The Mystery of the Missing Audience
Submitted by Steve on April 4, 2014
From Woods Bowman, writing for Nonprofit Quarterly:
It’s a mystery. How is it that the percentages of the U.S. population who had attended an opera performance declined from 3.2 percent in 2002 to 2.1 percent ten years later but the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s ticket sales were up by 15 percent? It’s probably not luck. During the same decade, subscriptions at the Chicago Opera Theater grew by 20 percent and Chicago welcomed two new opera companies.
F. Paul Driscoll, editor of Opera News magazine, calls the Chicago opera scene vibrant and says, “Chicago has a huge appetite for music.” True, but struggling opera companies want to know what they can do to hang on and hopefully to lay the groundwork for growth.
Allow me to help. I have studied nonprofit organizations for 15 years, as long as I have been a subscriber to Lyric Opera and other musical ensembles in Chicago, and I think I can discern some secrets of their success. But first let’s review the basic rules that all successful performing arts organizations follow instinctively. They may be obvious, but they deserve emphasis.