charts, graphs, to-do lists, and piles of emails. It's the fifth element of theatre. Audience,Actor,Stagecraft,Author,Room.
The room at times feels like the antithesis of theatre. No one goes into theatre to manage receipts, or calculate unemployment insurance, or present a foundation the demographic breakdown of audience members for financing that targets projects that will attract millenials...
Because of that, the work becomes the unpleasant chore for one or more members of the company. Watching an actor working two jobs to fulfill their dream of playing Macbeth spend their few spare hours negotiating a grant application is not a pretty sight. Everyone knows they need the room, and someone to be in it...They just don't want to be the ones inside the room.
My degree, and the work I'm doing, puts me square in the room. And I have to ask myself why I'm here. Being in the room means putting together a receipt and accounting system before wednesday. It means looking up the board's emails and phone#'s so they can get access to a database. It's finding a way to tell a large theatre that the reason your company is so successful with a target demographic is because of all the awesome things you do...And make sure the theatre doesn't realize the answer is 'they're the only ones who show up'.
It's puffing yourself up to bigger companies so you can swipe their lists.
It's turning your crazy drinking buddy who works at CNA into an excited board member.
It's making audience members excited that the pocket change they gave you goes to the light bulbs and space rental.
It's demographic breakdowns
It's applications
It's meetings
It's meetings
It's meetings
And the thing is, when I talk about it with others, I get so excited. I mean seriously excited. I can't stop talking about it. You want to hear about a large database training session I had with the League and Chicago Shakespeare? ASK ME! Holy shit, I will make your soul bleed with talk of netflix-style ordering of lists, and demographic breakdowns by religious affiliation and zip code. I can talk for hours with powerpoint slides about the utility of audience members visualizing where their contribution goes, down to the light bulbs ($16.53, but for only $510, you can get us an 8-piece set with 2 dimmers, clamps, cables and scaffolding! I'm sure you could afford $65.95 for four lamps! At that price there's no difference between buying a lamp or a bulb!).
I love this, and it's more than a little crazy. But it does something for me. Doing this, and loving this makes more theatre happen. It gives everyone else the breathing space to be their best. And that not only makes more theatre, but better theatre.
I live in the room. If I have my way, that room will -be- a room someday. With a window. Looking over backstage.
Step by step. Right now, I have to make a box office slip by Wednesday.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
First Meeting.
Friday was the first meeting I had with the whole Board for BOTC.
The Board consists of three individuals, Clint, Mark and Ann. They represent the creative and practical work of the company as well. In addition, John Morrison was in attendance. John is the director of the upcoming show, ‘Daddy Longlegs’, which will be presented on the beach of the lakeshore.
This is my first time talking nuts and bolts with the company. BOTC is out of their trial period for being a nonprofit, so they’re pretty locked, but they need to grow. We got to talk about the upcoming season, and what’s been going on with their current project, but the talk went to developing the brand and fundraising.
BOTC has a lot of tools at their disposal to reach their audience. They have a successful weekly show that brings in an audience, they have a solid facebook presence, a website, and a blog. Talk went to actively utilizing the three together, as well as including new tools.
• Production Journal – This is becoming essential. Audiences and donors need to feel like they’re part of the production, and the journal keeps everyone up to date. More importantly, that show never stops being on the audience’s minds.
• Press – Having a play set and staged in the lake is pretty unique. BOTC needs to get people writing about the show. Bloggers, The local press, etc… Moreso, every time someone –does- write BOTC up, it needs to go on our blogs, on facebook.
• Video. This got discussed a lot. BOTC’s main show is staged readings of personal ads from local papers. They’re hilarious. Videotaping some of them, along with select scenes from upcoming shows keeps the audience and newcomers engaged. Something funny on youtube could stretch even further.
• Direct mail. This is where I’m getting my start. Utilizing the Big list, we can reach thousands of households in areas we want to hit. It requires learning more about postal costs, but the results, both in getting audiences, and in mapping demographics is invaluable.
The other aspect of using the Big List is fundraising. Donor lists are available through the service, and we could access those lists for new fundraising efforts. Aggressive fundraising is relatively new to BOTC. They’re funded primarily through grants, with an annual fundraising event that takes place at a local bar. This year is the beginning of building mailing lists, coming up with donation drives, and coming up with new fundraising.
One of the ways discussed is both effective and a favorite of mine: Offering for ‘sale’ the key components of the theatre. For example:
$2.50 buys a light bulb
$15 feeds our interns
$50 buys the programs for the upcoming show.
These range from the practical to the ambitious:
$300 buys a new sound board.
$750 puts the company on a creative retreat
$5,000 pays for a residence.
Lifeline theatre in Rogers park does this extraordinarily well. Against one wall of the foyer is a stack of slips covering everything on Lifeline’s list from the smallest component to the most ambitious project. People can donate as much or as little as they like, but if a hundred patrons all buy the $2.50 screwdriver, that adds up to the $2,500 lighting scaffold. Bit by bit we build a theatre.
We also discussed internships. It seems that I’ll be in charge of the corralling of those. How do you provide value to people you don’t pay? We went over some ideas, and the big one was participation and access. I used renfaire as an example, and it seems that there’s a lot more value that we can provide than we expected. We’ll split the internships into shows rather than seasons, and I’m in charge of interviews.
The Board consists of three individuals, Clint, Mark and Ann. They represent the creative and practical work of the company as well. In addition, John Morrison was in attendance. John is the director of the upcoming show, ‘Daddy Longlegs’, which will be presented on the beach of the lakeshore.
This is my first time talking nuts and bolts with the company. BOTC is out of their trial period for being a nonprofit, so they’re pretty locked, but they need to grow. We got to talk about the upcoming season, and what’s been going on with their current project, but the talk went to developing the brand and fundraising.
BOTC has a lot of tools at their disposal to reach their audience. They have a successful weekly show that brings in an audience, they have a solid facebook presence, a website, and a blog. Talk went to actively utilizing the three together, as well as including new tools.
• Production Journal – This is becoming essential. Audiences and donors need to feel like they’re part of the production, and the journal keeps everyone up to date. More importantly, that show never stops being on the audience’s minds.
• Press – Having a play set and staged in the lake is pretty unique. BOTC needs to get people writing about the show. Bloggers, The local press, etc… Moreso, every time someone –does- write BOTC up, it needs to go on our blogs, on facebook.
• Video. This got discussed a lot. BOTC’s main show is staged readings of personal ads from local papers. They’re hilarious. Videotaping some of them, along with select scenes from upcoming shows keeps the audience and newcomers engaged. Something funny on youtube could stretch even further.
• Direct mail. This is where I’m getting my start. Utilizing the Big list, we can reach thousands of households in areas we want to hit. It requires learning more about postal costs, but the results, both in getting audiences, and in mapping demographics is invaluable.
The other aspect of using the Big List is fundraising. Donor lists are available through the service, and we could access those lists for new fundraising efforts. Aggressive fundraising is relatively new to BOTC. They’re funded primarily through grants, with an annual fundraising event that takes place at a local bar. This year is the beginning of building mailing lists, coming up with donation drives, and coming up with new fundraising.
One of the ways discussed is both effective and a favorite of mine: Offering for ‘sale’ the key components of the theatre. For example:
$2.50 buys a light bulb
$15 feeds our interns
$50 buys the programs for the upcoming show.
These range from the practical to the ambitious:
$300 buys a new sound board.
$750 puts the company on a creative retreat
$5,000 pays for a residence.
Lifeline theatre in Rogers park does this extraordinarily well. Against one wall of the foyer is a stack of slips covering everything on Lifeline’s list from the smallest component to the most ambitious project. People can donate as much or as little as they like, but if a hundred patrons all buy the $2.50 screwdriver, that adds up to the $2,500 lighting scaffold. Bit by bit we build a theatre.
We also discussed internships. It seems that I’ll be in charge of the corralling of those. How do you provide value to people you don’t pay? We went over some ideas, and the big one was participation and access. I used renfaire as an example, and it seems that there’s a lot more value that we can provide than we expected. We’ll split the internships into shows rather than seasons, and I’m in charge of interviews.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
The Big List – Broadening community participation.
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working as the business development intern for the Bruised Orange Theatre Company (BOTC). BOTC is fairly small itinerant group, who at the same time is a fully formed nonprofit.
My role as the BDI, is to try and figure out the different marketing and development opportunities that are available to BOTC, and make them work. Right now that means house managing their recent show Determination: The Reboot, and later on, corralling the actual 'grunt work' interns for the summer.
BOTC is looking to grow and expand, and to that end, they’ve taken advantage of numerous League of Chicago Theatre programs ranging from free and subsidized marketing to mentorship with other theaters. Recently, BOTC was invited to be part of a large-scale mailing list exchange and database called ‘The Big List’.
TRG Arts and The Big List
TRG Arts is a 15 year old arts consulting firm working in 8 markets through the United States. Although focusing on large cities such as Dallas and Chicago, they also take on smaller markets, and even whole states. Their combined database covers 50 million patron transactions to determine patron behavior.
Data for TRG’s databases comes from voluntary submission by individual theatres. In Chicago, TRG partnered with The League, and requested all the patron, member, and Board information from all member theatres. Members uploaded the information and were recently able to access their lists, and the data that list provides.
The Data
The benefit from providing all this information to TRG is fairly impressive. TRG matches the last name and address of every individual on the list, and obtains all pertinent information about them through Axiom. This enables the theatre to map their own list by economics, ethnicity, location, etc… TRG also provides large-scale analyses of the entire theatre community for use in advocacy.
The largest benefit of this data for the theatres, is the ability to compare and exchange mailing lists. Once the data is uploaded, from board members to single ticket purchasers, to subscribers, the theatre has the option to suppress individual lists. This prevents other theatres from requesting the information, but keeps the data available for the theatre for research purposes. The remaining lists are then available for exchange.
The Mailing Exchange
This part is brilliant. It’s based on a web-based shopping portal. Members can select lists by theatre, by location, by size, and request those lists from other members in a single stroke. For example:
BOTC wants to start their summer program They want to put together a direct-mail campaign to most the northside of Chicago, as far south as Belmont. They set up a campaign profile, with contact information, deadlines, and the purpose of the marketing campaign.
BOTC can then select the geography they want to affect. This can be anything from ‘X’ radius from the theatre, X range of Zip Codes or SCF’s, or individual codes. This filter will affect your existing mailing lists, and the ones you want to pull from.
The next step is that you shop from the available lists from all the theatres in the group. First selected is the theatres you want to work with. After selecting, BOTC then goes to a ‘purchase’ screen where individual lists are selected, which will have the size of the lists, and number of duplicates. After selecting all the lists you want to use, a single button click sends approval requests to all the theatres selected. If the theatre approves, BOTC now has access to a merged and cleaned mailing list available for the marketing campaign.
Paid services
All the above listed services are free. However, this same list can be divided up by demographics (income, age, ethnicity). This filtering costs ranging from $1.25 per thousand to up to $17.50 per thousand. A minimum order is $25, handled through credit card or invoice. To take the BOTC example again:
BOTC’s target market has always been the young, post-college crowd. Not a terrible amount of money, but consistent. For their production, they want to cater to an expanded version of that market, pulling mailing lists from similar theatres. They can attach filters to their list request of an age range of 18-35, and an income range of 15-40K. The two ranges would cost roughly $10 per thousand names. They assemble a list request that covers 3,000 names, pay $30, and when all the list requests are approved, BOTC has a large mail-merge that targets their special demographic for $30.
Additional data
BOTC can compare their lists to the lists of other theatres in the group. This aids in choosing which lists to use. If, for example, the lists of BOTC and Live Bait theatre were over 75% similar, they might not be the best people to request lists from.
Goal
TRG noted that in their research, a single axiom stood out: ‘The more they come, the more they come’. Patrons have an 85% return rate to theatre, and that’s not limited to a single company. The sharing of this information increases theatre attendance and participation across the board. Even for groups who are miserly with their lists, the option to control access and the opportunity for free analytics is definitely an incentive. The goal is to get more people exposed to theatre, and this exchange has the possibility to do so.
Personal
This is an amazing thing to be part of on the 'ground floor' for this community. Although the system is relatively simple to use, the variety of features and the huge amount of customization that's involved means that anyone who already has a specialty in this kind of exchange is going to be useful in markets that TRG has penetrated.
Notes for the Project
THis is the kind of tool I'm talking about for theatre development. As Chicago is just implementing this tool, I'm going to have to ask TRG for contact info for outside theatres to see how this works, and how the users feel about it.
Coming Soon
-Annotated Sources
-Mission Statement
-Notes on my first experiences as house manager
My role as the BDI, is to try and figure out the different marketing and development opportunities that are available to BOTC, and make them work. Right now that means house managing their recent show Determination: The Reboot, and later on, corralling the actual 'grunt work' interns for the summer.
BOTC is looking to grow and expand, and to that end, they’ve taken advantage of numerous League of Chicago Theatre programs ranging from free and subsidized marketing to mentorship with other theaters. Recently, BOTC was invited to be part of a large-scale mailing list exchange and database called ‘The Big List’.
TRG Arts and The Big List
TRG Arts is a 15 year old arts consulting firm working in 8 markets through the United States. Although focusing on large cities such as Dallas and Chicago, they also take on smaller markets, and even whole states. Their combined database covers 50 million patron transactions to determine patron behavior.
Data for TRG’s databases comes from voluntary submission by individual theatres. In Chicago, TRG partnered with The League, and requested all the patron, member, and Board information from all member theatres. Members uploaded the information and were recently able to access their lists, and the data that list provides.
The Data
The benefit from providing all this information to TRG is fairly impressive. TRG matches the last name and address of every individual on the list, and obtains all pertinent information about them through Axiom. This enables the theatre to map their own list by economics, ethnicity, location, etc… TRG also provides large-scale analyses of the entire theatre community for use in advocacy.
The largest benefit of this data for the theatres, is the ability to compare and exchange mailing lists. Once the data is uploaded, from board members to single ticket purchasers, to subscribers, the theatre has the option to suppress individual lists. This prevents other theatres from requesting the information, but keeps the data available for the theatre for research purposes. The remaining lists are then available for exchange.
The Mailing Exchange
This part is brilliant. It’s based on a web-based shopping portal. Members can select lists by theatre, by location, by size, and request those lists from other members in a single stroke. For example:
BOTC wants to start their summer program They want to put together a direct-mail campaign to most the northside of Chicago, as far south as Belmont. They set up a campaign profile, with contact information, deadlines, and the purpose of the marketing campaign.
BOTC can then select the geography they want to affect. This can be anything from ‘X’ radius from the theatre, X range of Zip Codes or SCF’s, or individual codes. This filter will affect your existing mailing lists, and the ones you want to pull from.
The next step is that you shop from the available lists from all the theatres in the group. First selected is the theatres you want to work with. After selecting, BOTC then goes to a ‘purchase’ screen where individual lists are selected, which will have the size of the lists, and number of duplicates. After selecting all the lists you want to use, a single button click sends approval requests to all the theatres selected. If the theatre approves, BOTC now has access to a merged and cleaned mailing list available for the marketing campaign.
Paid services
All the above listed services are free. However, this same list can be divided up by demographics (income, age, ethnicity). This filtering costs ranging from $1.25 per thousand to up to $17.50 per thousand. A minimum order is $25, handled through credit card or invoice. To take the BOTC example again:
BOTC’s target market has always been the young, post-college crowd. Not a terrible amount of money, but consistent. For their production, they want to cater to an expanded version of that market, pulling mailing lists from similar theatres. They can attach filters to their list request of an age range of 18-35, and an income range of 15-40K. The two ranges would cost roughly $10 per thousand names. They assemble a list request that covers 3,000 names, pay $30, and when all the list requests are approved, BOTC has a large mail-merge that targets their special demographic for $30.
Additional data
BOTC can compare their lists to the lists of other theatres in the group. This aids in choosing which lists to use. If, for example, the lists of BOTC and Live Bait theatre were over 75% similar, they might not be the best people to request lists from.
Goal
TRG noted that in their research, a single axiom stood out: ‘The more they come, the more they come’. Patrons have an 85% return rate to theatre, and that’s not limited to a single company. The sharing of this information increases theatre attendance and participation across the board. Even for groups who are miserly with their lists, the option to control access and the opportunity for free analytics is definitely an incentive. The goal is to get more people exposed to theatre, and this exchange has the possibility to do so.
Personal
This is an amazing thing to be part of on the 'ground floor' for this community. Although the system is relatively simple to use, the variety of features and the huge amount of customization that's involved means that anyone who already has a specialty in this kind of exchange is going to be useful in markets that TRG has penetrated.
Notes for the Project
THis is the kind of tool I'm talking about for theatre development. As Chicago is just implementing this tool, I'm going to have to ask TRG for contact info for outside theatres to see how this works, and how the users feel about it.
Coming Soon
-Annotated Sources
-Mission Statement
-Notes on my first experiences as house manager
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