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.