Re: [Organizers] A discussion on attendance fees

Chris wrote: So here are my thoughts. I've only been involved with serious dance organization in the SF Bay Area. BACDS sponsors a variety of contra and English dances, camps, balls, workshops, and other special events. (It also provides organizational cover for morris/longsword teams and a country-dance performance group, but the teams manage their own finances.) All profits go into a general fund, and losses come out of that general fund, rather than out of the personal profits of the organizers. We also get some revenue from membership fees. Some years we come out $15k ahead overall; some years we come out $15k behind overall, but we've had enough "ahead" years that we have a pretty good nest egg. Dance series that lose lots of money eventually get moved into less expensive halls or go away altogether. We set admission fees organization-wide, and we have a standard split (60% of the door to caller/band/sound, 40% to the organization, which will pay for the rent, insurance, calendar printing, etc) and standard minimum payments ($50 caller and up-to-three band members, half that for sound (for contra dances; at English dances it's $20 a head). (Those minimums and split arrangements are negotiable for hot out-of-town talent, and we can adjust our door prices up for them as well; that wasn't always true.) Current arrangements are that the door price for a three-hour evening dance is: $15 Supporter $10 General $ 8 member $ 5 student/low-income _or what you can_ We adopted the student rate specifically because we wanted younger people to come dancing; the community had been greying at an alarming rate. We also have a bunch of youth (30 and under) scholarships to our camps. This hasn't been completely unsuccessful. [The camp youth scholarships very often go to people from far away, so don't do too much for our regular dance evenings.] It was about a year later that it became the "student/low-income" rate; I'm not sure how that happened but I'm in favor of it. I read an article a couple of years ago from a theater administrator in (I think) Seattle who was talking about the crisis of a very grey audience for live theatre. If you can't get young people hooked on seeing theatre, your audience will eventually wither away. So his argument was that theatre companies should be going all out to get people who weren't hooked already in the door, whether that was massively-discounted seats for under-30s, adjusting show times to work with transit, giving tickets away for free on college campuses - whatever it took. Not as compassion for fixed-income youth, but as a long-term marketing strategy. Get 'em hooked now and when they do have money charge them more. We adopted the Supporter rate and the "or what you can" rate (idea and wording taken from our local Queer Contra group) specifically in response to the current economic downturn. There are some people who are doing fine and are happy to pay more. We used to get people who declined to buy memberships because they didn't want the staff to be stiffed for $1.20 because of the $2.00 discount. At the same time, I think, we started describing the "student rate" as "student/low-income". When the Board discussed this, the argument I made (after somebody else suggested that we do this) was that none of our dances were at risk of overflowing their halls. Barring an overfull hall (where a non-paying dancer could displace a full-paying dancer), the marginal cost for another dancer was zero, and any revenue that they did produce was a win. Contra-dancing is less fun with scanty attendance. We had deep enough pockets that we could comfortably take a risk on this new policy. So we did. What happened financially was essentially invisible. Attendance increased at some of our dances (which were also doing other things to increase attendance); student attendance increased somewhat. Anecdotally we've heard that a couple of out-of-work community members were able to continue attending dances when they wouldn't have been otherwise. It looks like no more than 10% of attendees take the student/low-income price, and eyeballing the floor it looks like that's roughly correct. We don't do any checking or enforcement; we don't even have an official definition of "low-income". Having a "student" rate has helped us get some high-school students as attendees (and one as an organizer) at Palo Alto. It works out. So for us, here, it's been a win. Broke people may feel more like they're wanted and welcome. Our dances are somewhat better attended and somewhat more intergenerational. Musicians and callers have more fun with larger attendance, and they get more money. Most people will pay full price. If a few people skate, how bad is that? (Yes, musicians and callers may be broke and deserve more money. But they might get a bit more - assuming the hall's not so full you have to turn people away - if you allow some to pay what they can, and they couldn't have come at all otherwise.) Are you more worried about nobody getting a free ride than about the possibility of a win-win where people who can't afford to pay can pay *something* and the band gets *something*? (Trading work for free admission is nice, but doesn't always work right. Ideally, the person sitting the door is trustworthy and welcoming. That can be true for a broke person, for sure, but not every broke person is the ideal concierge for the dance. And at camps, the work-trade people often have specific physically-demanding things to do, and being broke doesn't guarantee that you'll be able to do those physically-demanding things, so I've pushed to have some need-based scholarship as well as work-trade at our camps.) -- Alan -- =============================================================================== Alan Winston --- WINSTON(a)SSRL.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU Disclaimer: I speak only for myself, not SLAC or SSRL Phone: 650/926-3056 Paper mail to: SSRL -- SLAC BIN 99, 2575 Sand Hill Rd, Menlo Park CA 94025 ===============================================================================