This Week’s Insights: Ticket pricing isn’t always so much about money anymore – it should shape your audience strategies. Is the challenge of getting more young people interested in museums building apps to distract them? And here are five principles for creating good city-guide apps.
- Ticket Pricing Story I – Tickets As Audience Strategy: Think your ticket pricing is just about how much money you charge? With earned incoming making up less and less of the typical arts organization’s budget, ticket pricing has become more about identifying who you want in your audience. The Scottish National Orchestra built its whole audience strategy around pricing. “Working in a multi-city and multi-venue environment requires an approach to pricing that is adaptable in the different marketplaces in which we operate. Pricing is therefore viewed as a flexible tool that helps us achieve the central and multiple imperatives of the organisation: generate revenue, encourage attendance, reach new audiences, offer new experiences and promote the artistic reputation of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.”
- Ticket-Pricing Story II – What £5 Tickets Did For Shakespeare’s Globe: One of the central keys to success of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London has been the decision to price its yard tickets at £5. “Over the last twenty years that single fact has given over five million people an extraordinary experience for less than a sandwich costs.” This is not second quality or dedicated educational programming, but some of the highest-quality theatre out there. The cheap tickets have made theatre affordable to almost anyone.
- Ticket-Pricing Story III – The Met Museum Plans An Out-Of-Towner Tax: Okay, so the Met is in a money crunch. But is charging a straight $25 admission fee to non-residents (as opposed to the current “suggested donation”) a good message? The Met says that it can earn tens of millions with the new policy. “The Met’s current ‘suggested’ admissions fee, $25 for adults, generated about $39 million in the fiscal year 2016, or 13 percent of the museum’s overall revenue. A mandatory fee would be likely to generate tens of millions of dollars more a year.” And will the fee really deter out-of-towners who have made the special trip?
- Do We Really Need to Sex-Up The Museum Experience For Young People? Nikki Erlick writes that museums need to use technology to make the museum more attractive. “Museums must find new ways to engage and excite visitors. The growing slew of digital entertainment options wrestling for our attention may be part of the problem for museums, but for many institutions, digital technology also offers a potential solution. Charged with the crucial task of preserving our past, museums must now navigate the future.” But is this really true? Is the art itself not enough to get visitors excited? This is only the latest chapter in a debate that has raged for decades about how to make the museum experience more accessible.
- What We’ve Learned About City Guide Apps: It’s not always possible to have a live guide show you around. But can an app be a decent fill-in? Researchers at King’s College London and the University of Melbourne have been playing with designing these apps and have identified five key ingredients.
Image: Pixabay
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