AMERICAN THEATRE: Why does marketing always feel like a constant battle in nonprofit theater? One that we slowly seem to be losing. Why do we keep hearing about engagement, the engagement economy, and arts engagement? How does engagement work? Do marketing and engagement have anything to do with each other? The answers to these questions may not be as hard to find as you might think.
6 comments:
This is a really interesting article to me, because I've always sort of wondered how non-profit theater stays afloat. I never thought about the fact that modern advertising and marketing plans don't fit non-profit arts organizations, and that their promotion schemes have to be fundamentally different. Also, interesting to think that non-profit theaters have to engage the community in order to serve the community, and that outreach and engagement are ultimately different things. It was pretty eye-opening to read how the traditional "Four P's" of marketing translated into the nonprofit world. I actually started to make a lot of connections between the four E's and the regional theater near where I'm from - it sheds a lot of light on why they advertise they do. The article does a really good job of explaining everything, from why the four P's don't work to why theaters should adopt the "Engagement Edge". I hope that this article is able to reach the theaters that need it most, because there are definitely theaters that struggle with this.
This is a fascinating read on a subject that I have always found complex in our industry. As is pointed out within the article, for-profit advertisement is at odds with non-profit theatre. Non-profit theatres often focus on community engagement, but they also need to bring in revenue in order to keep serving the community. In order to bring in revenue, they need to sell tickets, and ticket sales are dependent upon reaching an audience. Advertisement is expensive and doesn't always reach the intended audience. It's a strange model to try to apply to the non-profit sector, for sure. I hadn't really made the connection between advertisement selling to the community rather than engaging with it, and this article really made that discrepancy click. I do think it's vitally important that non-profit theatres find a marketing strategy that more closely aligns with their values and mission statement.
I truly believe that theatre should be accessible to all people, and in its current mode, it is not. I can't say what the solution is because even in reading this article and understanding the nuances within, I just don't have a head for marketing. I do think that community engagement is vital, but I also think that persuading an audience into a product is the least egregious offense. To truly bring the community to the art, the art needs to be affordable to the community. I don't know how to solve that, but that's for other minds to sort out.
I’ve always been interested to read about marketing in theatre because, at least for me, I don’t really think about the money making and advertisement part of theatre. It slips my mind and I just focus on the creating part of theatre. It must be difficult to run a theatre as a nonprofit. But, how they describe that audiences want “engagement” and we are living in an “experience economy”. Art does require audience engagement. I do think art is art whether or not an audience sees it or not, but I think the market margin does need to be titled as “engagement”. I also really liked reading the “ease of access” section. Art should be about access, not money. We should be allowing others to experience art. If we dive deep at CMU SOD, most of us are here because we accessed art and it changed our lives. Imagine if we allowed everyone easy access to see art; our community would be changed.
Non-profit theater is an area of theater that I’ve always been interested in (it was my introduction to theater) but don’t know that much about technically - and this article looked at some of the questions I have wondered about this type of theater. To learn more about what goes into fundraising and marketing these types of theaters is engaging, and I think I now understand more about it in general. Considering the 4 P’s and the 4 E’s - Product/Experience, Price/Ease of Access, Place/Environment, and Promotion/Education - is looking at two different ways of approaching non-profit theater, and seeing how the article tackles and explores these topics was very enlightening to me. While I’m not a marketer, and probably never will be, it's interesting to consider theaters I’ve seen in my hometown and how they do (and don’t) prescribe to this kind of marketing. The Engagement Edge (the 4 E’s) is very important, and I think lend themselves to the beginning of making theater more accessible to everyone.
I really like the way the article broke down how art could be better marketed toward the public. And it’s a necessary part of art now that I think about it with that quote they used about art being for an audience and if it doesn’t have one then is it really art? But I mean some people could argue the only audience you need is yourself but I digress. I think the major problem with engagement at least for a theater would be what a theatrical production can offer someone versus like a tv show or movie. And I think we’re moving closer to that kind of theatre, yknow, making shows more accessible and interesting rather than just producing shows that make white people happy. I’d love to see a community where theater isn’t just seen as a privilege, but a universal experience anyone can enjoy, and truly enjoy it.
Non profit theater is pretty much the only theater I’ve had experience with, so this article was very very interesting for me to read about. When I first started dancing ballet, I started with a non-profit, donation based ballet company, and they made it so dance would be accessible to everyone, when I began 8th grade, they transitioned into a tuition based company although they still made scholarships and other work studies available to those who could not afford to dance at that school, I never really understood why they made that transition, and how they stayed afloat before that transition. Even before the transition, they were still able to afford new/mostly new costumes for all the students in the productions, keep a stable group of faculty, put on volunteer events, rent out venues for their performances, and put on a full ballet production each year, which needed costume designers, lighting designers, sound designers, and occasionally set designers.
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