The Covid-19 pandemic certainly didn’t make theatres’ audience-building efforts any easier. In Theatre Facts 2021, which analyzed the fiscal years most impacted by the pandemic, subscription income dropped 82 percent, topped only by the 92 percent decline in single-ticket income. While the most recent Theatre Facts revealed a 361 percent single-year increase in total ticket income, it was still 55 percent lower than in 2018.
But if you thought this was the death knell of subscriptions, you’d be wrong. The average number of subscribers actually increased by 12 percent from 2018 to 2022, pandemic and all. In June, American Theatre reported on some of the innovation driving that reversal of a decades-long trend in “Subscriptions Are Dead, Long Live Subscriptions!” In both that article and In Search of the Magic Bullet, what emerges is not a single grand strategy but a diverse set of tactical experiments.
One of the biggest takeaways from In Search of the Magic Bullet: Theatres learned they were communicating in ways that didn’t resonate with the audiences they wanted to grow. As one organization noted:
Images that we thought, from years of being in the arts, were the most appealing…really meant nothing to many of the audience members…They were replications of our own beliefs…We always put forth the notion of the art and the aesthetic. And for many of the audiences we were trying to reach, price was much more important. Now we just say upfront, “This is what it costs”…That was one of the most important lessons that we learned.
These findings were supported by market researchers retained by the Wallace Foundation for each organization. These researchers helped organizations challenge their assumptions around what was and wasn’t working in their audience-building efforts. As the Goodman Theatre’s Roche Schulfer noted in webinar about the report:
We learned it’s not about new; it’s about familiar versus unfamiliar. What we thought had been important, in the theatre, you get into this, “Oh, we’re doing world premieres, and we’re doing Chicago premieres, and it’s new, exciting work.” We found that for audiences, they didn’t really care if it was a world premiere. They cared whether they were familiar with the play, with the playwright, with the actors in it, or whether it was something that was completely new to them. That had broad implications, because it’s not only about new work being unfamiliar, but in the age we live in, Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare can be unfamiliar work for audiences. Providing a context for that work became the priority.
For the Goodman, and for a majority of BAS organizations, that meant investing in a more significant digital footprint. Organizations experimented with refined segmentation for emails and price discounts; more accessible and mobile-friendly websites; and enhanced social media and video content.
As Ballet Austin’s Cookie Ruiz noted in TCG’s Rebuilding Our Houses working group, “We start by sending a video from the person running our Welcome Center to each patron joining us for the first time. Her name is Vicki, and she is the world’s friendliest human being. People come through the door asking for Vicki, which is what she invites them to do, allowing us to know they’re viewing the video. Our front-of-house goal is to make them feel welcomed. Just after the curtain comes down, our artistic director, Stephen Mills, sends our newcomers a video thanking them for joining us and inviting them to return. It’s the first video at the top of their inbox when they get home.”
That blend of high tech and high touch not only creates a sense of welcome, but helps provide that critical context Schulfer mentioned. The importance of the lobby experience was also underlined by the success BAS organizations had in diversifying their front-of-house staff in terms of age and race. According to one BAS participant quoted in the report, this shift “has actually been remarkably potent as one simple change.”
A simple change, maybe—but do all of these changes add up to something more significant? In our email exchange, Dr. Ostower reflected that “an overarching finding of our study is that if organizations want to change audience engagement with them, then organizations need to be open to changing themselves. One question, then, is how ready are organizations to change?”
It remains to be seen if the five-year growth in subscribers continues in the next edition of Theatre Facts. If it does, it may hint at one answer to Ostrower’s question: Yes, some theatres are ready to change, to experiment in ways big and small, while letting go of the hope for any magic bullets, and building instead an emergence of new and renewed loyalty models. Maybe we’ll even have the chance to call theatre a “growth industry” in Theatre Facts 2027.
Corinna Schulenberg (she/her) is Co-Lead of Research Programs for Theatre Communications Group.
