All Blog Posts (54)

I attended the first national convening about What Next? at the Palace Theatre in London on Monday (29 April 2013).  The ‘organisers’ of what David Lan, Artistic Director of the Young Vic, was careful to describe as a “movement” and not an organisation, had done well, procuring over 20 venues in Central London for What Next? meetings that morning in their usual format of 20-30 people round a table.  Then over 650 people gathered at the Palace Theatre for 1.30pm, the venue supportively loaned…

The arts survive mostly on the backs of low paid people. 

We know many creative people in the arts are poorly paid, but under them are the Box Office, F-o-H, bars and catering, cleaning, docents, ushers and show staff paid minimum hourly rates, working part-time as required.  While attenders love the artists they see, they also remind us that the whole experience is in their visit, and the personal service they get from the actual people they get to meet, selling them tickets, serving…

The arts survive mostly on the backs of low paid people. 

We know many creative people in the arts are poorly paid, but under them are the Box Office, F-o-H, bars and catering, cleaning, docents, ushers and show staff paid minimum hourly rates, working part-time as required.  While attenders love the artists they see, they also remind us that the whole experience is in their visit, and the personal service they get from the actual people they get to meet, selling them tickets, serving…

Arts Council England ought to thank ArtsProfessional (Issue 257 September 2012 Page 5) for their balanced and measured report of Carol Lee’s complaint about the grant allocation process for the “Artists Taking the Lead” project in Yorkshire.  (Links here: http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/Magazine/view.cfm?id=6474&issue=257)

In a democracy like ours in the UK, it is…

 If you believe that market forces are what determines economic health, then we are living through some action research on how the arts are impacted. Which analogy works for you: pinch, squeeze, tunnel, dark future, etc.? Apologies for a largely UK focus - the evidence is arriving here that some arts organisations are having to re-think cherished models.

It started on Good Friday this Easter 2012 in the UK which should have been re-named Black Friday for the arts. Marking the start of…

The business world is waking up to the fact that there is a huge volume of data available today to inform them about their customers and their consumer behaviour.  Supplement that with socio-economic profiling tools, data from inter-actions through websites and social media, analysis of purchasing decisions and pricing, and there is an astonishing amount of intelligence about customers, actual and potential.  

Ironically, the arts and entertainment sector were there before…

It is Autumn 2011.  All the September indicators confirm that the UK economy is flat-lining in terms of growth, while inflation continues upwards on prices, unemployment increases, and there is a decline in the retail and services sector; and yet this is before the impact arrives of many of the UK government and local authority cuts.  All the evidence is of concern to us in the arts. 

For arts organisations facing the need to earn and raise more because of funding cuts, this…

I spent most of May and early June working in Spain, first with Tim Roberts (@artsoz) from Australia on the speakers’ tour to launch the Spanish version of our FULL HOUSE book, published as AFORO COMPLETO by the Fundacion Autor, then with Carol Jones (Chapter, Cardiff) and Debbie Richards (…

The frequently asked question: how is our social media marketing strategy working? needs a considered answer.  Ron Evans has been working on a solution to this.  He has devised a system for individuals or groups of arts organizations to be evaluated (via individualized score reports) on their use of all of their online marketing, leading to them making substantial changes/improvements to their behavior over time.…

These are challenging economic times in many countries.  Economic commentators in the UK and the US for example are talking about the length of the recession and defining it as "depression".  Predictions of 2013 or later before an upturn, and real potential for a worsening before it gets better.  In the UK, the impact of the cuts to the arts and the public sector are only just starting to arrive.

That the likes of Live Nation internationally and the West End of London are reporting…

Just a week after the major decisions about the funding of arts organisations in the UK, on 30 March 2011, seems a timely point to review the prospects for the arts here, in the US and elsewhere, in a continuing time of recession and poor economic prospects.

In the debate in the US the big discussion has been about 'supply' versus 'demand', ever since Rocco Landesman, Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts argued that there were "too many theatres".  There has been a…

The politics which audience development has to negotiate in the real world were exposed in January.  The "Arts Nation" team at Arts Council England, working on the delayed and diminished national campaign for England on developing audiences, circulated an invitation to agencies working with them to solicit interest in partnerships they had negotiated with large commercial companies in the marketplace, people like News International (for their newspapers) and Nintendo.

Since this had…

Leading researcher Alan Brown of Wolf Brown, in a light-hearted discussion about CRM at INTIX in San Francisco, asked delegates what they most wanted to know about customers to drive their CRM.  I repeated the question in my round-table workshop session at the AudienceView 'AV Connect' Session after INTIX.  There weren't many…

Is it going to be a happy New Year for all audiences?  The statistics show that, in most western economies, the ticket prices for the arts and entertainment sector have gone up above annual inflation for many years now, especially in what some describe as "the boom years" in the US and UK economies through 2007.  This does mean that a ticket for a popular piece of theatre, symphony concert, visit to an exhibition, a rock…

I am pleased to report that my website to help people with ticketing, marketing and CRM systems has now gone live: www.TheTicketingInstitute.com. In practice, December 2010 will be something of a "house-warming" month as content and functionality is…