Is Your Arts Organisation Healthy?

Recently I was engaged by a local government authority to undertake a review of the business model for one of their arts venues. It was a great opportunity to do a bit of a health check and see how things were tracking.

All too often, we don’t have time to stop and critically assess how things are going, even when we feel that things might be drifting off course a little. There’s often barely enough time to keep on top of day to day operations, so it can be hard to schedule in that time for longer term planning and evaluation.

Can I really sell that many tickets?

Following my post last week on budgeting I’ve been thinking about the concept of forecasting ticket sales, and how you can realistically project ticketing revenue for performances.  And that means not setting the target low so you can achieve it easily, or setting high revenue targets so they look good on paper (but are really unrealistic).

The notion of forecasting sales is common across all businesses, but in the performing arts there can be a large number of variables which make forecasting ticket sales a complex area. These can include (but certainly not limited to):

When is a shoestring budget really too short?

Small, tiny and in some cases non-existent budgets are all too common working in the arts. Over the years I have worked on lots of projects where there has been such a small budget that I have had to beg and borrow as much as I can to actually get things off the ground. And, as any artist knows, having constraints means you have to be creative, and that’s what makes great art!