Is This The Future of Ticketing for Small and Midsize Performing Arts Organizations?

Yesterday, I sat in on an all-day design workshop (in New York!) for a new product called AthenaTix, which is currently in development via the national service organization (formerly mostly know for its services to individuals) Fractured Atlas. The program, like Project Audience, which I wrote about earlier (and which I’ll be writing about again shortly), is funded in large part by the Mellon Foundation. AthenaTix, which is targeting to launch Version 1.0 about a year from now, will be an open-source, free ticketing software specifically designed for small and midsize arts organizations. V1.0 will allow for fairly mundane, but important, things like an easy sales path, robust show information, quick processing, printable tickets, etc. But, in later versions, it also has the potential for a lot more--notably shared attendance data across multiple companies (as more organizations start using the system), customizable logins, advanced customer tracking capability, and perhaps even (though likely not in V1.0) dynamic ticket pricing that would respond to set variables like percentage sold, length of time from performance, ticketing variations from night to night and seating area to seating area, and maybe even aggregate review response (via traditional media and social media) to maximize profits. And Athena (which is actually an extremely hard-working acronym for Advanced Technology Hub and Extensible Nexus for the Arts, but is also conveniently named after the goddess of wisdom) is actually envisioned as a modular system that will eventually cover everything a small organization would need in the way of technology, from constituent management to donor software to content management. The system, which, according to Fractured Atlas executive director Adam Huttler, will take up to 20 years (!) to complete, has the potential to revolutionize the way small companies interact with constituents and dramatically level the playing field between variably sized arts organizations.

To be clear, the product that comes out in a year will not be nearly as robust as that--it will probably function only for general admission houses of under 100 seats, with limited runs and a single price point for any given performance (i.e., no discounting). Given all that, perhaps it’s easy to see why what’s got me excited is what’s coming after V1.0--the high potential in V2.0 and onward for substantially benefiting small and midsize organizations (at little or no cost) is extremely appealing, even though V1.0, in the current formulation that they’re talking about (which may, I should point out, change as the design process continues), essentially replicates services that are already available with almost nothing new on the docket.

It seems, too, that when it rains it pours. PatronTechnology, the for-profit company behind PatronMail, is currently beta testing a similar product called PatronManager in Los Angeles. While I can't speak about specifics because the product is still very much in development, Theatre Bay Area staff and members of the Theatre Services Committee were recently presented with a half-hour demo of the product, and what we saw was very exciting.

In both of these cases, the goal is to create a low-to-no-cost solution for ticketing (and donor) management for small and midsize companies. Fractured Atlas, once AthenaTix is finished, will offer it as open source code to whoever wants it, but will also be launching a national ticket vending site built on the AthenaTix platform and collecting ticket processing fees as income. AthenaTix, and the entire Athena program, will be radically transparent--they're currently sharing everything at athena.fracturedatlas.org. PatronManager is still in beta, and so is somewhat under wraps. If you're interested in learning more, email me and I'll connect you into the process.

All of this is very much still in process, but we’re really excited here at Theatre Bay Area to see not one but two fantastic products coming down the pipeline designed to directly address a major field-wide need.

Donation Appeal or Ransom Note?

The Willows Theatre, which announced last week it must raise $350,000 by November or it will close its doors forever, has been called out by Backstage at BackstageJobs.com, which was picked up by You've Cott Mail, as a ransom demand that must stop.

The only difference between Willows' appeal and, say, the Magic's, Foothill Theatre Company's and Shakespeare Santa Cruz's (and many other companies across the nation) is that Willows is late to the party, and so suffers from donor fatigue. While no one wants to see any theatre company fail--especially one that offers weeks--it appears these give-us-$300K-or-we'll-die appeals are now in danger of getting the wrong kind of publicity. (And, it's interesting to note that $300K-350K seems to be the most common numbers.) But when the situation is that dire, what other options are there? How should companies make these kinds of appeals?

In any case, if you'd like to help the Willows out, click here.

Jobless in Seattle

"You've Cott Mail" posted a hot-topic article this morning from the Seattle Times about how the larger local theatres aren't hiring as many local actors as in even two years ago, or last year. The article, written by ex-Bay Area theatre writer Misha Berson, indicated that Seattle Rep slashed roles for local actors from 40 last year to 20 this year. Ouch.

Of course local actors cost less overall than out-of-town actors, so on the surface you have to wonder where the cost-savings is. Can we say touring productions, coproductions, touring solo shows? (Since this is Seattle, I'm reminded of Mike Daisey's diatribe monologue against big theatre companies who don't support their local artists, while he was touring around the country with his solo show taking up slots in regional theatres' season. Not that I disagreed with him, but irony can be unavoidable no matter your intentions.)

Might be interesting to compare how Seattle's regional theatres are dealing with the recession as opposed to Bay Area theatres. Last week I just finished editing an article for our October issue (that's how far in advance we work), a discussion about the benefits of hiring local artists--and the possibly surprising benefits of having out-of-town artists here. But anecdotally, I've noticed that San Jose Rep's Rick Lombardo, in his first season, is committed to the local actors, and even Magic Theatre hired mostly local actors in Loretta Greco's first season. (Now, if we can get some more local directors and playwrights in there too.... I did hear that Rick was meeting with a lot of local playwrights.)

The out-of-town casting/hiring is always a hot-button topic. The very first issue in 1976 of what is now Theatre Bay Area magazine had an article about it, and it seems we run an article about it every couple of years. I tried to cast (ahem) the October article a bit differently, holistically if you will. I know it's a month off yet, but I'll enjoy hearing your comments when it comes out.

The Facts Are These

I've never paid attention to Theatre Facts, the 35-page audit of American theatre as a whole published each year by TCG. Before I started here at Theatre Bay Area, I worked at Z Space, which wasn't a TCG member theatre, and as such the national service organization barely touched my radar. And last year I was swallowed whole by Free Night and the run-up to the intrinsic impact study. So I'm a Theatre Facts virgin, and I've got to say, it's quite the piece of work.

For those of you who don't want to take a wander through all 35 pages, I'd at least recommend reading the first page, which includes a very helpful "Inside this Article" summary. But if you want to delve deeper, there are a lot of numbers and some potentially disturbing trends.

One thing to point out first--while Theatre Facts was just published, it actually only looks at the period between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008. This is because it takes almost a year for TCG to do what it does in terms of verifying numbers, pouring over audits and 990s, and crafting the article. As such, it cuts off just before things got interesting with the economy. As you can imagine, I can't wait to see what it shows happened in the year they're auditing now--but alas, we'll have to wait until next August, by which time (one can dream) this whole financial downturn might have flipped back to an upswing. (An aside: this long timeline has inspired the currently-running Pulse survey, which we encourage all arts organizations, TCG and non-TCG alike, to take. The Pulse takes a much more cursory, but also much quicker-to-process, look at the state of the field.)

First, some of the quick takeaways from the study, and then some futher thoughts on meaning:

• Theatres presented the creative work of 83,000 artists to 32 million audience members.


• More than half of theatres ended 2008 in the red.


• Subscription income rose 2.6%, but 8% fewer subscription tickets were purchased and the number of subscribers fell by 10%.


• Overall attendance was up 1.9% and the number of performances offered was up 5.2%.


• Earned income dropped over 7% from 2007 to 2008, and supported fewer expenses per dollar than in any previous year.


• Of all earned income, ticket sales represented 76% of money earned in 2008, but covered 3% fewer expenses.

The main thing that caught my eye is this ever-rising discrepancy between income and expense--even with earned income on the rise, which it surely won't be in the next edition of this report, growth in expenses (19.1%) outstripped growth in earned income (6%) by a large margin over five years. Essentially, even as we continue to raise our prices, the cost of producing theatre continues to be a losing game financially.

I don't know where this leaves us, especially since of those five years referenced above, five were in a positive economy. And I'll be honest, I'm not really a numbers guy, so my eyes kind of glazed over around page 15, so I've got a lot more to process. But this is a start--and it leads me to ask, how can we as a community generate new models that allow our income to balance, if not exceed, our expenses? Admittedly, my numbers don't cover the development income/expense lines, which are a bit more positive, but still don't really even out.

I find this especially interesting in light of the discussion occuring in the comments on Rebecca's post "Growing versus Thriving" and an earlier post by Sabrina about the NEA funding coming under attack. TCG's survey looks almost exclusively at budgets over a million dollars (in many cases, far over a million dollars) because that's who TCG primarily serves. What would happen, I wonder, if we were to look at this same level of detail for companies like Crowded Fire or Shotgun Players? Is theatre morphing into a situation in which smaller is better, more sustainable? Additionally, some of the comments in those earlier entries have been discussing the assertion by certain Republican Congress members that the government shouldn't have the onus for supporting work that hasn't succeeded in the public sphere (i.e., hasn't made money on ticket sales). With this new data--that almost no one succeeds to that level, at least in the aggregate--where does that leave us as a field, especially as government and foundational funding wane with the descending good fortunes of the people whose money they redistribute?

Growing Versus Thriving

A few years after I started Crowded Fire, I remember the mother of a company member coming up after a show and saying enthusiastically, “You guys are going to be the next Berkeley Rep. I remember when they were just a small group starting out and look where they are now!” That sounded exciting to me--I thought it would be great to have our story look like the classic '70s/'80s story of the group of actors who got together to put on a show, attracted an audience and funding, built a building, and grew their company into one of the leading regional theatres in the country.

So we started to work on it. In between finding cheap lumber, tracking down rehearsal space and meeting playwrights, we started trying to look like a mini regional theatre. We put together an advisory board, we created an employee manual (I laugh when I think about that--I mean, we didn’t really have any employees), and we tried to seem as much like an institution as we could. This started to pay off fast: artists took us seriously, I got invited to speak on panels, and most importantly, it was easier to answer all those questions on grants that are oriented towards larger companies. Did we have a strategic plan? Of course! Did we know the ratio of earned to contributed income? You bet! Did we have a plan to become a nonprofit within three years? In progress.

But then I started to question this approach. Was growing into a multi-million dollar theatre really what we were aiming to do? For one thing, it didn’t look likely. The landscape has changed a lot since the early days of the regional theatre movement and there isn’t necessarily room for too many more institutions on that scale. For another thing, the kind of artist-driven, experimental work we were attracted to didn’t match well with the kind of revenue you need to grow exponentially like that. And honestly, all that time spent on the business of creating and maintaining a nonprofit structure was time not spent making art, or improving the art we were creating.

Fast forward some years, and here at Theatre Bay Area I often talk to small companies who want to know how to grow into midsize ones, or to other members of the community who want to know what TBA is doing to “help companies grow.” What I think now is that we’re not asking the right question. What can we all do to help companies thrive? Not everyone needs to grow, or especially to keep on growing year after year. Sure, it’s great to get big enough to have a paid staff member, to pay artists a semi-respectable wage, and to get the Chronicle to come review your plays. But maybe the question should be about achieving a sustainable size and then deepening the creative achievement, not just the size of your audience or the size of your budget. Especially in the midst of this recession, we need to find other ways to measure success. Year-over-year growth is not always possible, and perhaps not even desirable.

The thing is, though, this kind of thinking has to come from funders and other key players as well. If the art’s not real unless you own your space, if you can’t call it a “professional” production without an Equity contract, if you can’t get in the door of a major funder without a minimum budget size, then there are real reasons that we keep focusing on growth. This feels like such an American preoccupation to me. The stock market needs to keep rising and rising, we need to keep settling more and more land, we have to build bigger and bigger houses. Let’s not make that mistake in the arts.

What could we all do to change the conversation so that we have others ways to measure importance, achievement and value to the community? What if we asked how significant the work you’re making is instead of what budget category your company fits in or how many audience members attended last year? There’s no question that the institutional model is a problematic one for new companies to emulate. Let’s start thinking about new structures to help emerging artists attract the resources they need to make extraordinary work, and let’s work with our funders to figure out how to evaluate that work without always asking everyone to demonstrate growth.

So, Theatre's in Trouble, Eh?

Victoria Nguyen has a fairly substantial article in this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian (on newsstands now!) on the state of the theatre community in the Bay Area, specifically looking at small and midsize companies. It's interesting to see the article in finished form, as Victoria has spoken to me and other Theatre Bay Area staff at least three times in the process of writing it. Verdict? It's about what I thought it was going to be.

I've got to say, the picture she paints is not necessarily pretty, and I sort of knew that was coming. In our discussions, Victoria particularly requested that she be pointed towards companies "struggling to stay afloat" and employees "suffering from 'burnout'." While I took some time to let her know that hunting out those stories doesn't make them the standard for the community right now, she seems to have continued on that path and written an article that paints a bleaker picture than I think is really representative of the current situation.

This is not to say that her article is inaccurate--as our Pulse Survey (which she references in the article) shows, things are not all sunshine and lollipops for companies right now, and it's a little unclear whether companies are reacting as proactively and forcefully as they might. And she highlights some great realities in the field right now, like a potential over-reliance on ticket income and a potential dearth of large-cast plays because of the financial realities of mounting them. I can nitpick that she claims that companies of all sizes are seeing reductions in ticketing income and individual donations, which doesn't actually seem to be true across the board (see this mention on PianoFight's blog and this article about DC's Arena Stage, for example). Anecdotally, two of the companies mentioned in the article (Impact and City Lights) have both told me that someof their shows have actually seen larger audiences than predicted, in some cases record-setting numbers.

Ultimately, while I'm a little sad that the positive stuff (the increased cooperation within the community, the new innovations occurring every day across size and scope, the new spaces being created by Z Space, Intersection and others) didn't make it in except insofar as it was mentioned as a direct effort to stay afloat, I am absolutely thrilled that the Bay Guardian spent five pictures (including the front page) and two pages talking about some of our best and brightest small companies.

And there is one bit of wisdom that is always good to remember. In the last paragraph, Victoria quotes Z Space AD Lisa Steindler saying, "We're artists--we're a smart group of people. We've just tightened, tightened, tightened. And who knows? Maybe we just caught it in time."

Here's hoping.

In other news (and running counter to my relative optimism), the Magic officially announced today that they're exiting stage right (okay, actually exiting the stage on the right as you go up the stairs to their venue in Fort Mason). They're dropping out of the Sam Shepard Theatre at Fort Mason and keeping only the thrust. The space is available for rent through Fort Mason, if you're interested.

Photo: Anne Galjour in Z Space Studio's upcoming production of You Can't Get There From Here. Photo by Clayton Lord (hey that's me!) Find out more.