INTIX Quarterly: Critical Engagement

NEXT STAGE: When COVID-19 shut down productions, arts groups and theaters turned to livestreaming and additional fundraising. (Getty Images)

A strong connection to patrons helps arts organizations weather the storm, ticketing execs say

With venues being pressed to implement new health and safety measures and technologies like contactless ticketing and payment, the need to tap into new sources of revenue — whether through streaming, nontraditional offerings like drive-ins, increased fundraising or other means like new or expanded educational offerings — is for many a matter of economic survival.

Those with the strongest audience engagement models are most likely to find success in generating new income sources, according to some executives of companies that provide ticketing, marketing and customer relationship management platforms.

“If you haven’t been doing that, it’s very hard after the fact to say we want to get people to sign up for streaming because we want to light up this new revenue stream,” said AudienceView CEO Mark Fowlie. “You have to have had an effective engagement model with your fans, with your patrons all the way through to tap into some of these things. It’s a really difficult situation for many organizations because they are limited in terms of pursuing other revenue streams. The live event in their venue has been so central to what they bring to their community and to their fans and their patrons. Having a strong engagement model with your community is a starting point for finding those revenue streams.”

As an example, some clients are having success selling subscriptions to future seasons because they have loyal patrons willing to sign up for renewals despite not knowing just what the future holds, according to Fowlie, who says AudienceView has 4,500 clients representing over 9,000 venues.

“They are also able to tap into additional fundraising and donations,” he said. “You’re in a fundamentally better position when you are working from a well-integrated marketing-fundraising-ticketing platform and have been driving that engagement as a normal course pre-pandemic.”

Andrew Recinos, president of Tessitura Network, which has over 700 member organizations in the arts and culture space, says digital offerings are for many the only way to stay relevant amid the pandemic.

“Most of them started with some form of free versions and now the conversation has turned to how can we monetize it,” he said. “I think that there is a wide spectrum around whether it’s worth it from a financial perspective or is it just worth it from a relationship perspective and I think that scales with the size of the organization. I think the smaller organizations are trying to actually make some money off of it and for the larger ones it’s almost PR, but the other thing that I’m hearing a lot is that even as folks … start returning to venues, just about everyone I’ve talked to said they plan to have some kind of hybrid approach (combining in-person with live or recorded streamed offerings).”

Some symphonies and operas expect older patrons to be some of the last to return to venues and given that they are some of the most loyal customers, being able to offer streamed performances will be an important way of retaining that revenue source going forward, Recinos said.

To the question of how to allocate scarce resources, Recinos said organizations should invest their time and money on their core missions and disregard or put on the back burner all the rest.

As an example, he said a museum or other organization that must get people into the facility to survive or whose mission is providing a place for people to gather, “then you’re going to find the money to put up the plexiglass screens or everything else you have to do to get people back into your building, even if it’s at 20% capacity. It all becomes about, what’s the most important thing, whereas a museum in the next town might say, that’s not the most important thing. We’re going to stay closed and we are going to take our money to make sure that the digital experience that shows off our collection to the world is the most important thing.”

The sad reality is that without some form of relief, still other organizations won’t be able to fulfill their mission and will be forced to hibernate or cease operations, he said.

Fowlie said he expects to see consolidation among some ticketing technology companies and a washing out of others because of economic pressures that have come to bear in the era of COVID-19, leaving fewer but stronger players.

“I think that’s reasonable to expect for a number of reasons,” he said. “Consolidation in and of itself is good for the industry. Fragmentation causes a lack of critical innovation. Compare that to other industries; airlines, retail, the consumerization and convenience angle of how consumers just want to leverage technology to make their lives easier, more convenient, faster. I think we’re not there in the entertainment space and I think largely that’s due to the fragmentation of the market that limits investment and innovation. There are so many ticketing companies out there. I just don’t see how all of them are going to weather this storm.”

Fowlie has been quoted as calling the pandemic an “unfortunate opportunity” for AudienceView and other live events companies that have the scale to survive the pandemic’s economic crush while driving “an acceleration of innovation and providing utility and convenience to clients and their venues, the producers, the content owners and ultimately their fans and patrons.”

“I think we’ll look back in five years and we’ll say, wow, we really accelerated the pace of innovation because of the pandemic. It’s forced us to think differently. It’s forced vendors to focus their products in terms of the features and the roadmaps that they are building,” he said. “It’s really focused the venues and the content owners and producers to think about how are they going to market, how are they going to (combine or balance) livestream versus in-venue. We’re delighted to be a part of that. It’s unfortunate it took this pandemic for some of this to start materializing.”

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