Pull Out Your Pink Slips!

Crowded Fire has innovated again, in what may prove an interesting press hook/altruistic endeavor. For their most recent show, they offered up free tickets to people who could prove their unemployment -- in the words of Tiffany Cothran, their managing director, "it's really just taking Pay What You Can one step further."

Andrew Lloyd Webber did a similar thing in London, you might remember, except of course it was specifically targeted at stressed stockbrokers. Not quite as altruistic. I'm interested abstractedly, but would be worried about the devaluation issue...although by linking it to actual, provable unemployment, that makes it more interesting/manageable/discussable without devaluing the work. More about altruism, less about filling houses...

According to Tiffany, 2 people took advantage this time, and it got picked up by at least 2 blogs (plus, now, me) -- one of the blogs mentioned this in context with Free Night, talking about the relative value of giving tickets away, and while I really don't agree with what was said there, I think it is valid to wonder about the value of promotions like this for the long-term value of theatre. I think, though, that a giveaway in this context may be more useful as a publicity/goodwill making tactic than it is detrimental (if at all) to long-term value.

Why Theatre's Like Baseball

John Killacky of the San Francisco Foundation just published 10-point plan to survive as an arts organization at blueavocado.org that I suggest everyone check out. What caught me (which was probably sort of a throwaway line, but that's what usually catches me), was a reference about halfway through to children growing up to follow the sports they play when their young. This extends, of course, to the arts -- child musicians are most likely to follow musical organizations as adults, etc etc.

But what's interesting to me is what underlies that phenomenon -- and my theory follows along the same lines as language development theory -- that is to say, a child can easily learn a second language. All the nuances, all the forms, how to communicate -- it all comes naturally to a child -- and even if, after that, they don't speak it for 15 years, if they come back to that language, they are significantly more able to pick it back up than an adult trying to learn it for the first time.

I think theatre's like that, at least to a degree -- people who aren't regular theatregoers have trouble with the "language" of theatre -- where to go, what to do, how to know when a show's done, what to expect, what to wear, etc. And all of these little niggly issues that people who've been trained in that "language" get intuitively affect the ability of these newbies to enjoy and sink into the live theatre experience.

This is, in some ways, being borne out in the WolfBrown intrinsic impact data (we just got to look at the final report, and it's very exciting) -- but more on that later.

I guess, in short, I'm worried that the argument for live arts for children is more complex than just instilling the value of live arts in them before TV and movies and whatever else puts their claws into them. I think it's also about teaching them the vocabulary of theatre, the nuance, the steps you have to take to go down the rabbit hole -- because it gets parabolically harder to instill that stuff as the years go on.

Pricing Like You Mean It

Last week I attended the one-day Pricing Institute session underwritten by the Hewlett Foundation and presented by Artsopolis and Theatre Bay Area down in Palo Alto. While the whole session was a bit of a blur (compressed from 2 days into one, and presented to companies ranging in size from the SF Opera to City Lights in San Jose and smaller), the general premises of the day were both exciting and enlightening.

In a sentence, the Pricing Institute essentially advocates figuring out what your patrons will pay for a ticket, and charging them that amount -- and the kicker is, in most cases, that amount is more than what you're currently charging. In addition, PI points out that different nights have different demand levels (as do different areas of the house), and if you're not pricing to maximum advantage in both dimensions you're losing money.

What's so neat about this is that, if you do it right, you need not a single new person in the house to make substantially more money (or at least that's the hope). They highlighted a (gigantic) opera venue in England that they rejiggered the pricing on that made six figures or more in extra ticketing income just by changing their pricing.

If I had a complaint about the session, it revolved mostly around the fact that it was built and targeted towards giant companies (ACT, Opera, etc) -- and of course, in the Bay Area we really only have a handful of those. I felt like there was so much potential applicability for small-to-midsize orgs that wasn't being shown -- this stuff can work for those size companies, but it's very hard to demonstrate that when the exercises all center around houses of 1,000 seats or larger.

One participant from a smallish midsize org, I heard, attended a private session (also underwritten by Hewlett) and was actually told that they didn't have much data on companies his size. This seems problematic -- but I know the PI people are working on that, and hopefully we'll be able to work with them to push more information about applicability out in the near future.

For more information on the Pricing Institute, visit http://www.thepricinginstitute.com/.

Update -- for a thoughtful article on varied pricing, visit
http://www.artsjournal.com/artfulmanager/main/is-dynamic-pricing-in-your-fut.php

Rebel Yelp

An interesting (if a bit late, given all the attention Yelp's been getting here for months) article on how detrimental to newspapers Yelp has become is on Slate this morning:

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/0s-1s-and-s/2009/05/04/rebel-yelp