 give you a big welcome, and also just to give you a brief, brief interview, an overview of Audience Revolution, which is one of the three key points in TCG's strategic plan, along with our equity, diversity, and inclusion in our theater nation programs. We've been doing Audience Revolution for a number of years now, and we're in the second round, specifically of grant programs and conferencing. There are four main components to it. The first is the research piece, and Kevin, when he comes up, Kevin even more, when he comes up we'll be referring to some of the work that we've been doing with AMS consulting. We had the second of our Audience Revolution convenings in Kansas City recently. I know a lot of you are in the U.S. because you were there, and the one before was in Philly. We've got a grant program and spread among you are 10 of the grant recipients from the first round, and later on Kevin Peirman will be talking about OEM vision in the second round of the program. And then, dissemination is a big piece, a lot of which is what we're doing exactly right now. Some of the handouts up here are case studies. They're drafts of case studies. AMS, our consulting firm, did a lot of research both with individuals, audiences, and theaters, and then dove deeper into phone interviews, and then also actually aid case studies. So these are four that are on the preview version, and we're going to have the other four available within the next couple of weeks, and then also on the website. But that should just win your appetite a little bit. And we're partnering with the Wallace Foundation and their book here, The Road to Results. If you haven't already seen it, it's a really informative little booklet here. So with that, I'm going to call up Kevin Eatmore to take us through the morning. So, like Amelia said, we've really been working on this research, and we've worked with AMS planning and research. Lynette, I just want to give a shout out to you, because she was so helpful with us. No kidding. But what we wanted to do was find ways to quantify and define like the different audience engagement and community development strategies that are being used by theaters around the country. In this research, we identified sort of five audience engagement strategy clusters. And if you'll turn your attention to the screen in front of you, these are sort of generally the five strategy clusters we found to be most prevalent in the field. And what we're going to do is I'm going to go through these really quick, and then we're going to hear examples from all of these from some of our grantees that are actually using some of these. I think it's really important to note these clusters are rarely used solely, you know what I'm saying, like by themselves. I mean, usually people are using a combination of these different strategy clusters. But of these strategy clusters, the highest percentage of theaters are using relationships. So that means really building or enhancing the personal relationships that you have with your community, with other groups, you know, in your community, social services, audiences, you name it. I mean anybody that sort of makes up your community. The second highest identified cluster is like segmentation. So that's like defining and expanding and refining the intended people to be served by your work. So you're actually segmenting, you know, trying to reach young people, trying to reach the LGBT community, trying to reach seniors, trying to reach Latinos, whoever you've decided that you would like to actually see in your theater. The next highest group is content. So that means actually like doing different work, putting different work on stage in order to try and draw audiences that you would like to see in your theater. 19% of theaters said that they worked on the venues. So that's really like rethinking the place where you engage your work. How people get to your theater or taking the theater outside of the theater to the people. I mean that's a very popular sort of strategy right now. And last but not least, and it's really interesting because I think a lot of people think that income, like redesigning the financial exchange, like who pays how much for what and for whom. You know, we always think like a lot of theaters are using discounts or, you know, dynamic pricing. But really in the strategy clusters, it was identified as like the least used. Now that's not to say it's not being used. And like I said, I think that most of the theaters are using a combination of all of these different strategy clusters. It's really important to note that in addition to these strategies and approaches, the biggest fact that really continues to come up in regards to the success of any audience engagement project regardless of any of these approaches is the work. Audiences really, the data tells us that both anecdotal and statistical data, regardless of what strategy you're working on having a positive response to the art experience on stage is still like the most vital component to audience retention and increased engagement. So keep that in mind while we go through these examples of each kind of strategy cluster. But the work really is a very important part of this. And again, a lot of what you're going to hear today really is probably a combination of some of these clusters together, put together. So actually what we're going to do first is talk about relationship strategies. And this is really building the personal relationships like I said before that the organization has with the community. And in order to do that, I'm going to invite our friends from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where who there you go to talk about. Hello, my name is Freda Casillas and I'm the audience development manager at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And the photo there you see is Portland Aciders and that is part of our TCG grant. At OSF we sell close to 400,000 tickets every year. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, we have three to five Shakespeare shows of the 11 that we present every year. We have a fantastic audience. Our leadership with Bill Roush and Cynthia Ryder really wants us to focus on action steps so that we make our audience inclusive. And you might have heard of the audience development manifesto that came as a result of my program. We focus on inviting ethnic communities to OSF. We do that by cultivating relationships inviting new groups and we do that with introductory prices. We actually negotiate with a new group what they can actually afford and we comp also education programming for those groups also. We invite these groups to experience what our new audiences, what our regular, excuse me, current audiences have as a relationship with OSF and we're a destination theater. So when folks come to see us they come to vacation, they come to celebrate, they come to be stimulated with new ideas, they come to nurture their heart and they come to fall in love again because with Romeo and Juliet recently I had different couples tell me individually the wife would say to me I am coming here to fall in love again with my husband and that has happened. And husband also told me that also. So as we cultivate relationships that are sustainable we do that with customized experiences and customized programming. And the five programs that are funded by our TCG grant are number one, an education program that we collaborated with Impact Theater in Chicago. A couple of us went to Impact and saw what they were doing as far as teaching what storytelling means and also how storytelling is constructive. We had a wonderful partner that we cultivated in Portland named Connie Hines who is one of the best connectors in the world and she sent us to a high school that didn't have this kind of art engagement. What we have discovered from that model is that it's a wonderful way to cultivate new schools by actually giving them the educational experience that we have amalgamated with Impact. And that's going to keep going. We're going to keep giving these free educational sessions so that these schools will sign up for our other programs. Number two, actually I'm going to say that for last. We saw Faro is another point in this program and he is our first resident playwright. We're close to eight years old at OSF and we have just had our first resident playwright. He is Latino. He is a storyteller and he is a person who cultivates relationships from one conversation with a group. And we had him cultivate those with Portland State University, Partners in Diversity and many other social justice organizations. Another part of our program is a program evaluation that we're currently doing right now with the nonprofit association of Portland. And really the program evaluation was supposed to be really showing us what successes we've had, where we need to grow. And interestingly enough it wasn't just about my program. It wasn't just about cultural connections. They suggested that we do this for all of OSF. So it's really just phase one of what we're doing with them. The other part is Spanish open captioning and we're upgrading that and we are upgrading that because Latino families told us we want to come with our grandparents. We want to come with our mothers. You need to do Spanish open captioning for us. And it's had a lot of success and now we're looking at a different language also. And this picture right here is the ambassador program. We have local ambassadors in the Rogue Valley in Oregon. We're five hours away from Portland. These folks have all volunteered to be ambassadors for OSF. And they went through a program that included dinners with actors, learning about diversity in the theater, learning about marketing programs. They came to us from recommendations from organizations from the Latino network. The Hispanic Metropolitan Chamber, Partners in Diversity, many other social justice organization. The reason we do this is because word of mouth is pivotal in what we do in Oregon. We have so many referrals already from these folks on the photo. And I will give you two quotes that they gave us. Number one, seeing an African American woman performing on the main stage, a main character in the Shakespeare play was emotionally uplifting. The casting in all plays was wonderful. And number two, I was floored by the commitment by OSF to engage individuals of color in such a direct way and for specifically allocating resources to its mission. It is rare. And then they all stood up and cheered and cheered and then shouted out ideas that they had. So we're on our way. Thank you. So I think you can hear, like I was saying, that this is sort of a combination of all the different strategy clusters. But what we want you to do right now, am I right about this JP? Everybody to talk in their own group about can you explain that a little bit? Yeah. So if we're just real quick, we're going to just do kind of in your circles. When you're thinking about this strategy cluster of relationship, like what's like one question you have about it, or what's one way that you think this would be highly beneficial as kind of a dominant strategy for dominant cluster for like your particular strategy that you're thinking about. And we're going to do that for each one. Yeah. So take five minutes. Talk amongst yourselves. We just have a little bit of a discussion. All of our... That's who comes. It's all about the bad. I think today we're going to have a big meeting. It's making sure that we are building this relationship with the artists and why give us quite a few years to go over to and not find any pushback from what happened to my career. And to try to find those connections so that it's not just like that as the other person's question. Yeah, and they have to be genuine relationships because it is... I'm sure they will be able to do this. But if it was a one-year project with questions like that, or if it was about enlightening more people about the great work that's going on in the organization, so that they can show up at my door, so it's a certain process. It keeps working and it's a two-way street. It's a lot faster. For me, I think one of the things that will be the most important for all of us is building relationships and so acknowledging when this is going to start. I just pulled it out. Our station comes from... we came out of the... wherever people were. Our space is in a lot of ways... there's a lot of... for those kind of conversations. Non-profit... and also... some of the... the... the... I think that's kind of what we all want. People in New York... ... ... ... Guys, I hate to do this. I feel like I'm interrupting. We're going to move on and talk about another cluster. Okay? And you know what? I just want to say, you're going to get to do more of this type of work this afternoon. It's like, don't stop thinking and don't stop talking. I mean, stop talking right now. But you're going to be able to talk a lot more to each other. We're going to explore right now the segment strategy. This is really defining and refining the intended people that you want to be served by the institution. Examples are focusing by age, ethnicity, geography, participation, preference, etc. And I think who we're going to hear from first is Hallie from Steppenwolf. I'm going to read from this just because, like it was said before, we're combining so many efforts into this once. I just want to make sure I touch specifically on the segmentation. You know, currently, Steppenwolf, we're really good at programming for adults with our subscription shows and we're really good at programming for youth. And when I say youth, I say ages. We program specifically for ages 14 through 19. And we do two shows a year that are very specific to that target audience. What we found is really challenging is that seldom these two groups, meaning our subscriber house audience and the audience for our youth program productions do they come together in one place, in one viewing. And so we thought it would be really exciting to figure out a way to combine these groups with a focus and tension on creating experiences in which youth and adults learn and benefit from one another. And when I talk about this, I'm not talking about a family audience, but I'm talking about teens who are sitting next to an adult who they have no idea who they are and vice versa. We get those two audience together around the same production. So our target segment is a multi-generational audience comprised of members of different generations, including teens which are associated with our Steppenwolf for Young Adults programming, adult subscribers to Steppenwolf's main stage show. And some of these subscribers do come over to see our Steppenwolf for Young Adult productions, but only if their title recognition like to Kill a Mockingbird, Book Thief, and Animal Farm. But when we commission new work, we see a significant drop off of adult participation. So we decided to create a piece of work for the stage called the Compass, which is devised and directed by Michael Road, which will be on our main stage in the winter. This will be something very new in terms of it has audience participation, which we suspect that our adult subscriber audiences will probably not be used to, I'll say. So what we're doing is we're creating a series of these audience engagement events with youth beforehand that are all about decision making, because that's what the Compass play is going to be about. It's going to be about decision making and how we make decisions. Now, when we have these events, and this is a picture of one of them, we had, and this was around all the events relate back to the work on our stages. So this was an event that was about decision making around the play on our subscription show called The Heard. And it was, the theme of it was if you had one do over, what would you do? So we had an 11 year old girl tell her story. We had a teenager tell their story. What would they do over? And then we had someone in their early 30s, someone in their 50s, and then someone in their 70s. And so by that, and then we broke them off into groups and had them talk to each other. We purposely put together young people with adults who did not know each other. Again, what happened there is that both youth and the adult are in equal footing. So they're no longer parent, teacher, authority figure, but they're a learner and so is the youth. And then they all go to see the play after that. And so these events, we've had six of these events so far. And we are bringing all of these events and all of these audience participation to the compass play that will happen in which we have really massaged well enough this audience so that they're able to engage and interact with that play as well. Thanks. Awesome. So next we're going to hear from Sima Sueco at Pasadena Playhouse. Good morning, everyone. I'm Sima Sueco. I work as the Associate Artistic Director at Pasadena Playhouse. So for our audience revolution grant, our strategy was segment. And specifically, we wanted to increase arts participation among Latino communities in the San Gabriel Valley, which is the region where we're located. We were specifically focusing on adult populations, so ages 18 and up, and specifically focusing our work off our campus. So it also intersected with the venue strategy. We engage in a methodology called Consensus Organizing for Theatre. It's an artistic methodology that has roots in community organizing. And it's a type of organizing through which a theater deliberately and intentionally built stake in multiple pockets of communities. And those communities deliberately and intentionally built stake back in the theater by surfacing and organizing around mutual self-interest. And by using that strategy, we went out into a variety of communities in the San Gabriel Valley and surfaced four major partnerships. And by asking them, what do you really want? And engaging in intentional conversations. Some of the programming of our audience revolution grant included things like working with an organization called Imagine Action doing theater of the oppressed workshops throughout Northwest Pasadena that resulted in a community device forum play. We worked with the City of La Puente, Art Walk and Pasadena City College. Both of those organizations were really interested in art installations along with staged readings of existing plays. And then we also commissioned a new musical by Ozone Motley, the Grammy Award-winning band. All in all, our program directly engaged a thousand individuals 78% self-identifying as Latino and all off our campus. But I'd like to identify or discuss some of the long-lasting results of this work with the Imagine Action partnership as soon as we got off our campus and started asking folks, what do you really want? They said, well, you know, we think it's really great that you're out here, but what are you going to put Latinos on your main stage? And so we heard that and I'm so pleased to say that I'll be directing Real Women Have Curves by Josefina Lopez to kick off our next season as a direct result of what we heard out in the community. When we started doing the Theater of the Oppressed and Foreign Play work out in the community several other organizations heard about it and saw it and are now requesting it. So we now have a James Irvine grant to allow us to continue this work out in the community. And also one of the organizations we met being out in the community is a group called Adelante Youth Alliance and they've already contacted us and said we want to buy out the house when you do Real Women Have Curves. You know, it's having a direct impact on our ticket sales. With the City of La Puente as a long-term impact of this grant, the city itself is now looking at creating for the first time in their history a public art program. And if that's a result of this audience revolution grant, that's I think a triumph. With Pasadena City College, their involvement with us in this program, and this is actually a photo from the reading of Stand and Deliver, which is about Jaime Escalante who was an alum of Pasadena City College. This is just one of many partnerships we have with PCC. Last year they bought 200 tickets to our production of Kiss Me Kate, which was told through an African American lens, and then 200 tickets for our production of Stop Kiss. Next season they're already buying 400 tickets to Real Women Have Curves and 400 tickets to Fly. And with each of those partnerships we embed the show in their curriculum. We use their professors as experts in our talk backs, and it's a mutually beneficial partnership where we're each serving our self-interest. And then of course the long-term impact with the commissioning of the musical is that we continue to work on that musical by Ozone Motley, so we'll be doing more workshops of that next season. Internally for us, a long-term impact was that it helped us discover that this process of consensus organizing for theater works. And so we've codified it further. Last week held an internal workshop so that to get everybody on board with this process. We've now have like a working document of the philosophy of CO, consensus organizing the six-step process, etc. And then we've also gone out and taught this process to others. So Trinity Rep is now in consensus organizing. I went out and taught it there. People's light, mixed blood. And so we're finding sort of a cohort of organizations using this methodology in a variety of different settings and that's a long-term impact. I think just to summarize what I'll say is, what I love about this grant program is it's called Audience Revolution as if to imply that your audience will be revolutionized. And certainly that did happen. I think what I think is intentional on TCG's part in designing this is it's really also about organizational transformation. So by going out with this process it forced us as an organization to really transform how we work, how we make decisions, and restructure some things and use new methodology. Thanks. And next we're going to hear from Mika at Suteatro in Denver. Hi. For our project we opted to work with a specific population within our audience space. So we are a Chicago Latino theater company that is 42 years old and many of our audience members have grown up with our organization. And so looking at the Latino population in the country and in Denver specifically the largest growing part of that are the youth. So we were the specified people that were 14 to 25 that were either first generation or immigrants themselves coming into the city. And we were working with this population as part of our staff, as part of our company, and as part of our students that we serve in our education programs. So the idea was to take those people that are already engaged in our organization and are already members of our life and create a cohort of them to specifically outreach to other people in that population. So the first thing we did was bring them together and start some focus groups and start talking about it and they said okay we're in we want to, we want to go out, we want to do whatever, but what's marketing? How do we do this and what do we do? So one of the things we did is we took time weekly to use some of the staff members and work-states and artists that were engaged in that way and created kind of mini workshops within our own organization on what is marketing, how to do that. We incorporated into all of our education programs every production in the classes that we were already teaching had a direct connect. So we did a show called Enrique's Journey in the Fall, which is about an immigrant traveling to reunite with his mother in North Carolina from Honduras and all of our students then went and said what is your journey story? Where is, what is your journey and how do we cut it? And they reacted in different ways from creating their story, creating a play of their skits of their story that other kids helped them perform or however and those became part of the engagement strategies and having them be at the theater to perform this. This particular piece we did a show called Quaranteocho which is about two bombings in Boulder that happened in 1972. The whole cast was under 30 years old so they engaged with the whole process of creating the play but then you also have people that lived the experience and they had the intermixing between those. This was from an art exhibit that the students also created that was in the entryway coming into the performance. So other things that they did throughout the year included creating videos, creating Facebook, hashtags we did, some members of the cohort were able to go with us to the Latino theater in Cointreau and so they had national exposure. I'm going to fast forward, sorry. Okay so long term results were that our impact in the organization is that having a greater voice and expectation in the marketing and the programming that we do overall. Deeper commitment in engagement with the organization and consideration. The integration of education, the youth company itself has created a Snapchat and Instagram and that piece and also having access to space for their voice to be heard so one of the big projects that we're working on is activating our parking lot and behind our parking lot in a San Arta project where we give other organizations and our youth company access to performance based throughout the year. I think one of the things that I'm noticing as we listen to all of these stories is this work is labor intensive. I mean it's really labor intensive but it pays off. Gone are the days when you just put an ad out. I mean you've really got to engage your audience. So anyway, talk amongst yourselves for about five minutes about segmentation and then we're going to come back. What's coming back to what you said at the very, very end? You know, we say I and y'all, you know, if you got air, you just kind of take it that means somebody out there died very well for that. So I drastically, I would rather have 300 people paying $10 apiece and two people paying $150 apiece. We went from about five years ago, we went from a model where we gave away $9. I mean for a model where now we every show, every ticket, if you pick your price zero to where our average ticket person is. But we remember I don't think we ever had a real subscription model. We have patrons who are really used to subscribing to theaters and we'll call it their season tickets but literally anybody can, if you want to reserve a ticket online that's five bucks. But even if you just call and reserve a ticket, you can reserve a ticket for zero dollars so we have, and really the only people who pay nothing are artists or other people who would have expected to get comps anyway. And then we have anything from that all the way to the people who really like to use that as a make their annual gift through buying a couple of tickets at $100 or so. But mostly, like I said, it's a big and it brought up our average ticket price. Oh, yeah, they choose. We let them know that the base value of the ticket is usually $25. We don't tell them as an advance but I'm the developer so if they pay more than $25 for the ticket I count. You can count about $25 as it's deductible. You can get that from the show. I have a challenge for us. I don't know if we found a solution. We definitely found a solution. We definitely found a solution. We definitely found a solution. We definitely found a solution. Do you want to know what is it? Do you want to know what is it? Well in our case, it's kind of like we played the written and we scheduled it and we thought who would be having interest in it. Although it's a big story about immigration it's really a story about a incoming page. It's really popular in the high schools and the parties that teach the book. So they will be able to listen to the class. But that attention, personally, is your voice. So why is it that you don't know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a story about a Central American kid from Central America. We don't know Central America. But why is that wrong? But it is, you know, it's a little laughed at. And we did the show last round. It was a very strong monologue. But it's a young... Yes, people, you know, adults can relate to it. I can take the bus to see us for five minutes. But for the kids, they get the whole conversation. His search is not only for a physical space. It's a boy looking for his mom. A university that had stories. They let you hand out. So there was a reason for us to tell the kids. I was going to say, at the end of the day, do women have curves? We did the same. So the kids ran to 90% of the house. And we did not. We had other things scheduled. We did sex with women. Oh, I know that. They got us. They knew it. I've got to interrupt again. Sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Stop talking. No. I know, right? All right. So next, we're going to talk about content. And what we mean by content... I mean, it's doing different work rather than doing, like, the work that you're doing differently. Does that make sense? It's like putting different work on stage. Some examples are, like, audience participation in the artistic process of developing new work. Performances that solicit or encourage audience participation or substantial educational offerings. And the first group we're going to hear from is Tom Quaintance from Cape Fear Regional Theater. Hey, I wasn't told that this was not going to be a traditional theater space, so I designed this for a prescenium, sorry. Made fast forward in that. Oh, there we are. So Cape Fear Regional Theater is located in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is home of Fort Bragg and the 82nd Airborne, the largest military base in the world. So our project was intended to change the way we do audience engagement by putting that audience at the center of the art-making experience. We partnered with Hidden Voices, which is a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit specializing in going into underserved communities and finding their story and giving it a voice. So we partnered with Mike Wiley, who wrote The Parchment Hour, which we had an incredibly successful run over a couple of years before, and he already had some pull in our community. So, and the intention of the project was not just to give this, it was a, we were taking military spouses experience of deployment, the impact of deployment on families from the spouse point of view, from the family point of view. And we wanted to create a play to stand up to a three-week run in a regional theater. So we were looking to create a piece of art. And we started with these community workshops where we asked questions about what should, what are the questions we should be asking, and then encouraged conversation around those questions. Mike was in those workshops. We had recorded them, we transcribed them, and we also, part of the workshop that was very interesting was there was a visual artist that was engaged, and everybody created these kind of diorama box and sort of care packages that they would then send to either their younger self or a new spouse. And not only was the art cool, but some of the most important stories and material was developed around the creating of this artwork. Something about taking it away from the formality of sitting down and talking opened up the conversation. So we had a workshop where probably the most important thing that was said before that was, look Mike, we don't know that this is going to work. So, you know, don't feel like you need to come into this with a finished product or having all the answers. We had a really good group of artists, we had a music director and a choreographer, and played around for a week with the text. And what we came out with was something that had promise, but it was kind of a mess and it wasn't really a play. But we had a private staged reading for some of the people that we felt like, okay, are we getting this right? And then sent Mike off as a way to continue working. K.J. Sanchez sent me an email in October saying, hey, we're at TCG, we're looking at putting this thing together with Paula Vogel. There was a theater, veterans in theater initiative and we had a half day conversation around the issues of this wide range of conversation. But the thing that I took away from it was the difficulties of documentary theater in general and documentary theater with veterans in particular. And the result of that was we, this is where we decided we were much more of a content cluster than a segment cluster. We were kind of trying to do both in the beginning and we decided, okay, we need to refocus this really specifically on the content and put more resources toward supporting Mike in writing this play. So, new play reading, my first and second, we targeted very specifically the military families and community leadership to be our audience for this reading. Also between those two times we committed to doing the plays before we had a script that we thought would work next year. So we're going to do world premiere next year. But in this reading we targeted the military community and the leadership, community leadership to be our audience 87% military audience in this reading. And it was extraordinary. I've never been in an audience that was that engaged and the talk backs we had afterwards were as long as the play. It was passionate, smart and thrilling. And the artwork ended up being sort of another intersection of another opportunity to engage the audience in the process as a whole. Next year we're doing it as part of our season. It's our first world premiere. I guess there was one 30 years ago at the theater but it's the first one in 30 years. So we're very excited to be presenting downrange next year. And actually I think that's a really good example of a combination of the three strategy clusters we just have been talking about. It's really content and relationship and segmentation. So like I mentioned before you very rarely use just one and it's usually a combination. We're going to, are we standing and stretching or are they talking? I'm going to hand it over to Amelia. Just a couple things. We are going to be standing and stretching and giving you a moment to just take a bio break. There are some bathrooms across the lobby should you need to. And when you come back it would be great if you're actually sitting in a different circle that way you could engage with a different group of people. The other thing to keep in mind that the afternoon session is going to be about prototyping so hopefully you'll come in with ideas, strategies, models that you just want some group think around and we'll be having you fill out some intake forms at the end of this morning session so then during the break staff can scramble and try to organize you into different clusters. That will all make sense. So if I say that as you're listening and thinking you might want to think about which cluster your project that you want to work on falls into that because that would be very helpful. So let's take five-step stretch. The long haul for the bathrooms is across the lobby. See you back in another circle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How you doing? I'm very good. Did you ride last cook? Yeah. I'll give you a hug. Yeah, I don't know. You're just content. I'm just excited. Yeah, But it's the exact same thing that I just told you. That I could just try. Because you're the only one there. It's the same thing. Just like I really wanted to really talk to you about Yeah, I mean, I... Yeah, I mean, I... Well, you know, there's work that's... I don't know. I'm trying to work on this. There's some interesting... But for way here, it's going to be what everyone in this room is going to be doing. There's challenges and questions. Right now, well, and that's the net, that's exactly what we want. So for way now, that's kind of what's happening. People are more speaking. They're acting as a lot of people in the United States. And they're talking to more people than they can do, I know. As it is. So, now we're going to have four or two and a half hours. So, yeah, just nobody's going to find you anymore. And they're really... Yeah. Oh, No. Right now. I'm going to grab myInd Child Right Now, I'm not going to part of that, but I just want to see the message that came in. We're going to get those in the rest of the room. Hello. Thank you. How are you? Oh, wow. Oh, my God. Oh, you did it, didn't you? Oh, my God. All right. Find new seeds. Did you change places? Some people did. Some people don't like to change seeds, you know. But if you can find a new seed, new people, new ideas. You know what we did inadvertently was we skipped the turn and talk portion of the content. And I'm going to, like, ask this group, would you like to talk about content for five minutes? Or do you want to move on? If you want to talk about content for five minutes, raise your hand. Just you. Okay, we can just talk. So I think we're going to move on to venue and path. And venue and path strategy is really rethinking the place that people engage with the organization's work and the road that they follow to find it. Some examples are performing in non-traditional venues, actually working with your venue. I mean, with the venue that you're in to sort of transform that space or have people find it in a different way or delivering new content via the web or media channels. And we are going to, is this correct? Yes. We're going to hear from Corey from Pillsbury House and Theater in Minneapolis. Or is it the same call? It's Minneapolis. Twin Cities. Okay, come on. There you go. Again, I'm Corey. I'm from Pillsbury House in Minneapolis. I'm flipping to the beginning of my presentation. I'm sure some of you at least know Ralph Remington. Ralph Remington started Pillsbury House Theater in 1992 as a professional theater working in the context of an inner city community center with programs like a child care center, after school summer programs, a free integrated healthcare clinic. We have a bike shop that provides job skills to homeless youth and many other human service programs. And Ralph started some great programs like the Chicago Avenue Project which uses the model from the 52nd Street Project for kids to write and perform in new place alongside adult performers. Let's see what else. So the thing that makes us very unique is that in 2008 when the great recession was starting, one of the things that happened to keep the whole center viable was that the management of all of those human service programs was merged under the direction of the theaters to artistic directors. So let that sink in for a minute. So there were bumps along the way, but it was part of a bigger plan to use art as a foundation for all of those programs, not as an added arts activity for the kids to take up some more time, but really as a foundational part of the curriculum to improve the outcomes of those programs. That's mostly done through three resident teaching artists who each work in multiple programs developing and implementing curricula along with the program staff for those programs. And so they're doing storytelling, playwriting, acting, poetry, spoken word with some of the older teens, movement and dance, lots of other things. So there's art coming out of every corner of the building. It's been really wildly successful. Based on our successes integrating art inside the building, we've started using art as a community organizing tool out in these neighborhoods that we serve. So for example, we got an art place grant to work with artists living in these four neighborhoods we serve, which there are many artists living in these four neighborhoods. Commissioned artists to develop 20 place-making projects along the commercial corridor that goes through all four of those neighborhoods. Another project is called Art Blocks, and here we commission again artists living in those neighborhoods to meet everyone who lives on their block and create art in whatever their own discipline is to respond specifically to that audience. So two years ago, the TCG Audience Revolution convening and then this grant program really provided a great catalyst for us to take these things we've been doing inside the building and then things that we were starting to take outside the building and really for the first time point them back at our main stage productions because we weren't just doing neighborhoods theater. I mean, this is our arts weekly, named us the best theater between cities a couple of years ago last year, our state's biggest daily, named us the best mall theater venue in the state. We commissioned plays like Tracy Scott's Wilson's Buzzer, which the public theater is doing this season. So we're doing very high level work. And our goal is to, let's see, I'll keep the statistics as few as possible, but if 90% of the people in the human service programs come from these four neighborhoods that we serve, only about 25% of our main stage audience comes from these four neighborhoods. So it's a small 96 seat theater, so I don't need to double my audience size, but I want to increase the percentage of the audience that is coming from these neighborhoods that we're trying to serve. What we did with our TCG project, using some of the lessons learned in those other things, was we commissioned artists to create artwork based on the themes of the main stage productions. Those, oh, I've got one minute left. And then the art was installed inside the building, outside the building to create new paths to bring people along. So this is an installation that went along with John Adams, Gideon's not. These classroom installations were set up with workbooks. You can see illustration of only assignments. People are invited to sit down. Another project, we had an artist work with patients in the free clinic in the building and created these beautiful WPA style posters exploring issues of healthcare in our country to go along with Michael Milligan's Mercy Killers. So now what we found is I will skip to the good stuff that has happened because of this. We're now suddenly deeply rooted with many more artists in our community. And so, for example, in the current production that we have happening right now, the set designer was inspired to want to include some silk screen printing in the set design and it was getting a little late in the process and sure how to incorporate that. But he said, oh, wait, you had somebody here doing silk screen printing. And so the person who made those posters to go with Mercy Killers, we were able to then bring her in. And it was somebody who we had a relationship with, understand their work, and were able to, you know, use these other things that we did to strengthen other art that's happening in our community. Cool. So next, JT. We're going to hear from Kelsey at the Portland Center Stage. So this is a picture of me. I was so scared they would use this one, but oh well, they did. There it is. Our audience revolution project at Portland Center Stage had two main components. Number one, develop a gaming app with a loyalty component that rewards engagement. Number two, create a touring performance that goes out to the community to raise awareness of who we are, but also use that as a tool to sign people up for this digital loyalty gaming app. So you can see how this relates to the venue path strategy, how and where people engage with our work, a new digital property, and also an outreach tour. Now we have this very iconic building, the Gritting Theater in the Portland Armory. And it's been the center of our engagement program. It's very robust, animating the space 24-7. So after about seven years in this building, I thought, okay, we need to go out. We need to send something out. So we built the tour, and then having all this engagement program, and then we've really seen some positive changes in who our audience is, who's coming to the theater, who knows about us, kind of beefing that up and rewarding people for engaging in engagement activities. So what we ended up with was a playmaker, is what we call this, and a feelus is my abbreviation for the tour, which is called All's Fair in Love in Shakespeare. Simple, 50-minute, six scenes of Shakespeare's lovers going out to galleries, parks, farmers markets, libraries, cultural centers around the Portland Metro region. And playmaker actually changed from a gaming app to become more of a digital loyalty portal, is what we're calling it. So really, it ended up being a points rewards system with a gaming component, and down kind of in the shaded area where my title is, you can kind of see our proscenium and some set pieces. If we scroll down, you would see the gaming portion, which is the more points you earn, you can populate our proscenium with set pieces, costumes, and this is actually the designs for Oklahoma. You get an actor, you get costume, so you can populate our proscenium with a certain set. Once you complete one show, it will move on to another show. And it's the actual designs. There were some major challenges. We're not in the business of developing new technology, and we needed some partners in that, and finding those partners was really difficult. We started with a digital loyalty program called PERCA, and then they were like, oh, well, we can do the loyalty part, but we can't do the gaming part, so how about we partner with this group called the program? We were like, okay. And the program came up with this idea called the program. We were like, okay. And the program came on board, and they were really cool, and we did a scope of work, and then PERCA had to pull out, because they were acquired, and the program needed PERCA to do that. So it was very, very confusing, but what ended up happening is the program. All partners were really awesome. The program said, we're breaking up with you, but we want to introduce you to our really sexy friend, Watson Creative. And Watson Creative came on board, and they could do it all in one place. You're looking at kind of their designers. They do digital loyalty programs for the San Francisco 49ers, for the Denver Broncos, for Zoos. Really cool people, and they were very impressive in their Yahoo-esque offices on their iPads. But it was a journey, and there were delays, and we're a little behind. With the successes, the tours going great. We're sending a feelus out into the community all over, and we also hope to develop a histories tour to add to that. Partnering with Watson was a huge success. It ended up that Matt Watson and his wife were subscribers, and one of the marketers they used, Molly, is on our marketing committee. So it's like, okay, why didn't we figure this out to begin with? But we ended up together, so that's good. Really exciting for, I think, this group and the field is that this is integrated with Tessitura. So points, as people earn points, we're going to a prologue, a Q&A, a pre-show concert in our lobby, the feelus tour. That will show up in their Tessitura account, so our box office patrons know, and can give them, oh yeah, sure, you earned a free drink at the bar, here's a voucher, that sort of thing. And that will be available to other arts organizations, I think it's going to be really exciting. So we are behind, we hope to go into beta next month and launch it in the fall. That's awesome. Now I think we're going to hear from Kristen Jackson from Wally Manor. Hey everybody, my name is Kristen and I am the Connectivity Director at Wally Manor Theater in D.C. Connectivity is our community engagement strategy for both audience energizing and diversifying, as well as sort of embedding civic discourse that is going on in the nation's capital in our work, and sort of clarifying the relationship between our work and the conversations that are going on in our community. Connectivity has revolutionized the relationship between our theater and our city, and some of the best practices we've identified in our work. We're articulating the civic conversation that each play aims to have with our community, reaching out to stakeholders who have a special interest in those conversations and developing partnerships and programming to draw those stakeholders and networks to the theater, curating interactive lobby experiences that illuminate the form and the content of our plays, to share experiences and see themselves in the work, and lastly, positioning Wally as a place where you could come to explore the ideas that were relevant to your life. Which was that our department's organizational structure, which was one full-time staff member, the Connectivity Director, and a rotating cast of interns was an unsustainable model. And we lacked the consistent systems designed to build upon the aforementioned best practices and gain control and consistency over the connectivity experiment. We were in need of an organizational revolution to serve our audiences better and allow the Connectivity Director to play more of a community ambassador role. With the help of this grant, we brought in a connectivity associate in order to increase the footprint size and capacity of the department and longer-term relationships and also allow the Connectivity Director to get out of the office and into the community. Some of the next steps that we hope to be a part of our sort of connectivity revolution included increasing both the quality and quantity of our programming and moving connectivity beyond a one-way street from Wally out into the community by instead bringing the needs and passions of the community into Wally. So two examples of recent successes following the addition of the associate position that sort of speak to these needs. With the ability to spend more time in D.C. and our community and really show up for our partners has led to deeper and richer collaborations. One of our recent shows like To Rise On Grace dealt with the challenges that returning citizens face when coming back from incarceration. We attended a social justice hackathon around rebuilding the entry. As a result of being at that hackathon, we found partners who were excited about another way to explore some of the challenges that they were facing when they were coming home after incarceration. We developed these partnerships. It led to their willingness to come to our rehearsal room and speak with our actors about their experiences. It led to a prison reentry and the arts podcast for the court services and offender supervision agency. It led to a po-show panel about the challenges of reentry. And it led to the development of a life-size reentry board game in our lobby that was an interactive lobby experience where our patrons actually put themselves in the shoes of people facing these situations and these challenges and actually experiencing that firsthand. Another thing that we were able to do because of the addition of the associate and this is related to these fabulous dancing people on stage were a series that we called The Appetizers. This was where we actually invited the community into the artistic process of three new plays in development and this is in advance well in advance of their, the appetizers were in the fall and the productions were all in the spring so well in advance and these sort of open creative sessions allowed us to test our assumptions and allowed the partners who we involved and the audience members who were there to really help us shape what the connectivity conversations around the shows wanted to be and it allowed us to ask them who they felt like needed to be in the room in order to have an opportunity for dialogue and an understanding. By beginning the conversation well in advance of these productions we built relationships with key stakeholders much earlier in the process and it allowed for these stakeholders to make more informed decisions about whether a collaboration around a particular show also served their self-interest. What you see right there super briefly was also this was actually a pre-appetizer workshop with one of our longer-term partners so it was both the appetizers were an opportunity to build new relationships and to continue relationships that had previously been established. I like to call it the Amun's View and what you're seeing here was an opportunity for folks to come to this workshop in advance of the appetizer at our theater and through this workshop sort of find their embodied response to some of the themes we would later be exploring and build upon and it became an integral part of the workshop that the appetizer workshop that actually happened at Wolley. So in conclusion most of these things would not have been possible without the addition of an associate position and as we continue to revolutionize the work that we're doing with our and our audiences continue to revolutionize our theaters we need to continue to think about how we're preparing ourselves to do this work how we're structured and how we can best serve them. So thank you so much. You guys are like freaking smart. Alright so we're going to take five minutes to talk almost yourselves about the venue path strategy. This is a really nice person to put us off as they would be working on this. We are all working on this. The structure for what what how much it is. It's the venue for the to the idea of shows that are not to centralized one neighborhood. Small neighborhood. So we are working on the Bailam harness. What's your strategy right yet? show there. Properties right now. Football. So that's... Firing. Firing. Firing. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to me. Talking to you. Talking to me. Talking to me. She's from Nadiaまで, lambda, mini candy, disco, the police count. I mentioned Yeah, I don't see you guys here for a minute. I love you. We do, but I'm lucky sometimes. Well, we two are around. So that's why we're here. And then we got a community center. We have this drone that's now over right now. There you go. Then you, and then we need a partner. Then you also get a bill of dollars. So it's a serious problem. That's about it. Because as many boys as they would like to have a hold for all the people you're talking about, we have to be able to do it at that time. And they might just kill it and then it'll play. I think the challenge that we've been facing is we have to look for a bridge. Yeah. We look for a bridge. The challenge I think is one of the bigger ones and the favorite is the ... What is the deal. It's a lot of information. Oh, I hate to do this. I hate it in this part. I hate it. I know everybody's talking and I hate interrupting. We're going to have much more time to talk. I'm telling you what I'm saying. But I have to interrupt you and tell you once again, just stop talking. Okay, we're going to move on to our last but not least strategy cluster that we're going to be discussing and hearing some stories about his income, and that's really like redesigning the sort of financial exchange. Some examples are discounts, dynamic pricing, sponsored tickets. And again, I'm just going to remind you, we're going to hear some stories about this, but obviously people are usually using more than one strategy cluster at one time. It's rare that you actually just use one. But at any rate, we are going to hear from Daniel at Cornerstone Theatre Company in LA. Hello everyone, my name is Daniel, I'm the artistic associate at Cornerstone Theatre Company. We make plays within four communities. We don't have an actual theater space, we're located in Los Angeles, but we move around from different communities, depending on how we define community, community being a loaded word, like many of the words here, like audience, like revolution. And one of the things that we do in order to make our work accessible and really be working with communities, all our shows are pay what you can, which means that we don't charge for a show. We sometimes have suggested donations, but really if you can donate, if you can give $5, give $10, if you can give $500, we'll take that as well. If you give nothing, then that's fine as well, right? So it's about building a community, this community, being the audience. I'm sure some of you have similar strategies in offering discounted tickets, student rush tickets, memberships, monthly memberships or whatnot. And we thought, okay, we're free, so our houses should always be full. And they're not, right? And so why is that? So what this led us to do is really start having these conversations with our past community members, past community participants and community organizations about, well, what else is happening here? What would get you into to watch this play? And what this allowed us to do, and like they're talking about the intersections between the clusters, is to create these relationships. And now that this question was at the forefront of how can we get you into the space, we started getting answers back. Well, it's not just that it's about the money, right? It's about, I don't have transportation to get there, and transportation costs me something as well. I don't have a babysitter. I can't provide. I don't have that. I have to work. And I can't go watch a play. I have to work to be able to pay for my transportation. So now we get all these. We can't solve all those problems, right? But we try to make it more accessible. But having that conversation, that direct, I think another big part about this was also that I'm embarrassed to go in and not pay anything, as other people are paying something. That was also a real conversation. I don't know what to wear to the theater, so I'm going to feel underdressed. I don't have this, right? So what I don't have to go. So what this started doing, what we did was we created the Community Connectors Program. And we had members from past community participants from our past first shows that were welcoming and inviting and creating audience for our fifth show and our hunger cycle bliss point dealing with addiction and recovery. So we had these events around creative seeds, which were workshops, conversations, volunteer opportunities that allowed for these connectors who had been a part of the process before to really sit and have these types of conversations with other members and bring people that they knew. We talk about the different layers of audience that we have and there's the people that are already subscribers or that know about your work and are coming to all your plays. We talk about then the people that we reach through our social media and email blast. Then we have our community partners, our past participants. Then we have a layer of audience that these connectors had relationships with that we did not have. We don't have the time to connect with everyone. We don't have the ability and the resources to connect with everyone. But what we saw happening was really what's happening here. And we have 60 people and I can't talk to every single person or share what it is that you would like to see or what would help you get there. But we have about two, one or two people from this audience revolution that are having these more in-depth conversations. So I think that's what I mean. The creative achievements were also open and free and available. They were in the community. They were with our past partners. That was also something that was really exciting to build that relationship with our past partners because they're like, well, what is it going to cost us? Nothing. We want to come to your space and if we can, we'll give you a donation. This grant also allowed us to hire, contract the community connectors. So they were getting paid for their time and working with us. And what they did is they really took the ownership and were empowered to build and be the audience for these shows. I don't want to make it seem also that it's all about money, but I think it's really diving deeper into that issue of income and finances and what we can do as a company if we're saying, we want you to come see our shows. It's not just about here's a ticket, now you're here. What are the next levels of that? And what is else preventing there? So it's a beautiful opportunity to really have those conversations and get into that and dive in deeper with that. I think that's pretty much good unless, yeah, it's a little bit better program. Cool. Last but not least, we're going to hear from Nancy at Dallas Children's Theatre. Hello. So Dallas Children's Theatre is committed to serving every child like we've been hearing how important in life changing theatre is. And we started to really realize that there was a segment of our community that we were not serving in the best way that we could because parents started coming to us saying, could you please adapt your programming for my child on the autistic spectrum, my child who has sensory processing challenges? And then they were saying, when will you adapt your programming? And we said, yeah, we're going to do that and we're going to do that really soon. And then this grant came to us and we thought this is the way to try and make this work. So we, somebody's asked me how much the grant is, can I, I can say? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was like... And one of the magic best parts is that there's... And one of the best parts with great thanks for our friends at the Doris Duke Shadow Foundation who I haven't already thanked is the general operating support which is approximately 30% of your grant amount. So it's very rare in that way. Yes, and it was a godsend because we were able to travel to two of our sister theaters to Nashville and to Orlando and to see how they were doing this work and how they were adapting their programming. And so it paid for that. And then we brought them to us and we had a kind of a mini conference with our national partners and with our local community partners. These were the folks from Autism Speaks, from the children's hospitals, from the universities and we all talked about how to do this work. And a big important part discussed in another session yesterday was you're going to make some mistakes and that's okay. Don't keep, don't let that keep you from doing the work. So that was, I always kept that in my head. I thought, what if I say it the wrong way? What if I, you know, it's okay, it's okay. Have good heart and it'll go. So one of the things that our wonderful community partner said was to charge. We were going to do the first show for free and they said that's putting no value on that. So we did $5, which, you know, was much cheaper than our normal ticket price. But, and if anybody called in and needed a scholarship or had a group of kiddos, yes, they got free tickets, but that was so great. And so that's part of the income strategy there. But we learned so much from our partners and we learned so much from the families coming. The other important thing that we did were surveys with the parents, evaluation, you know, we're all asked to do this evaluation. Well, we asked questions like, of course did your child enjoy the show, but did your child talk to someone they didn't know? This is important. And our community partners helped us come up with these questions. What was great was we set a baseline of saying, hopefully 75% of the people will say yes, 95% of the people said yes. So that was very helpful in finding the next round of grants because what we then did was leverage these dollars to apply for a very large grant from a community partner that only usually does the children's hospitals and the teen rape victims, I mean, the very serious child issues, they wanted to pay for this. And because we had some of this evaluation and survey information from the parents, it was very helpful. And we've actually gotten several grants. We got a local Unitarian Church gave us their weekly donation one week because, I mean, church can be okay. So they, we got to go and speak and they gave us the most $3,000, but hey, that paid for some tickets. So, you know, this turned out to be a good opportunity for us to learn and to grow and to be able to serve these children because we've also heard that it's the siblings, you know, that suffer too. Because brother or sister just is having a meltdown and can't go out. So tomorrow I'm doing, with Erica from the MacArthur, we're doing a toolkit about how to do this because part of this is we want to share this information. We did another little mini conference this past January, just sort of on our own with our local, all the museums and everybody and talking about how you can do this work and we've already gotten great feedback that they're doing it. So it's been Cameron said one years ago that this is God's work and it's joyous and it's wonderful and I thank everyone and encourage you to put your toe in the water. All right, talk to your neighbors about it. Like you don't talk about that enough, right? I love what she said about giving her so much. And then pray. And you don't see that as much. It's just phenomenal by the past. I hear they're swiping, they're swiping. There are some times is the assumption that the barrier to being theater is particular. And that's not to be the leading reason. It may be that it's an interest in programming, or it may be that all of us do. We don't really want to ask the future over here. But we often, on the marketing side of things at the very least, we often hear, oh, you just need to discount your ticket prices, and then the audience will have it. That, at most, I don't necessarily think that it is a very good call to buy. And then you will always have it. And we did recently, we did a talk. We did a talk. That's what it's like to touch a challenge and do what you're saying to maintain that. And depending on every dog that I have at the end of the day. And so because that was what we did at the museum, just because one of our partners at the museum is playing out, they always get $5. So it's like a certain number of shows. I found that it's not consistent. It's just one of the times you feel like they care. And it's not going to be on the screen. But I want it. Part of it, because it explains that they go on. And then they get on the box off of the file, and they get the right ticket. except that our grandson from the Department of Defense is... I mean, it's a show-off. Yeah, you know, you can do it. Better dry that. It's like, what's your son? It's like, come on. It's a good thing. I'm going to teach you that. Yeah, they're going to... I'm going to teach you that. They're going to take it to Shakespeare Park and they're going to take it to... I'm going to sign up to the theater and show them how to eat and have access to one of their ice cream. I'm going to teach you that. Yeah, they would get super bad people. I mean, I... I'm going to teach you that. So, some bad future... What's the military? What's the military? What's the military? What's the military? What's the military? What's the military? What's the military? Yes, I agree... Okay. All right, great. Thank you... You guys, I want to bring your attention before I hand it over to a million to wrap us up. I wanna bring your attention one more time to this table over here. We have some case studies from four theaters from Longworth, from Youth Speaks in San Francisco, from Arkansas Rep, and from the theater offensive in Boston. Please take these and read them. They're actually, they say draft on them, so they're drafts, but please take them. And we also have a book here called The Roads Results from Wallace. The Wallace Foundation is doing a lot of work, as you probably know, on audience building. So please take some of this information home with you, but I'm gonna hand it to Amelia. Hey, thank you guys. Hopefully those conversations we've had so far were helpful, productive for you. When you come back in the second session after lunch, you'll be organized by strategy cluster, the clusters we've just been talking about earlier today. And to help us do that sorting, I think JP has got the protocol intake form, which is really pretty straightforward, just a brief in seconds description about the strategy model thing that you wanna explore, get some group think around, and what really will help us organize general for this afternoon is what cluster you believe it falls into. And there can be some tweaking and changing as you think about that, you're not blocked into it. But again, that will just help us do a bit of organizing. Also, this afternoon, we'll have a little bit more specifics about round two of Holiday Inn's Revolution Grant Program, how we tweaked it, how we changed it, and hopefully happy you can access it. So lunch right now, we actually would love to collect the intake forms before you leave. So if you can take a couple of moments to fill those out, we can collect them. We still have a couple of moments before the end of the session. And then when you leave, lunch is in the state theater, Bobby, when you're just early. So let us know if you've had any questions about any of this. Thanks. If anyone didn't get one, just raise your hand.