Spend More To Make Your Donation Really Worth It

For the last couple weeks I have been attending films at the Hawaii International Film Festival. I actually don’t go to the movies all that often so seeing a series of movies over 11 days got to be a strain at times, but the opportunity to see a number of quality films is too good to pass up. Of course, I paid attention to the way the festival interacted with their audience.

I became a member at the $100 level this year and received an allotment of free tickets in exchange. Membership also allowed me to enter the theatres first before those who had purchased their tickets singly. This is an option for providing a perk in a general admission setting. Though it required that I queue up about a half hour in advance. They did a good job assigning their movies to appropriate sized theatres in the complex. My friends were in the non-member line and handed me their coats to put on the seats next to me. The theaters never got so full before they were able to gain admission that I had to contend with the no saving seats policy.

There was one house manager that was excellent. I encountered her in a number of films. She had control of the audience of 200-300 people all by herself. She filled the space with her voice and promised ludicrous things to anyone who identified an open seat. It got people laughing and on her side.

Getting back to the membership structure again. Intentional or not, the way the festival structured the membership benefits, it had my friends talking themselves into buying more tickets. In addition to free tickets and getting in first, membership also allowed you to purchase the $12 tickets for $8. The way my friends figured it, if I paid $100 for my membership and got 6 tickets free ($72 value) the membership would be worth it if I purchased an additional 7 tickets (four dollars savings on each one equaling $28, thus saving me my $100 membership.) Of course, by that point I would have spent $156 which I am sure the film festival would have appreciated. That convoluted attempt at reasoning made me reflect on the psychology of pricing and the way people make decisions. I have been reading bits and pieces about the field of behavioral economics as discussed by people like Dan Ariely. Episodes like this make me think I should be paying better attention.

The one other lesson I took from the festival is that even though technology seems to be a threat to the performing arts, it can’t be a substitute for a story. Though it often seems that way.

Julie Taymor’s The Tempest had some great acting, an interesting location (filmed on the lava fields of the Big Island of Hawaii and island of Lana‘i), and an intriguing dynamic created by casting Helen Mirren as Prospero, a role Shakespeare wrote as a male. But the movie had a such a large amount of CGI, some of which seemed to be left over from the psychedelic parts of Taymor’s Across the Universe, it made the movie disappointing for me.

Zhang Yimou’s Under the Hawthorn Tree depended entirely on the story of two people falling in love during China’s Cultural Revolution to make its impact. The movie is based on a true story and was so heart breaking, I was hoping some of the chaste lovers’ interactions had been exaggerated for dramatic effect because it the reality of it would have been too hard to bear. (I am sure the reality was indeed much worse.) I was so anxious that they were going to be found out and their lives ruined for mundane things like the guy buying the girl boots so her feet would be protected against lime burns, I was a little relieved by the sorrowful ending that left the audience in tears because it didn’t involve prison or re-education camps.

There is great importance to a good story told well. This isn’t a matter of comparing an American director to a Chinese director. People are hailing Zhang Yimou for returning to this type of storytelling after big garish extravaganzas like Curse of the Golden Flower which relied so heavily on spectacle.

Twitter Thursdays

So we have a production coming up that will have six performances. Because one performance is generally poorly attended, we generally offer some sort of last minute rush promotion requiring people to say a silly phrase to get their discount. Since the audience for this show tends to be younger, I thought I might also experiment and make that night a “social media performance.” Essentially, we would have a night where people would openly be invited to do text friends and update Twitter and Facebook status. The only thing we couldn’t let people do due to intellectual property concerns is record or take pictures.

If it was successful, I might consider expanding it to other performances as appropriate. We don’t get a more than 5-10 people commenting about our shows on social media sites so I wanted to see what would happen if we openly encouraged it. Because most classes were required to see the production the previous week, we wouldn’t see too many grouses about being forced to see the stupid show by a professor.

Knowing that a lot of people don’t like to have those around them leaning over a glowing cell phone, I thought having a specific performance dedicated to the practice might help draw those who liked the practice and allow those who disliked it to attend at other times. It wouldn’t guarantee a texting free environment at all shows, but might lead both groups to feel we recognized their needs.

When I brought the idea up at the weekly production meeting, I thought there might be some resistance. My biggest concern was for the actors who might not get the same audience reactions on that particular evening as they did in other performances due to divided attention. In fact, there might be more conversation at that performance as individuals whisper inquiries about what has transpired after everyone else laughs or gasps. I figured there would have to be some discussion of appropriateness and shifting expectations.

What I hadn’t expected was a vociferous and absolute refusal to perform that night from one of the creative team. The individual was wholly opposed to the practice which he felt was an awful trend and inappropriate at a live performance. He was under no illusion that it wouldn’t happen anyway regardless of what we did, and perhaps become more common and widespread, he just didn’t want to be party to an effort to encourage people to do it.

I think this is just part of a set of concerns that has existed for awhile and may become more prevalent soon enough. Do we diminish the performance by validating something outside of the usual practice? For orchestras, it has been projection of video images in support of the music in some way. In theatre it has been stunt casting of television/movie/pop music figures in stage performances. This isn’t just about Broadway casting choice. All across the country weather forecasters and football heroes get cast in the hope that their popularity will bring more butts to the seats. I am not sure what the characteristic corresponding situation would be in fine arts and dance.

In many ways this is different. Those elements, for better or for worse, are part of the artistic product. It may be cheapening the product to dilute it in this manner in the name of getting more attendance. It is another thing to encourage people to ignore the performance entirely to tell their friends to come to the show.

In one of my favorite Take A Friend To The Orchestra outings, Drew McManus takes a guy to a concert in Carnegie Hall. Drew tells him it is okay to be bored during some portions of the performance and I think brings binoculars so he can look more closely at the musicians during these times. Even though Drew says it is okay to be bored and not entirely engaged by the performance, his suggested alternatives encourage his companion to try to remain involved even if the music isn’t finding purchase in his ear.

Encouraging people to text sends the message that is okay to be bored, but encourages them to disengage themselves from the performance entirely without making the attempt to involve themselves in some other aspect of the experience and give the performance a chance to connect and draw them back.

I know I sound like I am siding with the objector against something I proposed doing. But this is really a matter of the two sides of my identity as an arts professional in conflict. From the marketing standpoint, allowing people to tell their friends about their experience can improve attendance. Not just as a matter of simple recommendation, but as a way for experimenters to lead their more wary friends to new experiences.

But it changes the way people are interacting with the arts in some undesirable ways. If people are viewing a performance in terms of what they can report on every few minutes, there isn’t any time given to digest the experience. There are many inveterate arts professionals who aren’t really sure what they thought about a show until the next morning. If you view a performance as a loaf of bread to comment on a slice at a time, you may never see the golden beauty of the loaf as a whole. You decide that Helen Mirren as Prospero is dumb when she first appears in The Tempest and then look for the next moment to comment on, and then the next and the next, you may miss what Julie Taymor was trying to do with the story.

Is this the way we want to encourage people to approach their experience with art? Mediated through the lens of whether what just happened was interesting enough to report to their friends at the expense of missing/incompletely comprehending what happens next? I remember reading about how certain actors in Shakespeare’s time were judged masterful when the girls wandering the aisles stopped hawking oranges. Will the power of a show be judged not by a standing ovation, the value of which seems to have degraded of late, but by the fact people were so entranced that they stopped texting?

Tip You Might Be Able To Use

With all the discussion of using GroupOn to sell subscriptions and tickets that has been occurring of late, (neatly summarized by Drew McManus last week), my brain was receptive to the mention of a similar service which may be better for both the consumer and the business.

I was listening to the radio when I heard an interview with a representative of a company called Tippr that provides a similar service to GroupOn’s. The benefit for businesses is that they have representatives in every city in which they have a presence who can sit down and structure an offer specific to your company and needs rather than the same arrangement everyone else gets. This includes making sure responses don’t exceed your company’s resources and ability to service them. One of the biggest problems businesses have had with Groupon is being overwhelmed by the number of people seeking to redeem deals. Tippr seems to view themselves as a service that provides growth to businesses rather than a discount deal site.

Which is not to say the consumer doesn’t benefit. Tippr offers three deals a day rather than just one. But the real value comes in what Tippr calls an Accelerated Deal. The more people sign on to deal, the bigger the discount. It starts at 50% but can go up to 90%. Presumably, the business can set a cap on how large the discount grows to.

You won’t see the Accelerated Deal anywhere else. The process was patented by a company named Mercata in the 1990s which went belly up according to Gigaom because, “Online social networking didn’t exist back then, customers were much less likely to spend money online…” Tippr bought the patents on the process.

When I first heard the Accelerated Deal described, I thought it was a system that rewarded early adopters. In my post on GroupOn, I had suggested that with the correct timing, one could use that service to reward people who committed early.

When they first started talking about how Tippr worked, it almost sounded like you could pay $10 for $25 worth of merchandise and then as people joined in the next level of discount would have you pay $15 for the discount which might now be at $30. Except that since the discount was the same for everyone, the person who paid $10 now was getting $30 worth of merchandise. So as the discount increased, the late comers were getting a really great deal, but the early adopters who were driving the whole effort really made out well.

For the business, this could really work out well if you structured the curve of the discount well. Sure, you may end up giving $100 of merchandise for $10, but if the cost of the discount went up to $20 after the first 10 people bought, you limit that exposure. The same if you limit the number of $20 deals knowing the discount will top out at $100 merchandise for $60. If you have a couple hundred people buying at the $60 range when the average sale in your store is $15, it might be good planning. Especially if you know from more modest offers that a fair percentage will return to your store to buy at full price and since they have already paid $60 in your store once, they are inclined to spend more than the normal $15 average.

While that isn’t how Tippr actually works, if more companies enter this market niche, you may see companies using this type of model of obscene discounts for the first responders to differentiate themselves from the pack. Hmm, maybe I should download the patent paperwork….

I am not sure how well Tippr might work for arts organizations. It may make sense for subscriptions over single ticket sales. If earned income is 40% of your budget and you have the potential of discounting your tickets anywhere from 50%-75%, it could be a perilous situation. But it can be absolutely worth it if you decide rather than spend a couple thousand dollars on print and radio advertising, you will forgo a couple thousand dollars in ticket revenue knowing every few dollars lost is a guaranteed audience member. Since Tippr has a representative to sit down with you and listen to your concerns so you can develop a sane plan for how much to discount and limit the number offered, you can also be guaranteed not to incur any more expense than you intended.

Prices So Low, It Might Be Insane!

There was a fair bit of discussion on Adaptistration two weeks ago about the Joffrey Ballet’s success in gaining over 2000 subscribers in a single day using the GroupOn discounting site. As a theatre manager, I get caught in the debate between making 25% of my ticket price vs. having an empty seat against possibly training people to wait for the deep discount in the future.

One of the best points that I think is made in the comments on the Adaptistration entry is that while you may be making 25% of the ticket revenue, you don’t have the marketing costs usually associated with promoting the show when you work with GroupOn. My assumption is that most arts organizations marketing costs aren’t 75% of the ticket price so there is still a danger of not meeting the other overhead costs you have by using GroupOn, but if the discount is structured correctly, you could end up doing marginally better than you might have and have a fuller house. Looking like you are successful is half the battle in convincing donors and granting organizations to support you.

Still, I was pleased to see Chad Bauman, the Director of Communications at Arena Stage take the subject on. In addition to suggesting that you are rewarding the wrong kind of behavior with these discounts and risk alienating the person who paid full price months ago, he notes that paying less than full price seems to translate into less than full commitment in both renewing and attendance.

“We must always remember that discount buyers behave differently and you must budget for that. Full season subscribers at most organizations renew at a rate between 85% to 90%. However, I have found that full season subscribers that purchase their subscriptions at a drastic discount renew at a much lower rate (around 60%). Additionally, because they spent significantly less amount of money per ticket, the no show rates are also substantially higher, sometimes leaving large empty holes in your house.”

As an alternative, Bauman suggests a slightly more work intensive process of acquiring mailing lists, sorting out your current subscribers and ticket buyers and-

5. Using the exact same deep discount offer you were going to give to Groupon, develop a cheap, but effective mailer and send to your list. Make sure it is an offer that is impossible to pass up, and that the offer leads in design and has a deadline. (note: if you don’t have a large box office staff, then make sure the offer is online only, or you will be swamped). The key is to keep production and mailing costs low–send using non-profit postage and use a discount printer/mail house.

By doing this, you get to keep the entire purchase price of the discounted subscription, and you minimize the possibility that your dedicated and loyal patrons will see that you are heavily discounting late into your campaign after thousands have already purchased.

Taken together, the Adaptistration entry and comments and Chad Bauman’s take, give a pretty good picture of the factors to consider and some alternative approaches to take.

I haven’t used GroupOn yet for personal consumption. In fact, it appears it might not have a lot of traction locally because there is no listing of past deals for my city. Though that could just be a technical matter. I wonder if you can effect the timing of the offer. That way, you can use it in a manner closer to that used by airlines. Not everyone in the plane is paying the same for their seats, but generally it is recognized that those who purchased earlier got a better deal. If you can arrange things so that people need to commit to the performance a couple months out, then at least you emphasize the need to plan ahead. Only problem is that if people don’t show up because their investment is as low as the price they paid for the ticket, you may judge it something of a mixed blessing.