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MANIFESTO

We believe that great art needs great audiences, and that's why our Manifesto outlines our key messages for funders, policy-makers and the sector in England and the evidence behind those views. You can download our Manifesto here.

Having the GGA Audience Development Intern with us this year was invaluable. Susie’s focus on family audiences pushed this area of our work up the agenda at the right time when we had new opportunities in our programming to exploit and made it an active part of our strategic and tactical planning for the year. It allowed us to achieve results in an important area of our development as a company and I firmly believe these would not have been achieved otherwise.

Alison Martin, Marketing & Communications Manager, Citizens' Theatre Glasgow

Can a venue be at full capacity when it's 33% empty?

30th April 2010

I have been talking to our friends at Cultural Consulting about some interesting and potentially very useful work they doing in Hampshire with Audiences South on mapping and assessing the future cultural needs of an area. 

They have come up with a really clever model which involves lots of variables linked to the current arts provision and the current and future make-up of the population. One of the variables is based on usage or ‘capacity’ of venues. This has led them to ask what I think is a deceptively tricky question: when can you say a performing arts venue is ‘playing to capacity’ and therefore indicating a need to increase the number of seats (if possible) or build a bigger venue?
 
The Steering Group for the project has been pondering this and thought that maybe any venue over the national average attendance for the year (generally believed to be about 66%, but I'm not sure where this figure comes from?) should be seen as operating at 'capacity'. That's a tough one to sell to a planner or chief finance officer.
 
When all shows are playing to 100% capacity for all performances? I don't think any venue can claim this. Even tiny venues doing marvellous work like the Donmar stage the occasional show where you can find the odd empty seat. I'd still argue they are playing to capacity as for many productions they would still sell out an entire run if they had three times their current number of seats.
 
Had a thought-provoking conversation with research colleagues in several of the Audience Development Agencies about this. They suggested it would be better to frame the question as ‘how frequently do you not have enough seats to sell?’ rather than looking at an overall percentage attendance figure for a year. This sounds sensible to me and chimes with the way capacity is measured for swimming pools (it’s not measured on all the time the pool is open, just recognised peak times).
 
So is the best way of measuring whether a venue is at capacity is to see whether it is playing to over 95% capacity for a high proportion of performances? Or is there a better way?

David Brownlee, Chief Executive, Audiences UK

Comments

  1. Author
    Sarah Gee, Indigo Ltd
    Permanent link
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    Date
    30th April 2010
    Comment
    The 'national average' figure that you refer to is most likely to come from the TMA's Audience Data Survey which has been running since 1990 and provides statistics on the number of tickets sold, the value of these tickets, the average ticket yield in total, as well as according to repertoire undertaken by all those members who return data and by a constant sub-set of TMA member theatres
    _________________________

    Thanks Sarah - that makes a lot of sense. Are you aware of a comparable source for concert halls?
  2. Author
    Oliver Mantell
    Permanent link
    #
    Date
    30th April 2010
    Comment
    I suspect that for planning additional capacity, its marginal cost and marginal benefit would be the key measures: capacity (whether measured at % of possible tickets sold or % of events sold out) can be affected by pricing / programming / ticket types too much to really be able to say in an absolute sense 'we're full' in a given scenario. If you could sell an extra 1,000 tickets at £20 for 5 productions a year, then it just depends if it's worth the outlay for that additional £100k income. Whether or not you're full on a tuesday evening in September isn't relevant (unless smart pricing could free up peak capacity by moving price-sensitive audiences to use those spare seats). But there's probably more that could be done to make the most of existing capacity in many cases.
    ________________________________________
    Thanks Oliver. This is only one element in a larger model that will take into account some of the other variables you mention in what is a really complex scenario. I agree with what you're suggesting about more sophisticated approaches to pricing though. In a tough financial climate, more venues need to wise up to smart pricing. This could and should increase income, increase numbers of people engaging and increase the number of seats filled, even for currently very successful venues. - David

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