 Oh, there we go. Okay, I am, after that last session, I'm supremely nervous about the time queue. We are serious about time keeping around here. And also doing these slides at the same time. So, there I am. I'm Kevin Moore, I'm the managing director here at TCG. And I have the great good fortune of facilitating our next session, sharing research and data. Now I know what you're thinking. Ooh, we get to talk about research and data? And the answer is yes. So we're going from sort of a more philosophical conversation to a very specific conversation. And I hope it's as exciting. It's really the details and the data and the research that let us know whether we're really making an impact or just kind of shuffling the debt chairs on the SS theater. I didn't write that. But before we bring out our next panel on the subject, I wanna update you on the state of TCG's audience revolution research. So TCG has a longstanding commitment to audience engagement and community development that includes publications such as Danny Newman's Subscribe Now, we published that. Seminal work and Donna Walker-Cune's invitation to the party. We have grant programs that include new generations and future audiences supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. And special events such as the Free Night of Theater. In 2012, TCG launched Audience Revolution, a four-part program designed to study, promote, and support audience engagement and community development. So what is Audience Revolution? It was designed by TCG to address field challenges and it's a four-stage program that includes research and assessment, a learning convening that we held in Philadelphia two years ago, and this is our second learning convening for round two, a grant program and a dissemination of some of the case studies that have come out of the grant program. And you're gonna hear some of that actually today in this presentation. You know, we learned some lessons, key lessons that we learned really from some of the above activities in the recent research conducted by AMS Planning and Research for Audience Revolution. And you heard some of this in the first panel and I just wanna reiterate a lot of it because I think they're very important lessons. Some of them seem very obvious and others, they may seem obvious, but they're things we really need to think hard about. First of all, audience engagement efforts take time. I think you heard that in the first panel. They really take time. They don't, you don't see strong programs results overnight. So if you ever hear that phrase, we did a play about XX community and they didn't come. It doesn't work that way. You know, it takes a really long time and it takes a lot of behind the scenes work up front listening, listening, listening before, you know, you have these communities in your theater that you would like to see. A team approach is key. I heard, you know, some of the questions we had before in the earlier session was as a marketing person in the transactional relationship versus the transformational relationship. We believe it is not versus. We believe the transactional is part of the transformational relationship. Does that make sense? So it's all departments. Literally, it is a audience engagement is the work of every person on your staff and board. Boards leads me to the next point. Board support is essential and buy-in throughout the organization is key. Leadership has to believe in audience engagement totally and that needs to extend to the entire staff and board. I don't care what role you play. I mean, not I, but we don't care what role you play in the theater. It needs to be embraced by everyone. Programs should be mission connected. We talked about that. Identify goals and have intended outcomes and measure success. Commit the necessary resources and a lot of times it's more time than money to be honest with you. It is time, it takes a lot of time and time is money, you know, but it takes a lot of time and a strong commitment. Start small, you know, don't celebrate your early easy wins because like Martha Levy said, this is a Sisyphean effort that is forever. I mean, it never ends. You're never gonna say, okay, we're done. Everybody's here. It is going to be ongoing and so celebrate the wins when you have them. Success will be different from theater to theater and I think it's really important that each theater define success for itself, not necessarily on another theater's success. And redefine failure for yourself. I mean, you know, I'm not sure that failure is even, you know, I think that first of all, I think failure is okay, but define what that means as well as success because something that you might see as a failure will we didn't make our ticket goal or whatever, might not be failure, you know? So just have conversations around that and all the way through, adjust, adjust, adjust. Don't be so hard and fast in the way you're doing things. Listen, listen to people and they will guide you. As part of the audience revolution research process, I'm gonna quickly go through five audience engagement strategy clusters that AMS defined for us, designed to sort of organize a theater's tactics to support more productive collaboration and suggest underexplored approaches. The strategy cluster concept is a practical way to sort of help streamline decisions that need to be made in the planning process in order to successfully execute a project. It also helps focus decision-making regarding tactics and allows for more specific steps to be taken in the execution phase of the project. So the five audience engagement strategy clusters are really in order of the most highly used strategies are as follows, relationship strategies. 89% of the theaters that we surveyed listed this as their primary sort of strategy as they move forward into creating new inroads into communities. So that's sort of building or enhancing the personal relationships that you have with our community. This takes a tremendous amount of time and it takes a genuine effort. People know when you're just trying to get them to buy it to get to your theater. I mean, this is a genuine effort of trying to match, like SEMA said, sort of match your self-interest with the self-interest of the organization that you're trying to work with. Segment, this is another strategy cluster. 68% of our theaters that we talk to are using this cluster. That's expanding and refining the intended people to be served by your work, whether that's young people, whether that's the Latino community, whether that's the senior community or the gay and lesbian community. Third, content, 38% responded that they work with this strategy cluster. This is doing different work. This is actually programming for certain communities that you're wanting to engage. The fourth on this is the venue and path. This is this physical place, rethinking the place where you engage people in your work and the road that they follow to find it. This is an important one in many cases because a lot of our theaters perform in these sort of large, beautiful, very beautiful but can be very intimidating as well, places. In this, a lot of people are exploring how to get out of the theater and go to the communities or go outside of the intended space that you're trying to invite people into and reach them in their own place. And last but not least, by any stretch is income. That is a strategy cluster. Redesigning the financial exchange. Who pays how much, for what and for whom. So that includes ticket discounts. That includes dynamic pricing and those strategies. And we do tend to use, as marketing directors specifically, that is a big chunk of sort of how we are approaching these inroads and these strategies into new communities. So one of the things that we're gonna do right now, we have staff from three of the AMS case studies who are gonna give a little sneak preview of case studies that will be available at our national conference in Cleveland in a much larger form. But we're gonna do some quick, quick. I'm here from some of these folks about some things they're doing in their local community. So I would invite our case study folks up to the stage, please. First we're gonna hear, yeah, you guys just, Bob, first we're gonna hear from Bob Hupp. He is the producing artistic director from Arkansas Repertory Theater. And if you'd like to use the podium, you're more than welcome. I will use the podium. Thank you, Kevin. Good afternoon. I guess it's still morning. It just, with his time constraint, it seems like it should be like a midnight. I come from Arkansas Repertory Theater, which is a D theater in Little Rock. And the engagement activity that I'm gonna talk to you about today that will be addressed in this case study is an ongoing engagement activity that is now in its 11th year. So when Kevin says that these activities take time and investment, this is something that we've learned, is that in focusing on this one specific activity in our engagement sort of universe, 11 years, I think we've just started to be able to ask the right questions. We certainly don't presume to have all of the answers. But here's what we did. We acknowledged that our challenge was our theater, our community of theater, our audience didn't reflect our community. How were we going to address that concern? We chose to light upon opportunistically a milestone activity that was about to happen in Little Rock. It was the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School. You'll recall in 1957, the Little Rock Nine, nine young school children were the first African-American students to walk into Central High escorted by the 101st Airborne. And the city was about to celebrate that event, commemorate that event. And so about three years before that commemoration was to take place, we wanted to tell that story on our stage because it was a story that hadn't been talked about for 50 years in our community. It was as if it didn't happen. It was in history books, but it wasn't part of our community conversation. So using a New Generations grant as a catalyst, we engaged a director, dramaturgs, videographers, and we began conversations with our community. We formed partnerships with our community. And we focused on a specific community that surrounded Central High School, that in the 50s had been a white community and was today an African-American community, predominantly. And we began a conversation, how could we tell these stories? At the theater, we gathered people who had been part of the 57 desegregation issue, white voices, black voices. And we talked to students at Central High today. This was a legacy project. What was the legacy of what happened in 57? And so over the course of three years, we gathered oral histories, we listened, and we drafted stories to tell on our stage. And this culminated in a project in 07 that was part of the 50th anniversary commemoration where we brought this play to life. We used 16 actors, African-American actors, white actors telling stories, men playing women, women playing men, African-American actors telling the white stories. There was no boundaries in terms of the storytelling. The community came to this project, they listened, and it changed the conversation in the community. Our talk backs, which were facilitated after every performance, were longer than the play itself sometimes. They became confessionals. And it changed our way of looking at how we create our work. The impact, and this is, how do you exit? Well, we realized we didn't want to exit. We could never exit. And things happened as a result of this initial engagement that we didn't anticipate, but we had to embrace. One young woman wrote a play about her mother's experience, one of the Little Rock Nine, Minny Jean Brown. Her daughter wrote a play about what it was like to be a 15-year-old girl confronting the hatred and vitriol that came at her. And we worked with her. She was a playwright. We worked with her and turned that into a play that we toured our entire state. Also coming out of that same conversation with some of the artists we worked with was the creation of a new playwriting development program called Voices at the River, which was an opportunity for Latino and African-American playwrights to come together and create work that we could workshop and work on there in our community. As time evolved, we found that the program morphed from a community development project to an audience engagement experience. Because we saw things come about that changed not just our community, but changed us and changed our thinking. So for instance now, every project we do at Arkansas Rep is tied to partnerships. That's the most important thing as we look at plays we select to do. Who are the community partners that we can talk to? We did a production of Clyburn Park a couple of years ago. Going back to the same neighborhood that helped us develop It Happened in Little Rock, the legacy project, we talked about what happened to that community after 1957. And Clyburn Park was a jumping off point for that conversation and for the formation of those partnerships. And so engaging that audience again and again in different ways and unanticipated ways has been the profound impact of this new generations grant we got 10, 11 years ago. There are always challenges. Because funding is always a challenge. Funders' priorities change, and you have to roll with that. You have to anticipate how you can continue to build engagement. If you want heat, you have to fuel the furnace. And so we are continually looking for ways to gain support to build these bridges. The next thing we're doing, the next wave of this engagement is we are opening a new theater and an education space. And in that theater, we really see that theater as a community engagement opportunity for people to come and tell their stories. And so we raised enough money, about $400,000, to make sure that money wasn't a barrier to using and accessing the space. And so this idea of listening, articulating the need of finding common ground and mutual benefit has tried to define every aspect of this ongoing 11-year community engagement project. And so, as I said before, we don't presume to have all of the answers, but I think we're asking better questions and we're definitely forming better partnerships. And that's the way forward for us. And I think I did that in five minutes or something close to it. You did it, haven't you? All right, thank you very much. All right, thank you, Bob. Next up, we have with us Kim Weitner, the producing director in Amanda Siglowski, marketing director for Here Art Center in New York. Hello, we're so different. We're on the other end of the spectrum. I'm Kim. I'm Amanda. And we thought we'd double team it. Here is a $1.7 million contemporary performing arts venue in Lower Manhattan. We're really both a producing and a presenting organization which presents a lot of different challenges. We are an incubator for artists through our producing program, through our Here Resident Artist Program, where we commission develop and produce work. And we present work in all different disciplines by many, many artists in New York City. In the 2013 TCG case study, we addressed five main strategies to deepen audience engagement. The first one was creating multiple points of contact, real and virtual between resident artists and the Greater Here community. Early in their two to three year development and production residency, the marketing department teaches our resident artists to participate in developing audiences from the inception of their projects by using our interactive website, building their individual pages, uploading content, photos and videos, posting to their blogs and utilizing social media. Our weekly newsletter, The Here Say, subscriber list has expanded to 19,000 people and we regularly include interactive elements such as videos and slideshows. Our second strategy was focusing on building community partnerships and as well as developing co-productions with other cultural organizations. And this has been an area of great growth for us. In early cohort building, we established the Lower Manhattan Arts Alliance, a group of 11 downtown organizations with whom we did a joint marketing initiative over two years with funding from American Express. But then we started to venture into co-productions. We co-produced a project with the Hip Hop Theater Festival and subsequently we created the prototype festival of Opera Theater and Music Theater in collaboration with Beth Morrison Projects. Prototype is in its third year and has become a huge and very successful part of here's programming and really developing that audience of Opera Theater and Music Theater but it's become kind of gargantuan. The staff's now dedicating a third of its time to planning and implementing it year round. Our third strategy was streamlining the ticket buying process. Here work to streamline its ticket buying systems so that taining tickets is a clear and simple process for the consumer. Our mission includes accessibility through low ticket prices. In 2013, we initiated a 20th anniversary season ticket price of $10 which increased to $20 24 hours before the show. We abandoned this after one year. We found that price did not matter at our level. The biggest issue is getting people to make the advanced commitment in the face of all other competition for their time. Our new challenge was determining how to stand out. Our fourth strategy is building online and onsite opportunities simultaneously. Our focus was to engage patrons before, during and after their theater experience. Here creates an ongoing relationship with audiences by opening up the project development process to the public. This includes welcoming them into open rehearsals and works in progress with an opportunity to give feedback and encouraging them to experience the work over the two to three years of development. We also do pre-show conversations, post-show discussions and panels and continue with artist blogs, our website and Facebook interaction. Audience members are given an opportunity to record the responses to shows through our five for five video project where our staff prompts five patrons to give feedback about the production they just saw in one minute. Post-show interview is conducted in the lobby. Our staff tapes and edits the responses into brief videos that are posted on here's website and in our newsletter. Our fifth strategy was constructing opportunities geared to specific patron demographics. Here's worked very hard to identify the theater's target audiences of which there are many. Since the work here offers a so diverse and runs a spectrum of genre, form and content, there is consistency of quality but no consistency of programming. Subsequent to the case study, we've added a new membership program, the often club that offers $15 tickets to four shows plus four glasses of wine. This is the first year and our numbers are low but they've increased over the course of the year as people have caught on to it. One specific patron demographic we have targeted is students through our free student rush program. Next is measuring success. While we're not able to devote tremendous resources to measuring the outcomes of our audience engagement efforts, we do continue to track audience numbers, talk back attendance, survey takers, web analytics and check our open rates and click throughs for newsletters and retargeting ads. We've seen increased page views and social media numbers are up 70%. We've invested retargeting ads that provide ticket conversion data. This season spending $9,500 across four campaigns and we've achieved 166% ROI and ticket sales. Some lessons learned, benefits to the field. Most importantly, we find that the artists working with here know how to activate their specific audiences. So it's important to engage them in this endeavor. Programs and activities need time to succeed yet if something is not working, cease and desist. Another lesson is to not make assumptions about the audience regarding what they wanna see or how they would like to be engaged. Instead ask them what they want. Focus group anyone? Price is not always the motivating factor for audiences when determining their level of engagement. Here's all staff involvement approach to developing and implementing audience engagement practices is essential. Since the case study in 2013, we've more recently done significant value proposition work and brand repositioning as part of a special marketing for the arts cohort pulled together by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. We've done a lot of work to reorient and we believe that here needs to focus on connecting with audiences that share similar personality traits, values, behaviors and interests as our artists and as the organization itself sort of coming up with an organizational personality. As our programming moves between productions and presentations, artistic disciplines and performance styles, our audience shifts in segments. The key issue that we face is what will make our adventurous live art goer who is extremely busy running around to numerous shows and juggling simultaneous activities and computer TV time want to return to here and try something new. And we seem to be missing the last little point. But, well, we have figured that our main issue is building trust and creation. Getting people to believe in here and identify with our brand as an organization. It's likely going to evolve but we feel that our plan is underway and we're moving ahead. Excellent. Thank you very much. I didn't know about you but I heard one very important statistic in your speech and that was four glasses of wine. That's a lot. Okay, anyway, that's community engagement right there. Okay, next up is Josh Bornstein, Managing Director of Long War Theater in New Haven, Connecticut. Take it away, Josh. Well, thank you. Height adjustment here. Okay, so for those of you that don't know Long War for Regional Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, we're in the midst of our 50th anniversary season. We have two theaters, a 407 seat thrust, 199 seats stage two. I laugh when you talk about intimidating buildings because we're in the meat packing facility for the city of New Haven. So we're a wedge between the hot dog factory and the boneless chicken factory. So, you know, we're not a palace of art, high art like that. The TCG case study talks about three of our audience engagement activities, two of which tend to deepen the audience experience. One is called SPARC and it's an opportunity for 50 people to trace the rehearsal process of a new play from reading the play before first rehearsal through public performances and it's followed by a debrief conversation and purposes to educate people about how new plays are rehearsed and are transformed during their world premiere production. We have something called the Elder Play Project which is a partnership with a local senior living center and we have a dozen seniors who come, they see all the plays, they pick one in a season, they pick one which is inspiring to them and they work with our teaching artists to create a memoir based device theater piece inspired by one of the plays they've seen at Long Warf and they do a performance at Long Warf and they do a performance back at Tower One Tower East which is the center there. The most comprehensive partnership we have which is described in the case study is Page Stage Engage which is our partnership with the New Haven Free Public Library and we created it because we really want, this is a program in which we wanted to broaden participation from New Haven. Because of our location we actually have a very suburban audience. Only 15% of our audience comes from New Haven so we wanted to find ways to break down both practical and perceived barriers to get more people from the city to be engaged with us. There are four components to it. One is that Long Warf is a micro branch of the New Haven Public Library. The librarians curate a bookshelf based on the themes of the play that we have going on. Anyone, then anyone with a state of Connecticut library card can come in, check out a book after they've seen the show or during intermission would have you and they can return it to their local branch and it just like magically makes its way back to New Haven. And that's been a great way to enrich the audience experience there. We've started producing, for the last three years we've been producing programs at the library. We pick one or two plays a season and then we do programming at all five of the New Haven Public Library branches. This year we chose Our Town and we chose Brownsville Song Beside for Trey by Kimberly. It's a play that centers around the death of a young teen from an act of urban violence which as you may know is a huge issue, a huge problem in New Haven. And the presentation send out some artistic content usually a scene from the play followed by a facilitated conversation by a community leader. We also have Long Wharf Theater Passes at each of the five branches of the theater. So you can go in, you can check out a pass like you check out a book that gets you two comps to that evening's performance best available seats and it's really grown into something that's been very popular. The first season we did this we gave out 154 tickets this way. This year we have two shows to go and we've already issued 492 tickets this way. So the use of these passes has really expanded. Not coincidentally, whenever we do a library program the use of the pass goes up between 40 to 50%. So when we do the library programs that really encourages people to then go see the check out the pass and come see a play. The last component is we do have a community ambassador and ongoing community ambassadors program which was inspired by the Foundry theaters program a little bit. What we do is we have approximately 20 ambassadors who commit to the entire season. So they come see all six plays. They come, we have a pizza dinner with them which we talk about the themes of the play for during the final dress rehearsal. They see final dress so they understand what the play is about and they understand our production. And then they, and then we give them six comps. So them and five people are assigned to a performance and we asked them to bring people who would not be able to come to the show otherwise. The only thing we ask is that we ask them to stay for the post-show conversation. There's a post-show conversation after every performance at Longworth. They don't have to participate. We do ask them to at least stay and listen. And this has been fantastic. One of the, some of the key learnings from the library partnership and I'll start with community ambassadors is that they're really true ongoing advocates and representatives of the work that's going on because we're engaging them with every play not just one play every four years, something like that. And we're really seeing that now with Brownsville song because we're really trying to get a real, a wide swath of the community to come see this play because the issues are so important and they're really energized and activated because they have a two or three, many of them have a two or three year relationship with us now. So they really understand us, we have a good relationship with them and that's been fantastic. The lectures at the library, one of the things we've learned from the lectures library branches are just a couple things. One is that using the community leaders has been fantastic because it creates a really nice insider-outsider relationship with them so they know us a little bit but not quite so they can bring a perspective that say our artistic department couldn't bring. But the other thing that's also great which we didn't anticipate is they bring their own constituents. You know, they'll push, they'll promote the talks through their own social media and Twitter and all that. And so what ends up happening is at least 10 or 15 people at a library talk are people we never would have met otherwise and it gets them interested in the themes of the play on a community level and also it gets them interested in what's happening at Longworth. The other thing we learned about the library talks is we've focusing them around one or two shows is really the way to go. We tried to disperse them more and you couldn't get like real buzz then about what's going on so we've focused that. We started branding this initiative, PageStage Engaged. We're gonna phase out that brand because that was a miss on our part because really our brand and the library's brand are much stronger and are much more compelling to people than us trying to create a new brand so we're gonna phase that away. And then the last thing that we learned is the last challenge we're having I should say is scalability. We're really pleased with this partnership and it's been extremely successful but as Kevin was saying earlier it is enormously time. It's a lot of time where literary manager Elizabeth spends a lot of time on it. So we're trying to figure out a way in which we can scale it or find the funding to add more staff so we can do more programs like it in neighboring communities. Thank you. Thanks Josh. And thanks to all of you. By the way I will say these are just three of the case studies. This room is full of case studies and when we were talking about research this is research. I mean listening to what other people are doing is very, very important so you can steal it or tailor it for your own. You wouldn't mind if people stole things from you. You can model it. Model it, model it, that's right. Okay, thank you very much. All right before we move to round two of this panel or this presentation I wanted to just mention briefly, I mentioned before the research that we did in round one of Audience Revolution. We are now in round two of Audience Revolution and the research component that we've added into this round is different than the last research that we did. We decided actually it would be very interesting to look into TCG's own fiscal survey data. As you may or may not know, I hope you do know, we have been collecting data from the field for the last 25 years and really hold the most data of any organization on the financial history of theater in America. So we decided to dig into our own research led by two of our staff members, Lori Baskin and Alana Rose and we have also engaged to help with us. A woman by the name of Kathy Bencevanga who is here in the audience somewhere. There she is, right there. Under the auspices of Southern Methodist University and Zanni Voss, our very dear friend, Zanni Voss. But we're gonna be looking into our own research and seeing over the last five or 10 years some of the theaters that have actually grown their subscriber base or their ticket base, I should say, not subscribers, but ticket base to sort of see what other correlations we can find between those theaters. Are there other things that they're doing with their board, with their staffing, with their ideas, with their, are there other things, correlations that we can make? And maybe there aren't, but we think there might be. So we're actually digging into our own research and we'll be publishing something on that in the very near future so that maybe some of these other intangibles about an organization may have something to do with how well they're doing with audience engagement or building new audiences. And I just wanna give that a little plug because we're about to roll into now, TCG is not by far the only organization doing work on audience engagement. I mean, it's probably, I always say, I think probably the ancient Greeks actually had these same conversations and will continue to have these conversations because it's really, really super important. So we've brought some people here to talk to you about what they are doing, what their organizations are doing with audience engagement and research in that field. And I would like to invite the next round of panelists to come sit up here and we're gonna hear from each one of them. So Jill, Brad, Tori, come on up, just have a seat, Paul. And first we are going to hear, I wanna make sure I've got this order correct. Yeah, so now we're gonna hear from, I'm pleased to welcome to the podium and I'm gonna give you the clicker, actually. Jill Robinson, who is the president and CEO of TRG Arts. And there's your very own clicker for that. Thank you. Good morning. Some of you know TRG is a consulting firm based out of Colorado. Our focus and goal in our work is providing consulting and research analytics tools that help organizations, arts and cultural organizations like yours, grow sustainable patron income. At TRG, patron is a nice word for people, really. And all of the things that people can and do do in your organizations, like buying tickets and memberships, making a gift, attending events and yes, buying a subscription. A couple of months ago, I was surprised and delighted, in fact, when I wrote a blog and hosted a webinar that talked about the death of the subscription or season ticket. This reignited an important dialogue in our little corner of the universe. And during that webinar, I offered that the subscriptions death appears to have become an accepted fact and reality in 2015. And then I suggested someone might want to tell the Green Bay Packers about the death of the season ticket since season tickets have been sold out at Lambeau Field since the 1960s. But all jokes aside, our 20 years of consulting and analytics experience has demonstrated to us again and again, even in 2015, that the subscription is not dead in the performing arts. Demand, as well as perceived demand, does play a real role in its success as it does in collegiate and professional sports. Just ask our friends at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis who in the past two years have been working aggressively to manage their every performance perception of success through inventive scale plans and inventory management they've been investing heartily in planned blockbuster productions to ensure that they reach sell out and then they've been investing organizationally in their subscription program and associated benefits messaging. These strategies are helping not only their most appealing programs but investments in retention are reinforcing loyalty with patrons who love new work too. As data study tells in their case and virtually every case that we study, patrons who purchase your most nuanced programs are the stickiest or most loyal. Balance appears to be a really important key in loyalty success. And after years of subscription decline, they've experienced 10% growth in the past two seasons or there's the case of the Hollywood Pantages Theater who this year had 22,000 subscribers and has seen growth in the past four years in their program or Performing Arts Fort Worth Bass Hall whose new subscription program this year grew 44% or perhaps my favorite case, Houston Ballet whose work over the past decade to integrate smart strategies has experienced 25% growth in subscription, 27% growth in tickets sold to subscribers over that decade. But we're not naive at TRG. We know like you do that some parts of the subscription model have long since gone the way of the dinosaur. We no longer see 20 concert subscriptions sold at orchestras or subscription revenues delivered only through traditional fixed seat packaging. Nope, it's 2015. The environment has changed radically since the late 80s or 90s. I've shared some recent specific examples but broader research analytics provides another view which we find equally compelling. For example, in 2014 the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance retained TRG to implement a patron loyalty study with transactional data from 17 arts and cultural organizations ranging from the zoo to the ballet to small museums. In this study we grouped each organization into either a performing arts or museum's bucket, studied the aggregated trends as well as trends within each sub-sector. In the performing arts sector we learned that subscription household participation has been consistent across the seven years of data that we study. We use at TRG a loyalty model that some of you in this room I know are familiar with that creates three major loyalty segments. We call advocates, buyers and triers. And we found that in each segment patrons subscribed somewhere in the performing arts sector consistently. What were the differences? A full 100% of advocates subscribed somewhere in the sector every single year of the seven years. 90% of the group we called buyers subscribed somewhere every single year. And just under 10% of trier households the least loyal segment which made up the lion's share of the behavior in that community and virtually every community that we study subscribed somewhere every year. But we saw steady household participation overall. At individual organizations you bet some were up and some were down but not across the sector. And also this year we were asked to study behavior in the DC theater community with seven theater companies over a decade. Now this study hasn't been released publicly yet but they won't be embarrassed for me to share one of many highlights from that report. And that is subscriber households have increased over the decade in the DC theater community 20% in the past five seasons. Does that automatically mean that package sizes and revenues have been growing alongside these trends? Absolutely not. We've changed the size and scope and shape of these subscriptions substantially in the past decade and demand for them has changed as well. Not every industry or market reports these trends but it's important to remember that different is not death and death isn't happening everywhere. I'm here today believing in arts and culture at TRG we're true believers and we believe that we all should be going for our Green Bay Packer equivalent of this and this and this. I appreciate being invited to this discussion here in one of my favorite towns of Kansas City. I look forward to talking with you about this and more as we continue. Thank you. Thank you, Jill. Thank you. All right, next up I would like to call to the podium. Brad Erickson who is the executive director of Theater Bay Area and Victoria Bailey executive director of Theater Development Fund in New York to talk about a shared project you've probably heard about and participated in called Triple Play and here's your, I'm passing my clicker to you. And I'm actually gonna turn on my timer so that we know that we are keeping within our allotted seven minutes. So Theater Bay Area and Theater Development Fund have been engaging in this project that we call Triple Play for the last almost two years now. It's an effort to understand and then eventually deepen and strengthen the relationship between artists and really in this particular case, generative artists and the audience. The idea for this project came at a convening similar to this, the scarcity to abundance convening at the arena theater in Washington maybe five years ago or so which just shows the power that these convenings can have where we were talking a lot about the relationship between the artist and the institution. And someone in one of those discussions said, you know really the institution theaters ought to be acting as a bridge between artists and the audience and the community but too often we wind up inadvertently acting like a wall. And that idea of how do we create a bridge between artists and communities? How do we create what we were thinking of as a triangular relationship between artist, institution and audience was the sort of the beginning point of this project. We looked for some money. We were very grateful to receive money from the Doris Duke Foundation. And then we set out to do some, to get some research done and to look into really some thinking and some exploration that had already been done in the field. And so we asked Donnie Voss to dig a little deeper into some of the work that she had done. Alan Brown at Wolf Brown to look at some of the work that he had done and also Polly Carl to look into what she was thinking of as being bright spots around the country. What were things that were already working? So we took the research, digested the research and then we embarked on a series of conversations and you'll see the six cities that we traveled to working with most of the time other performing arts service organizations with Woolly in Washington. We went in the order listed so we were in Minneapolis and Chicago in January and February. Many of you here, why not? Many of you, lots of you here have participated in some of those conversations and we basically met with theaters, representatives from theaters and with playwrights and other generative artists. And we kind of began to drill down and say, okay, what in this research rings true? Let's talk about bright spots in your community. This was the whole focus of this research. We're big believers in what's working and that's what we were focusing on. And so we really collected people's response to some of the material and of course what we learned even, this is not news, but every community was so different and one of the things that struck us because we've both done other projects in national conversations was the extent to which the cities were even more varied than they had been three or four years ago in terms of their attitudes towards, their work with their communities, how they thought about their communities and those differences began to, we began to realize it was gonna be hard to figure out the next part and we realized the one folks we hadn't heard from despite our best intentions was the audience. Right, we were trying to avoid being in conversation with the real wonks, especially around new works. We had a couple of them in the room but that's not the majority of folks. So we thought how can we actually connect with, how can we start to model this conversation of artists talking with audience members and around and using the theater as a platform for doing that. So we worked with Allen Brown to create protocols where we used playwrights as researchers working in partnership with staff of theater, often the marketing staff. And so we had playwrights interviewing people who were coming to a new play, not their own new play, somebody else's new play. And they would interview the audience members about why they were attracted to a new play, what they were expecting to get out of that, what they had experienced from going to new plays in the past and what their desire or maybe there was no desire to actually connect with the playwright was and the staff member from the theater was taking notes and then we flipped that and we had the marketing person, the staff member from the theater lead a focus group asking similar questions from audience members with the playwright taking notes. And I think some of the learnings from that were the most exciting things that we found in our research. We then gathered everyone again and went to Boston again in January for another conversation. The day before the snowstorm we left. And a lot of you were there as well. And we had a really rich day and a half's worth of conversations where we talked and heard in large part from both the playwrights and the marketing directors and others at the theaters who were involved. And I think given where we are on time, let's talk a little bit about what we learned really quickly. So one of the things that we found out. Oh actually I should, yeah I'm going first. One of the things we found out was that playwrights really want to meet the audience and the audience really wants to talk to the playwrights. And one of the playwrights were deeply moved by these conversations and we realized of course that at most of our theaters the playwrights talk to the board, the playwrights talk to the donors and the playwrights don't very often actually sit down and just talk to the audience. And those were very rich conversations. The other thing that we found out along the way was really this thing that so many of you are doing which is to contextualize, contextualize, contextualize, think about designing the entire evening for the audience. And it actually runs up before they enter the door. And a big, big piece of this that the audience wants to know when we found this out from the intrinsic impact that we had done several years ago, they want to know the plot. It's really simple. They want to know what happens in the play before they get to come see the play and you cannot give it away. And we also found out the playwrights don't mind that idea. Right, as Tori says it's not a basketball game, it's not about the score at the end. They want to know the plot. Another thing we learned is that people want to follow the playwrights. They want to follow the artists perhaps more than they want to follow the institution. People said over and over again, I wish when I looked at the play bill or the program it told me more about this playwright or this play or what inspired it. I really don't care yet about the next play at this theater. So I was thinking about that a lot when I was thinking about entrances and exits, right? What is it that they're following? Right, so there's no one size that fits all. All of these theaters are so different. We've been hearing about that today. Your missions are different, your communities are different, your focus is different. There's a whole lot more that we want to learn. And so we hope to go on to phase two of this work to, we felt like we've just scratched the surface and to dig deeper, find out more and come back with actionable things that you as theater makers can be doing in your theaters and in your towns. So we'll be back to you. Yeah, 705. That is, oh yeah, thank you. All right, thanks you guys. That's cool, cool stuff. To close us out, we have Sarah Vogt who's the marketing and communications manager and Paul Tyler who's the grants director, both from ArtsKC to talk a little bit about what's happening right here in Kansas City. There's your clicker. Hi everybody, so ArtsKC is a local arts agency. Our mission is to unleash the power of the arts and we love data and research. So we act as a champion for the arts we're supporting artists and art organizations throughout the metro area where they're advocate. We like to be the voice for the Kansas City arts community. On behalf of all of them, welcome. We're very glad you're here. And thank you for welcoming us to your gathering today. It's really an honor to be here. And we also promote the arts and that's also something we've used data for. I'm gonna talk, we bring people together. We try to, we think the arts will help us build a city of great dreams and vigorous life. And I'm gonna give you three brief examples of what we've done over the last decade or so. The first one is a 2004 report that was about collaborative marketing. This is one of the key findings from that report. Kansas City area is a really large, we're sprawling metro. We have two states in our service area. So we're divided by a state line and a river. And what we found in 2004, working with all of our constituents is that the market reach was really, really strong in one quadrant, the lower left quadrant there, Johnson County, but there was a lot of room for growth north of the river, east of the state line throughout Eastern Jackson County and really throughout the metro area. And I'm happy to say that, what now, 11 years later, we've done some more work. The local arts index is a project we took part in. And one of the things we found in 2012 was that we were seeing a lot more participation north of the river. In fact, it's interesting to note that in three of the five counties here, over 25% of the residents, adult residents, reported attending a live theater event in the last year, at least one. And that kind of collective impact that we're able to report on to our civic and community leaders has helped us to change the conversation from one in which the arts are perceived as a nicety, something marginal, something that only a small number of people participate in, to something that many, many, many people value deeply. Now Sarah works with our designer, helped take these wonky Excel bar graphs and turn them into infographics. This is really, really important in terms of our advocacy work. Now it's easier for people to see that 43% of the Metro residents attended live performing arts events in the last year. That number is kind of staggering for community leaders to sit down and have to wrestle with and understand just how much the arts are a part of people's lives. We did something, this is a very wonky slide, I'm not gonna get into details of it, but it measured the raw participation rates and a broad range of activities. And we realized that the regional average was 20% higher than the national average and that we are in fact a community where arts and culture is thriving and participation is rising. We had the benefit of comparing our region to 14 others throughout the country who also took part in the Los Angeles Index Study. We were third on the list behind St. Louis and Washington, D.C. overall and ahead of the Twin Cities in New York which speaks to the easy access to the arts in our community and the wide range of different options are available. And we have a large economic impact and what we hate to dwell on this number, in fact, this is the number that gets a lot of attention at the municipal government level because they like to know that we are in fact a business and that we have large impact as a group. I'm now gonna turn the rest of the presentation over to Sarah to talk a little bit about our regional plan and where we're going in the future. Hi, I'll be super brief. But I just wanted to talk really quickly about what we do with these numbers as a local arts agency. Obviously doing research is a great role for us to fulfill in the community and then sharing that with all of the arts organizations and artists here that can utilize that for their own audience development. But we're working to develop our own audience development work here too. And a lot of that is through engaging new audiences that are our donors. So we have workplace giving campaigns to raise money for our grant recipients. And those are people that we have a unique opportunity to reach. And so through reaching those people, we're trying to engage them in sort of short experiences with our grant recipients through some of our events, we feature these little micro experiences with our grant recipients. And then they get an introduction to an organization that they might not have otherwise known about. And then real quickly, our collaborative arts marketing work is really just starting to get going. We spent the last year and a half working on a regional cultural plan. And what we learned from that is that Kansas City and both elected officials, city leadership, and people living here have a really strong desire for easier access to information. In all of our town halls and in all of our online activities, one of the number one complaints we saw was that people felt like they didn't know how to find out what was going on. And even if they did, they didn't know whether or not that was for them or if they were comfortable going to those kinds of events. So starting this spring, we'll be identifying partners in arts organizations here and both kind of civic leadership organizations to figure out how we can tackle that problem. How can we make it easier for the average Kansas City and to find out what's going on and feel comfortable going there. So I think that's all we had. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, guys. So throughout this panel, if I've heard two words over and over and over again, it's clicker. No, I'm kidding. It's partners and patience. And I think it takes both of those things to make this work work. Okay, that's it for time. Thanks to all of our case studies and fellow researchers for all that great thinking. And you can leave the stage now. Thank you. Now, don't get up. Because before we had the lunch, we're going to hear from another Kansas City info blast. This one is from Amy Winterscheidt. She is the national volunteer manager of a company you may be familiar with for tugging on your heartstrings, Hallmark Cards. For those who don't live here, Hallmark isn't only one of the biggest employers in the city, but also a great supporter of the arts. Please join me in welcoming Amy Winterscheidt to the podium. Thank you so much. Hallmark is a creative community and has a very large creative community of over 500. Really, arts is in our DNA. It's who we are. Part of my job is funding the major performing arts organizations. And as I met with the leadership teams of each organization, I noticed commonalities or common denominators in terms of aspirations of long-term audience development and almost simultaneously, Kansas City was about to open the Performing Arts Center, and we knew that long-term audience development was key to the success of that center. So I found myself wondering, what if we brought the performing arts organizations together in a collaborative audience development? I asked Hallmark for some seed money, and they said yes. I asked the performing arts organizations, and they graciously said yes. And we formed the Fab Arts Collab. And I'm humbled to be here. This was just a small ad hoc project, but we've been fortunate to achieve some nice successes. This is really the team's project. At times they would look at me and say, is it OK to spend the money this way? It's their money, their project. I'm here to support and help make it happen. But I did encourage the team to choose one key goal each year and then to measure that goal. And we meet just once a month for about an hour, seven or eight times a year. And it was pretty early on in the first year. 2015, this is our fifth year together, but early on in the first year, we realized we really can't do much with long-term audience development until we know who our patrons are. And we didn't have the funds to do in-depth patron data analysis, so we began tapping on some doors. First, I asked Hallmark Research if they would consider uploading all of the data to a secure site and then downloading that and analyzing it. They said yes and did a cluster analysis. That was good, but we really wanted more. We wanted household-level analysis. So I asked one of Hallmark's partners, HSP Marketing, if they would do a pro bono project for the team. Household-level analysis of all the data, and they agreed. And ended up actually doing three years of analysis. The first year, they did two and a half seasons for all four organizations. Second year, they did three full seasons and third year, three full seasons. And we found some interesting results from that. The first was kind of dispelling a myth that we had. There was very little crossover among the four, 14%. The second, aha, was that our patrons look alike, even though they aren't the same patrons attending the four, the ballet, opera, symphony, and rap, excuse me, they do look alike in terms of how many over 50, how many under 40, how many amount of money they're making, and whether they're single or married. And the third big aha was that retention and acquisition is critical. So the wonderful thing about that patron data analysis was not only the great information we gave to the organization, but it was that HSP Marketing at the end of the analysis identified some low-hanging fruit for the organizations. And one piece of fruit the team really liked was the idea of now that we know who our patrons are, what they look like, how about if we find other people who look like that and invite them to attend. So the team came up with an idea called New Movers Postcards. We found out folks who were moving to Kansas City who fit that profile, we sent a postcard to those folks, said, hey, would you like to attend the rap, the ballet, the opera, the symphony? So that was the first piece. Second piece of low-hanging fruit was we knew that we were losing seasoned subscribers between years one and three across the four organizations. And so the team came up with an idea of subscriber retention events. Again, the team decided how much money to allocate to each organization. Each organization determined what event best fit their patrons, whether it was something at First Friday or if it was at the Steamboat Arabia Museum or if it was during intermission. So the projects turned out to be pretty successful. The New Movers Postcard, we've sent a couple of those out. The investment tickets sold and revenue. And then the subscriber retention events have been really wildly successful. Pretty high attendance. And the organization's tracked specifically those who attended and what the renewal rate was. So those renewal rates were between 77% and 98%. Third thing the group wanted to know was we want to know more about young audiences. Again, just I'm not part of my job is tapping into the resources at Hallmark. And to learn more about millennials, we tapped on Research's door again. And they linked us with the PERC group that does professional facilitation. They lent their time pro bono. I asked the Hallmark ERG, the Merge, the Millennial ERG if they would participate and they agreed. So we ran five focus groups. The marketing directors of each organization sat in and listened. We asked questions like, are you attending? Would you be interested in attending? What would entice you to attend? And what we found were these common themes. Ticket price, ease of purchasing. I don't want to have to click four times to buy a ticket. Familiarity, if I took ballet lessons as a child, I'd be more likely to attend the ballet. If my parents took me to a Christmas Carol every year, more likely to go to theater. And then friends and family, that social piece was really important. And finally, at the beginning of last year, the team said, you know, we really need to add mobile ticketing. None of the organizations had it. They knew they needed it. We needed to be fishing where the fish are swimming. So they put together a two-year plan. We were almost out of seed money, so we knew we had to tap on some other doors to fund this. We talked to the Hall Family Foundation and the Francis Family Foundation. They funded $75,000 in $95,000. The team was able to launch it really with great success. In the first eight months, the mobile ticketing directly has led to $280,000 in ticket sales. So that's the FAB team. I'm sure appreciate your time. And I'm here this afternoon if you have questions. Thank you. That's great. Well, I think Kansas City, it's apparent they're very lucky to have you and have Hallmark cards in their community. So that's it. I think Lisa, I am turning it back over to Lisa Mounds. Oh, yes. Research and data. Enough with the low-hanging fruit. Let's go fishing. So I'm going to do three things, and then there's lunch. Thing one is logistics. Things two is cohorts. And things three are breakouts. So logistics. Those of you who are struggling with your airport transport see any TCG staff member with the Burgundy Ribbon. We will email you the Google form on the spot. You will fill out the Google form, because that's the only way we're getting you to the airport and coordinating that information. So find any staff member. We've all got that capability. Tomorrow morning, if you're checking out of the hotel and you're leaving tomorrow afternoon, bring your bags to the Westin. We will guard them with our happy little lives and leave them there. And you will depart for the airport from the Westin. Air travel. Field trips. Please remember which bus you signed up for. A, for actors. B, for bombasts. C, for cohort. D, for donors. Whichever letter you chose, they're going to take role on the buses. And if you haven't signed up for a field trip, the sign up's out there. Hold your question. We'll get to them afterwards, one on one. We will be posting digital versions of these fabulous boards that Len Carruthers is creating. So you will have access to those. But check in on them as you go. Many of the slides that Kevin was showing at the beginning of this are in your workbooks. And following the meeting, we'll post Michael Rhodes' slides with all his brilliant ideas, not just the blank ones that say you, but the content stuff that's in there. That's logistics. Cohortification. How many of you were not present yesterday afternoon when we began the cohorting exercises? I need to see some hands. Not so very many of you. If you're sticking around all the way through tomorrow afternoon and you want to make a cohort, you are now the cohort of the delayed. And you have a special table in the truest room. It says on it, cohort of the delayed. And Carmen Morgan will spend special time with you because we want everybody to be special. Especially those who were delayed by forces beyond their control. So if you want to join in the cohort building exercise, cohort of the delayed, you're in there. Last piece of information is going to take the longest because I'm going to walk you through the breakouts just to make sure that it's clear. Starting at 1.15, going for 50 minute segments each, we have breakout sessions this afternoon. The first two are knowledge sharing sessions. And the last one is about prototyping. The knowledge sharing is an opportunity to learn from your peers and we've organized it around the bucket areas like motivating staff, like measuring data and effectiveness, like creative place making, whatever the hell that is. Each knowledge sharing session repeats so you can climb into two buckets, right? You can spend some time with Rachel if your device is charged up in new tech tools and social media. And then in the next session, you can go motivate your staff to tweet really brilliantly about you, okay? So, Rachel is one of our several anchors. There'll be the same person holding down the room in each session. They'll be joined by flankers who have brilliant ideas about this and will make sure that the conversation is still going. As always, there is a wild card bucket so if you want to crawl into the bucket that dare not speak its name, other, I'll be facilitating that one in both sessions. So we'll talk about whatever the people in the room need to talk about if it doesn't fit in those buckets. Now, even though we've organized these sessions around the buckets and we broke out your cohorts around the buckets, you don't have to go to the buckets that you co-ordered in. Comprende? Bueno, okay. Then we go to prototyping, right? So in prototyping, you have an opportunity to do some quick, it will be timed, feedback-based investigations. So bring an idea that you've gotten from this that you wanna test out about how it might work in your theater or bring an idea that you're working on already and you want some feedback from other smart people. We've organized these around your roles or job titles, not around the buckets. So marketing directors, there's a room designated for you, people on the artistic staff, there's a room designated for you, but again, you go where your conscience leads you, right? So if you wanna, if you're a marketing director and you wanna invade the artistic staff because by God, you need to be there at the beginning of the conversation, you might choose to go there. It's up to you. And as always, there's a wild card room for people who just defy categorization and Carmen Morgan gets to be the facilitator for that one. These are gonna be fish bowls where we will choose three people, maximum of three, to prototype ideas. They get to come to the front of the room. Three people say, I wanna respond to that idea. They come to the front of the room and in 10 to 12 minutes, you'll have an exchange among those four people. And then as Kevin did here, magically we'll switch and we'll go to the next idea and we'll go to the next idea. So while the afternoon contains a lot of content, it's gonna be delivered in very short bites so that you will not fall asleep after you eat your nutritious lunch. That's it on the afternoon breakouts. Go eat, you'll find yourselves in the rooms at 1.15 sharp to start it all off. Thanks, y'all.