TCG Conference

By now I hope you all know that the Theatre Communications Group conference is happening in Chicago June 17-19, 2010. The League is hosting. What we are most energized about is the opportunity to showcase Chicago theatre, 800 theatre professionals from across the Country will be here and we don’t want anyone to leave without understanding the depth and breadth of our community. We are also looking to have every single theatre in Chicago involved in the conference, there are going to be all kinds of opportunities for that to happen. We have put together a host committee for Chicago that is charged with organizing the “late-night event,” hospitality for attendees, Chicago specific programming, and of course showcasing Chicago theatre. We have had one meeting and the next meeting is Monday, September 14 at 4:00, if you are interested in serving on the committee, please email me at deb@chicagoplays.com.

Deb

Community Database

I want to let you all know about a very exciting new project we are embarking on – a community database, also known as a big list.

What is it?
It is a database into which we all submit our patron data. We will be using eMerge, a web-based data management and mining application designed by Target Resource Group (TRG) for marketers to mazimize efficiency and usability of patron data.

What will it do for me?
If you don’t have a database, this will provide you with one, the list will enable you to exchange lists, merge/purge, perform NCOA, run reports on your patrons and in general enable you to do much more sophisticated and targeted direct mail marketing. You can enter emails and phones into the list and do analysis on those for more targeted marketing, but that information cannot be traded.

How much does it cost?
TRG is providing the service to us for free. The above services will be free for League members, additional services from TRG are available at an extra cost.

How do I find out more?
Email Deb at deb@chicagoplays.com. TRG is offering webinars and we will direct you to one.

When will it launch?
January of 2010.

Goals for Chicago Theatre

Over at The New Colony Blog they have a conversation going on about Goals for Chicago Theatre. I think it’s a very interesting conversation and would love to hear from more people about what you think the goals are or should be for Chicago Theatre. Apparently Time Out New York printed a goals for New York Theatre which started the whole thing. The New Colony is planning a “storefront summit,” which I think is a great idea, we will certainly be there, will you? Someone else suggested to me this week that there be more events where people just get together – a “beer summit,” I wonder if people would be interested in that, just getting together and meeting on a regular basis at a bar or something. The League does host Managing/Executive Director Roundtables, but maybe something more informal and more inclusive of artistic directors. And, on that note, all of you who open this email and are still reading – thanks. Any suggestions on how we could reach more people would be much appreciated. While we feel like we reach a good portion of our community we would like to reach everyone, there are so many of us and we feel like we are underrepresented at so many events. Any ideas?

Service

The following quote was passed along to me by Ian Belknap at Writers' (who gave an awesome talk on grantwriting to our emerging theatres on Monday) and I thought it was so inspiring I wanted to share it with you, unfortunately I can’t find any links to the entire speech.

“Sometimes we choose to serve our country in uniform, in war. Sometimes in elected office. And those are the ways of serving our country that I think we are trained to easily call heroic. It’s also a service to your country, I think, to teach poetry in the prisons, to be an incredibly dedicated student of dance, to fight for funding music and arts education in the schools. A country without an expectation of minimal artistic literacy, without a basic structure by which the artists among us can be awakened and given the choice of following their talents and a way to get to be great at what they do, is a country that is not actually as great as it could be. And a country without the capacity to nurture artistic greatness is not being a great country. It is a service to our country, and sometimes it is heroic service to our country, to fight for the United States of America to have the capacity to nurture artistic greatness.”

--MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, speaking at Jacob’s Pillow

Free Month

We’re going to do Free Month of Theater again this October and the whole point of Free Month is to attract NEW patrons to the theatre. So, what do we do? How do we get to the people who don’t go to theatre but who maybe might try it for free? Where are those people who might be most interested in watching baseball or playing volleyball or shooting skeet but who might also like to try something new? What is a good way to reach them through the internet? Naturally, we can’t afford to do an ad on the White Sox website (if they even sell ads), there must be something we can do to get those folks who might crossover and give us a try. If we can come up with an idea, this might be a breakthrough for all of us. Last year over 6000 tickets were distributed during Free Month, 83% of those people said they had never been to the theatre they attended before and 43% said they bought a ticket after attending. Those are fantastic numbers, but we want to go even better than that. We want to make theatre goers out of non theatre goers. Anybody have any ideas? Are there networking websites we don’t know about? We thought of meetup.com, and some of the others, but there’s always a snag, i.e. linked in doesn’t do ads and all of our connections are arts folks. It needs to be far away from what we usually do – not arts groups, but other groups, sports groups, dog lover groups, that kind of thing.

Any ideas? Lemme know.

Deb

Outrage

Cliff Stearns in an open letter to NEA Acting Chair Patrice Walker Powell, “The fundamental question is why is the federal government supporting artists that the taxpayers have refused to support in the open marketplace?” The man is opposed to arts funding and he uses the rest of the letter to play on people’s hate and fear by letting them know that the NEA spent .002% ($100,000) of the $50,000,000 they received in stimulus money on organizations that have produced or presented art that he (and the other signers of the letter and presumably his constituents) finds objectionable. If only all of our federal spending was looked at with that kind of scrutiny.

I find his voting record not just “abhorrent,” “offensive” and “antithetical to our values and culture,” but unconscionable. But I digress. Ummm…billions of dollars have been spent to bail out car companies whose products I can only assume taxpayers have refused to support in the open market place. I guess Mr. Stearns doesn’t find that so objectionable that he needs to write an open letter. I won’t get into what people need more. To be against federal arts funding is to be against art; is to not acknowledge the millions of arts workers in this country; is to be against the billions of dollars that the arts puts back into our economy every year. To turn art over to the marketplace is to silence the voices of those who cannot compete in the marketplace. If we turn art over to the marketplace it is only for people who can afford it (and believe me that will be very few if we don’t have any public support). We owe art to everybody, even those who can’t afford it. We owe it to the taxpayers who do want to hear voices speak not only the language of their own soul, but the language of other souls so that we may better understand each other.

Don't Let It Get You

I’m sensing a trend and I don’t think I like it. Throughout my career I’ve heard the phrases “going in another direction,” or “going to the next level,” used any number of times, they are always euphemisms for “we need more money.” Living in such a scary and uncertain economy can lead us all to constantly think about money, right, living with no money leads us to constantly fight about money. Don’t let it get you, don’t let it become about the money. I would humbly suggest that we all remember why we came, all of us, artists, staff and board every day, remember that we came here to do something meaningful, to create something where there was nothing and to make the world a better place through art. Nothing less. What an extraordinary purpose, what lofty goals, what could possibly be harder? These very public break downs of communications within organizations are about people and personalities and money. It’s never about art, we are doing great art, we are fulfilling our mission, we are accomplishing what we came to accomplish. Isn’t that something? Keep it together people, next time you sit down together don’t think about it as art vs. profit, board vs. staff, us vs. them no matter who the us is and who the them is. Sit down and look at what you’ve done together, how far you’ve come and remember WHY you came. Then figure it out. You can do it.

Deb

Working with the City

I have been asked to serve on the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection Advisory Group for the City. These are the folks who do licensing, PPA and Liquor. As part of that I am serving on the Education/Communication and Technology Sub-committee. The charge of the sub-committee is to make short term recommendations and come up with long term goals for the department having to do with the ways in which information is disseminated through this department. I know that it is sometimes frustrating and confusing dealing with the City and this is an opportunity to try to make it better. So, I need your suggestions about what can be done to make it easier. The stated goal of the committee is to make it easier to do business in Chicago. And, I think they do have some trouble getting information out there, for instance, did you know they hold Business Education Workshops? I did not. There are all kinds, including “How to Obtain a Liquor & Public Place of Amusement License.” They have all kinds, including Business Marketing Strategy, Understanding Employment Law, etc. They can be found at www.cityofchicago.org/bacp.

Please let me know either by leaving a comment or emailing me at deb@chicagoplays.com if there are particular issues you would like me to bring up with this committee.

Deb

A Good Idea

Apropos of nothing, I thought this was a great idea…I was on vacation last week, in Connecticut. I have a friend who works for the Westport Country Playhouse who told me about a great family program they do. They invite families to come through email invitations of lists they have from school events and so forth. They don’t do any advertising, it is all email and word of mouth. They invite them to the playhouse for dinner and a show. They charge $10.00 per person, consciously keeping it the price of a movie. A local restaurant donates pizza or lasagna or something inexpensive. It has been a huge success, they have had over 100 people at each event they have done so far. They have a cutesy name for it like Hanging with the ‘rents or something like that. He read me a couple of the emails from the parents who are so incredibly grateful to have an inexpensive evening out with their kids. I was really impressed.

Deb

Happy Independence Day!

We wish you all a safe and relaxing Fourth of July weekend!

Core Values

We (the staff of the League) have been doing a little work on core values this week. I gave everyone a list of words that describe values and asked them to come into our staff meeting with what they felt were the top three that described the core values of the League (everyone rebelled and insisted on five, so we did five). We had a conversation about each of the values that everyone put forward and next week we will talk more about it. It’s not necessarily about defining the core values for the League at this moment but more about defining how we are doing in fulfilling our mission as we filter it through our core values. The words from our mission that we use all the time are “promote, support and advocate.” Those of you who know me know I’m not really a big process person, not really interested in a lot of naval gazing. I like to get stuff done. But, I do think it’s important to take a step back from the work from time to time and say how are we doing on a different level, how are we defining success for ourselves. What IS our decision making process? I was very pleasantly surprised at how eagerly the staff took to this task and how much thought went into their responses. So, what ARE the core values of the League? Well, we don’t know yet (our community is much larger than just our staff and we would never presume to identify for everyone), but the list was about 80 words, from those 80 as a staff we picked a total of 14 and the top three…community, leadership and support. I was also very pleased and gratified that there seemed to be so much in-synch thinking. It didn’t take long, it was fun and I think it got us re-focused.

Deb

Online Ticketing Market Research Released

I talked a little bit about this study before and now it is complete. Conducted by Slover-Linett and funded by The Chicago Community Trust, it is chock full of good information. The study was done to try to determine what can be done to increase on-line ticket buying. To me, some of the most interesting findings are these: A large minority of respondents (40-45%) passively awaits information; they do not seek it out. While patrons identified email as the best way for them to receive information, 25% of in-theatre respondents indicated that they got their information for that performance via regular mail and only 11% said they got it through an email. There is much more there and I hope you all find it useful. The League will be doing some enhancements and making some changes both on the website and Hot Tix, we will keep you posted as to what those are.

Deb