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In our ongoing attempt to define the Future of ARTC I have been toying with another idea, especially in light of recent developments regarding grants and the acquisition of the SFX library. This discussion will go along with Bill's desire for us to evaluate our live performances for effectiveness.
Live performances have traditionally served the following purposes for ARTC: 1) Marketing - which is twofold: first it gives us something relatively easy to market to people and second it serves as a tool to get them to buy our studio work 2) Faster production cycle keeps actors/techs busy and gives writers an outlet for their work 3) Serving the fanbase at conventions
Of those three, only the second and third purposes are actually showing any reasonable, measurable results at this time. From a sales point of view, our sales at the shows themselves (and mail order afterwards) are negligible and any bounce we might be getting at Audible is impossible to track. Google Analytics will give us some indication of whether the marketing of the shows is giving us any additional web traffic.
The questions we are then faced with are as follows: 1) Are keeping the actors/techs busy and serving our fanbase sufficient reasons to keep producing live shows? 2) If we continue to produce live shows, will the Marketing aspect eventually catch up and prove useful? 3) Is there some other way we can accomplish the same goals that live productions are supposed to provide?
Realizing that I have been personally leading the charge in favor of producing live performances for a public audience, I wonder if we might discuss a new strategy with the following steps:
1) Dispense with public performances. Relegate ourselves to convention shows, studio work, and special paid performances. 2) Keep the convention schedule modest. LibertyCon, Dragon*Con, Chattacon, and perhaps one other local Atlanta convention if a suitable one can be found. No more than four total per year. 3) Step up the studio schedule. 4) Step up the podcast schedule. 5) Keep only a small number of CDs in inventory, selling the majority to other vendors at wholesale.
This strategy is dependent on the following: 1) Finding enough studios that meet our needs that we can schedule one readily. The grant money we will be applying for will assist with this. 2) Finding (or paying) more editors.
The desired outcomes are as follows: 1) Keeping convention shows will allow us to continue to satisfy the fanbase. It also allows us to continue claiming a differentiating factor, which is that we are one of the few radio theatres that perform live. 2) Keeping convention shows low will reduce wear-and-tear on producers and minimize the number of times we have to haul equipment for small audiences. 3) Public live performances do not make us money. Studio work and convention shows traditionally have. Furthermore, certain marketing expenses would no longer be necessary (ACPA membership, possibly rack cards, etc) 4) Podcasts could take the place of live performance in our marketing model. Material would be serialized, either taken from our existing scripts or written specially for podcast. 5) Additional studio work would mean additional inventory. With mail order sales slumping, we could cease marketing directly to the consumer and instead sell wholesale. This would keep inventory low (we'd want some on hand for convention shows), could increase revenue, cut down on recurring shipping expenses, and most of our sales are happening via download these days anyway.
Downsides: 1) Studio work lacks the excitement of live theatre. Our performances in the studio are traditionally lower-energy than our live shows. 2) Marketing wholesale is a much different process than selling to the consumer. 3) Scheduling studio time is much different than scheduling rehearsals/live performances.
Timetable: We should plan on a second season at Academy Theatre with shows in October, December, and April for a few reasons. 1) We should assess how quickly we might start building an audience. Our first year is not a good time to start assessing attendance trends. 2) There will be a certain amount of lag time between getting the grants and having scripts available to produce. While it is certainly true that having grant money will change our production schedule, I think it's easily possible that (based on the timetables Bill has given us so far) we could receive the grants by August or September, which could mean no scripts until after Christmas, and then there would be script editing and we might not have a final version until April anyway.
This new strategy is possible because we are presumably about to be in a position to afford studio time, a luxury we previously had no budget for. It is also possible because of the SFX library, which enables us to speed up the production cycle.
Discussion?