The well-intentioned, ghettoized program asks us: are Abe and Sophie still the ones coming, only now they’re paying less?
An elderly couple in Florida are going out to dinner. Abe’s at the door, but Sophie’s still upstairs in the bedroom.
Abe: Hurry up, Darling!
Sophie: I’m coming, Sweetheart! I just have to put on my 18-inch, double-strand pearls!
Abe: Hurry up, Darling!
Sophie: I’m coming, Sweetheart! I just have to put on my 40-karat diamond ring!
Abe: Hurry up, Darling!
Sophie: I’m coming, Sweetheart! I just have to put on my full-length mink!
Abe: Would you hurry up already?! We’re going to miss the early-bird special!
Nonprofit performing arts organizations have been presenting “Pay-What-You-Can” (PWYC or Pay-What-You-Will, Pay-What-You-Want, Pay-What-You-Choose, and other monikers) for years now. It’s a pretty cheap way to deal with a lousy-selling night of the week (they always seem to fall on Tuesday nights or midweek matinees, or often, in the theater world, final dress rehearsals) and look like you care for your community at the same time.
In the museum world, the practice is usually called something like “First Thursday,” and offers free admission for a certain time period during a Thursday, when attendance lags anyway. It’s a little different from PWYC, in that museums sometimes offer talks or tours free of charge for those events as well.
When PWYC’s proponents offer one performance at whatever the audience member wishes to pay, they believe they are reaching out to a community of people for whom price is the only obstacle to attendance and fandom. And they claim, with questionable data gathering techniques such as lists of names of attendees and no follow-up, that each event is predominately comprised of “first-timers,” those whose names had not appeared on their lists before that performance. They see it as community service, proof that they care, really care, REALLY REALLY care about the community, which they define as “their audience.”
Bushwa.
PWYC is cheap, easy, and sounds productive. It’s also outdated and offers little in the way of audience development, proof of worth as a nonprofit, or even first-time event-going. The risk is negligible — the performance was probably a lightly-sold one in the first place. As a result, PWYC offers little reward except to add a small rubber-stamped paragraph to a grant application and make a few insiders feel better. But at what cost?
After 30 years of working with PWYC performances, I can honestly say that a number of people in the audience would actually pay the price for a ticket but, like the coupon-clipping Abe and Sophies of the world, just want to save a buck. Aside from them, you’ll find volunteer ushers, seniors who used to attend, and a few people for whom that’s just the night that works best for them.
There’s nothing inherently wrong about appealing to any of these groups, but it’s not audience development nor is it community service. PWYC performances still force people for whom money is an issue to travel to a venue, often causing unwanted expenses elsewhere (parking, etc.). They do not occur, in general, in the neighborhoods of people who need help or who, at the very least, might diversify the audience base. God forbid.
Finally, it reeks of good master plantation behavior. “Come on in from the hot fields and horrible working conditions and have dinner inside the house for one night,” they seem to be telling the community. After the performance, they’re sent back. Then, in today’s world, their names are put on mailing lists which are sold, traded, and otherwise leaked, and they’re asked to donate at every possible opportunity, even though money and lack of same were interpreted by that same arts organization to be motivators for presenting a PWYC performance in the first place.
I often tell the story of attending a midweek matinee PWYC at Seattle Rep in the late 1990s and running into Bill Gates. Literally. As in, we were each running after our respective partners at the end of intermission and crashed into each other, nearly knocking us on our respective tuchuses. Both of us laughed and apologized and continued our pursuits. Then, one thought stopped me: this was a Pay-What-You-Can performance. Bill Gates can pay a million dollars for a ticket. I always wondered whether he did.
Now we get to the crux of the question that motivated PWYC performances in the first place. Why do them?
If there were no advantage to pursuing a program to aid those in need, would your local behemoth nonprofit arts organization engage in it?
After all, PWYC is just one program that shows nicely on a grant application. But if it didn’t, or if that organization just had some free performances (plural) at which people with little means could attend that were just done because it’s the right thing to do, would these same organizations do them? If free tickets at any performance were utilized not as an audience development tactic (the wrongheaded thinking being that a $5 ticket suddenly transforms into a $100 ticket for the second moment of attendance), but as a gift to those who get always seem to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop, would it be the wrong thing to do?
There are ways of offering service to those in your community who need help. PWYC is not one of them. Why not try some of these?
If you insist on hosting people at your venue — which is the worst way to diversify your audience base and help your community, but stubbornness is a hallmark of toxic nonprofit arts organizations) — then, instead of partitioning off one performance, offer free tickets (not as audience development, but as community help) to all your performances based on who the person is, not who you are. Cater to their convenience, not yours. For example, honoring elementary educators with free tickets might be a caring, community-minded thing to do; but they work hard all week, go to bed early to get there before the kids, and are only available (for the most part) for weekend performances.
Don’t make them come to a Tuesday night just because you can’t sell tickets to a Tuesday night. Wouldn’t you be better off inviting them and letting them come to a Saturday night because that’s more convenient for them?
Can they buy their tickets in advance? If not, why not?
Is your nonprofit arts organization looking after their needs before your own? “Service Above Self” isn’t just the Rotary Club motto; it should guide everything every nonprofit does.
What about groups of people whose live in insecurity and horror? Would you offer free tickets to people at a domestic abuse shelter, who could really use a break? Afterwards, would you refrain from talking about it, even on a grant application, so that their fear of being traced by their abusers can be mitigated? Or do you only do community service when there’s money involved?
What about ex-cons living in halfway houses — those who have completely served their time but can’t get work because of that checkbox on the application form? Can’t they get a night out?
Or does your organization believe that their attendance at your cultured event would negatively affect the elite folks that attend now?
If that’s the case, you might have bigger systemic problems than a silly PWYC performance.
I have an art organization that is designed to service low income people. We have a pay what you wish policy. We also run a grocery distribution program once a month and we offer programs to a local community center where people go to get benefits, including tickets to open dress rehearsals.
To answer your question, we do all the right things that we can to service our community and our local freelancers to share their gifts with that community.
Some people take advantage of that I’m sure, but in the last concert, we only had six people pay nothing at all, and a lot of them paid more than what was suggested.
is it perfect? No.
But your article is a little snarky and basically insinuates that arts organizations don’t take their commitment to the community seriously, maybe some don’t. I can’t speak for them but I know ours does. I don’t appreciate the tone of this article.
Would it be great if we could charge $100 a ticket? That would be awesome but we can’t this economy anyway.
P.s. In our grants, we ask for funding for round-trip ticket to our event so that when we give tickets to people and community centers of shelters, we can include those.. We thought of that because as artists sometimes we are the people in the community who need those services. A lot of us get it more than you think, Being an artist of any kind in this day and age rarely involves living in comfort. Usually, you’re at the lowest end of the spectrum. That’s just how society values the arts. We value our community and do our best to serve it, and our community includes the freelancers who live in our area.
Dear Susan,
I combined your posts into one. I hope that’s okay.
Isn’t it always the way that the ones who are already doing the right thing (as far as nonprofit arts organizations are concerned) are the ones who feel upset that the implication is that they’re not doing enough?
Susan, you are leading an incredible nonprofit, a real charity, one that does what the IRS language in section 501c3 has dictated. And you should be funded to the max because of it. Unfortunately for the industry, there are, in fact, a whole boatful of large nonprofit arts organizations that have a side education program with no metrics of results, a single PWYC performance, or some other non-impactful one-off and tell the world that they’re doing it for the community. If there was snark, and I’ve been accused of that before, it was intended for them, not you and the nonprofit arts organizations that take this charity thing seriously.
I would rather feature your company in an upcoming article in order to show, as I’ve done in the past, that this is what the industry needs to run to, not from. Providing classical music almost exclusively to those who never get to experience it (instead of providing a cozy, somewhat exclusive experience for wealthy donors) is a great thing. And I hope you never consider charging $100 per ticket – the results of that would be the opposite of awesome. Keep up the amazing work.
Alan! Thank you so much for your book. I have run a non-profit theatre and teach Arts Admin. I picked up your book this past summer and have been referencing its wisdom and wonderful snark all term. My students get sound business information from our standard textbook, but they get genuine, hard knocks wisdom from you. It cuts to the chase and challenges them to think practically and meaningfully. We do an exercise where they write a “standard” Mission Statement and an “Alan Harrison” Mission Statement–it knocks the empty, lofty rhetoric out of their statements and gets them to the heart of the matter. I also really value your no nonsense emphasis on genuinely serving the community.
Thank you, Elizabeth! Your work speaks exactly to the reason I’ve written these books. Book 2 will be out shortly (SCENE CHANGE 2: THE FIVE REAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF NONPROFIT ARTS BOARDS, and I think you’ll like it as well. Let me know if you’d like me to speak to your class!