How Opera Theatre Of St. Louis Tackled Its “Leaky Bucket”

December 2, 2018 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

Like many performing arts organizations, OTSL realized that it suffered from “leaky bucket” syndrome: As older audience members dropped away, not enough young ones were stepping up to take up the slack, leading to a net loss in patrons. Those losses meant less earned income and more empty seats and could endanger the company’s future.

READ MORE: St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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WALLACE FOUNDATION AUDIENCE RESOURCES

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WORLD MUSIC/CRASHarts Tests New Format New Name to Draw New Audiences
This article and video are part of a series describing the early work of some of the 25 performing arts organizations participating in The Wallace Foundation’s $52 million Building Audiences for Sustainability initiative. Launched in 2015 in response to concerns about a declining audience base for a number of major art forms, the endeavor seeks to help the organizations strengthen their audience-building efforts, see if this contributes to their financial sustainability, and develop insights from the work for the wider arts field.

Think Opera’s Not for You? Opera Theatre of Saint Louis Says Think Again
Analysis showed that while the company’s core audience bought several tickets each year, even tending to schedule their May and June around opera season, newcomers behaved differently.

Can the City's Boom Mean New Audiences for the Seattle Symphony?
In line with the community’s spirit of innovation, Seattle Symphony is using audience research to help target and woo recent transplants.

Denver Center Theatre Company is Cracking the Millennial Code...One Step at a Time
The average single-ticket buyer at the Denver Center Theatre Company is 50 years old and the average subscriber is 63, despite the fact that millennials, a group often defined as people born between 1981 and 1997, compose the largest age group in Denver. Since 2010, the Denver Center has been engaged in an iterative process of experimentation, evaluation and refinement to help reverse this trend.

The Party’s Still a Hit: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Builds on its Millennial Momentum
That ongoing research has revealed areas to adjust, as well as successes. Soon after the re-opening, for example, the team partnered with a local music school, taking the opportunity to hold 45-minute concerts in Calderwood Hall. But in part through survey results, it realized the approach didn’t work. [read more]

Austin Ballet’s “Familiarity” Problem And How It Learned To Connect With New Audiences

“Encouraging people to attend the ballet more often was less about increasing their familiarity with productions and more about bridging an uncertainty gap. “Familiarity is about information,” notes Martin, “whereas uncertainty about how an experience will feel is much more personal. You can give somebody a lot of information but that’s not necessarily going to reassure them that they’re going to belong in that audience.”

How the Contemporary Jewish Museum
Expanded its Reach

The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco moves to a larger space and secures a nine-fold increase in family visitors of all backgrounds.

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