Theater For The Future

A couple conversations on various blogs are hot hot hot in the last 48 hours (and taking up all my time in posting responses). They are posts that have generated a lot of community thought, and underscored both the value and the pitfalls of developing ideas and solutions as a group. I’m summarizing them for the benefit of those of you that don’t read a lot of other theater blogs yet but are interested in the collaborative aspects of blog problem solving.

If this doesn’t interest you, skip down to the picture of my proposal for a marketing campaign so bad it just might work.

1) The aforementioned exploration on the TOC blog of who the hell are these people anyway? Recent additions include pleas for reason and pizza. Insightful follow ups on Kris’, Patrick’s, and Rob’s sites.

2) Rob asked about whether previews should be sold as regular performances. This sparked a more general conversation about the value of previews on Creative Control, Grey Zelda and once again Storefront Rebellion.

3) Don Hall wants to lower ticket prices and/or increase the perceived value of theater. (And it turns out that Roche Shulfer wants the same thing.) Awesome. Finally something we can agree upon.

Before you complain about the link: I know, I know. It’s a placeholder.

I hinted in the last post about a Theater Dish event that changed the landscape for me. That specific Theater Dish was a talk about marketing innovations prepared for the League by Larry Keeley of Doblin Marketing, one of the architects behind the WBEZ programming renaissance. I still have his Powerpoint presentation which he generously posted for League download, and it’s one of the most inspiring and genius documents I’ve ever read. Check it out yourself. Unfortunately, while that particular talk was dead brilliant it was overshadowed by what happened next: the announcement of the resignation of Marj Halperin. (She went to become campaign manager for Forrest Claypool’s bid for Cook County Commissioner, so that was worth it). All told, it was a pretty eventful night for my first League event. I just wish more of Larry’s suggestions had been implemented by now. Frankly, this is where the League could use the help of the vast volunteer resources of storefront theaters to accomplish some of the big-picture goals on the table.

That’s where I’m coming from. I want to get this stuff done, and speed us along to the part where we see if it works. The solutions are out there, you just need to know where to find them and get started on implementing them, one step at a time.

I mentioned a few off-the-cuff possibilities to easily add value to your own theater productions on Don’s blog, in many ways inspired by Larry’s extremely leveragable and collaborative suggestions. Post your own.

Then we roadmap, people. It’s project management time.

Five minutes of Brain Storm

Blogs. Check. But every theater should have one, and there should be blogs that cross over into other disciplines and draw connections back to theater, and for every question we ask on a blog we should have four bad answers like this one.

Podcasts and Videocasts. Otherwise known as: make your own TV show and wave it in front of your ADD friends and say “Ah, it’s great to have good writing on this screen again. You seen that last Grey Zelda show? AWESOME script. That dude can write.”

Site-Specific stagings of issue plays or locally-inspired plays that matter to the community. Ask the Chicago History Museum to sponsor showings of a time-traveling play about the current CTA debacle in that old rail car they have. Who wants to write that? I’ll production manage it. Seriously.

Get excited about other people’s work, and talk it up. Talk about your fellow Chicago Theater artists like they were superstars, and see through their financial and temporal limitations to see their genius and value their efforts. Be ambassadors to the general public and make talking about your theater habit at your day job as easy as discussing what happened on The Office last night. Theaters should not have to waste their time marketing to the industry, that’s a horrible losing game. Help them out by proactively seeing, discussing and encouraging the best of their work.

Don’t overextend. You get a lot done if the work excites you, but despair will shut you down. Don’t get mired trying to add false value in your actual work. Use just enough design, not too much. I say this as a sound designer, knowing full well my entire role in theater depends on you thinking you need sound in theater. You don’t. You don’t need projections. You don’t need a set, you don’t need programmable lights. You need what the show needs. If you can’t hire or bribe a designer for a theatrical element, don’t use that element at all, and think of some other way of getting by without it. That’s honesty and truth, and that is valuable, and creates a vital final product. Remove any need to pick up the hammer during rehearsal time, and use the time to coax better performances from your cast and build stronger trust within your ensemble.

Food. Drink. If not in the theater, as a part of an easy-bake planned evening. Make friends with the owners and/or staff at your local restaurants and cafes, and get them excited about your work. Wear them down, and kill them with kindness and excitement. When they get excited, they’ll talk about you all day long to every customer.

Train yourself to use talking points about your work. Use those talking points to convince your friends to be an ambassador for your work, and for the work being done in town in general. You don’t have to be a crazy automaton about it, but if you’re legitimately excited about something, let it show.

Audience Participation Events. Let the audience see the guts of how you make your show. Get the ensemble to invite friends to sit next to the stage manager and designers during tech and show them how freaking hard they work, and make THAT the show. Invite them to talk with the cast and the director about what everyone is thinking about in the room, and walk them through the process. It will make your theater focus as an ensemble, and every person that gets to do that will see the show in a totally different light. To a non-theater person, it’s like they’ve been invited on a film set with the stars. Seriously. It blows them away.

Keep it Smart. People want smart right now. Don’t fall into the double trap of dumbing down your work or thinking your work is smarter than it really is. Theater is just smart enough that it’s refreshing.

Bring theater to the people, and people will come to the theater. The most powerful marketing tool is word of mouth buzz, and with the number of people in our industry, there’s no reason we can’t make theater an activity that 40 – 50% of this town participates in on a regular basis.

Of course, that means that we’ll need to coordinate our efforts a little bit. Think we can do it?

First of all, a thrillingly honest perspective today from Dan Granata on the old inter-community feedback question, and the specifically difficult challenges facing performers on that front. Also of note is that funny way that theater lifers seem to get a little cracked as they hammer away over the years. This hit me most of all as I’ve been making steady moves this year towards becoming a Chicago theater lifer, for better or worse. Who knows if that’ll stick over the next decade, but sometimes you just see when you’ve arrived home, and it’s time to go “all in.”

Can you hear the ground shifting?

Two recent announcements made me check my seismograph.

The first was the League of Chicago Theatres’ announcement of the finalists for the second ever Emerging Theatre Award, which is awarded to theaters that “have been in existence at least 3 and no longer than 10 years, and have demonstrated artistic excellence and fiscal responsibility in business practices.”

This years’ finalists are:

ADVENTURE STAGE CHICAGO
DOG AND PONY THEATRE
SILK ROAD THEATRE PROJECT
THE GIFT THEATRE
T.U.T.A.

And the deadline for voting is in one week, February 1st.

Yes, no New Leaf, but that’s cool. We’re going to be a much better candidate next year, that much I can say, and this is a solid list of finalists. It’s really great to have another grant in town, this one specifically to be used to enhancing a theater’s marketing presence in the company. It’s even BETTER that this has been organized as a community-offered grant, with League member theaters offered a vote in the process. The one criticism of the award that some leveled in its first year was that it went to the House, which seemed to be a theater that certainly met the criteria but didn’t really need the marketing help. Even more eyebrow raising was the possibility that the award was being used to provide Broadway in Chicago with cheap artistic labor to produce the next blockbuster Broadway hit (not a bad thing at all for storefront theaters with a marketable product, but check out this Parabasis article on the potential ramifications of the increasingly common practice of enhancement. Which is essentially generating or even test-driving a for-profit production in a non-profit theater. *SpArrOw*. Excuse me, did some one cough?)

Happily, I think this list allows me, at least, to put to rest any doubt I had about the program.

So who would I vote for? Well, I’ve only had the privilege of working with Dog & Pony, and I’ve directly seen the work of Silk Road. I’ve talked in depth with company members and freelancers who have worked with every theater on this list, so I know at least a bit about how each company works. So I’m aware of the excitement surrounding each company. So then for me it becomes a question of: Which of these theaters is best for the community at large, and who could use the help the most?

For me, that becomes a tossup. I see Silk Road as one of the only theater companies in town creating theater for and about a huge and underserved demographic in the population. That’s important work which brings new audiences to theater, and I think they do an amazing job with it. (Merchant on Venice was one of the most delightful shows of the year this season). On the other hand, Silk Road’s upcoming partnership with the Goodman means they have several developmental and marketing hands pulling them up already. And thanks to designer Andrew Skwish, their marketing materials are already the best in town. THE BEST.

Dog & Pony does really gutsy work that really excites me. From Jarrett Dapier’s stagings of the works of Sheila Callaghan, who I think could prove to be one of the most gifted playwrights of our generation,to Devon DeMayo’s balls-to-the-wall promenade project As Told By the Vivian Girls (a nine-room exploration of the works of eccentric Chicagoan Henry Darger) to be staged at Theater on the Lake later this season. This is also a theater company that has strong relationships with the city and potentially has the infrastructure for big growth along the lines of Redmoon that brings a new audience to see other storefront shows. But what they don’t have is money and a strong enough brand to carry that growth. I think if you want to invest in a company at a time where it could make all the difference, Dog & Pony’s your company.

This is not to slight TUTA or The Gift. They’re fine companies that value their artistic staff well and are true to their missions, but I don’t see them building communities on the scale of Silk Road or D&P, and I think community-building is what will eventually help us all. The Gift, in particular, already has a particularly savvy marketing plan, an ensemble of savvy movers and shakers, and friends in high places (check out their list of close artistic advisors) that are serving them well, so I’m not sure if their need is as great as some of the others on the list. I’m sure they make a great-looking candidate for Broadway in Chicago, of course, and their need is definitely greater than the House’s.

The one theater on the list that I feel a little queasy about is Adventure Stage Chicago. Not because of the work they do – I’ve heard it’s great, and many of the artists working there are excited about the company. I also think a healthy children’s theater has been really important to the overall growth of the theater scene here – the work being done by the well-funded, well-managed, and city-supported Chicago Children’s Theatre is some of the most exciting work I’ve seen for any audience in recent memory (we still sing songs with glee from A Year with Frog & Toad up here in the Owen booth). The tricky thing about ASC’s candidacy for this award is that they aren’t necessarily “emerging.” I don’t know much about ASC, which means I don’t know how completely they reformed from the preexisting Vittum Theatre, which had been in operation for over a decade. (I’d love any enlightenment from all you commenters out there). Was it simply a mission change or is it an entirely new theater and new staff that is capitalizing on the existing Vittum brand?

All told, it’s a good list, and I’m excited about this annual award again. I think it’ll be a great opportunity for industry folks to really get to know all the great theaters in town and get some positive cross-pollenation going.

I told myself this would be a short blog post, but I need to also mention the other announcement that came in the mail today… The Jeffs are auditing their brand.

and don’t forget the

In a letter to Chicago theater companies, the Jeff Committee announced the results of a preliminary Brand Audit process (conducted by Patricia Heimann & Associates and Peak Communications) which will be followed up with more discussion and feedback from within the organization and throughout Chicago.

New Leaf went through a complete brand overhaul a few years ago, and when done right rebranding isn’t just about a change in logo. It’s like organizational therapy. It means focusing some inter-organizational scrutiny on the entire process and culture of how the Jeff committee works and how it is perceived in the community. It means refocusing the mission and removing the bad habits that sometimes develop when you’re trying do something crazy in scope – like providing the valuable service of seeing and evaluating very nearly EVERY show in Chicago. It looks like one of the big things on that agenda is finding a way to introduce a little more organizational transparency:

Because Committee members are positioned as judges with the power to influence success or failure of a performance, respondents want to know the selection criteria for judges. Respondents felt they should be informed how committee members are selected, the committee’s extended relationships and define more fully the committee’s overall role in the theatre community.

Given what folks have been saying about the odd lines between theater practitioner and theater evaluator (see Dan’s final paragraph), I think that improving organizational transparency is a FANTASTIC step. The kind of step that makes me want to hug the Jeff committee members one at a time. Because it’s not going to be an easy road.

It goes to show that public discussion of perceived problems helps address those problems. Duh, nice insight, Nick. Making your voice heard is the first step in creating common techniques and public policy that creates solutions. Developing solutions that are both reasonable and new creates value for everyone in the industry. As Dan says and David Alan Moore backs up, our chosen profession has a way of making reasonable people leave the discussion, and that’s a clear hurdle to building a more healthy community culture. I feel the burn too, and it’s a battle with myself to keep writing and designing and periodically checking in with myself to make sure my actions aren’t making things more difficult for the other folks in the boat with me.

At the end of the day, the Jeffs are us – committee members are picked from theater practitioners and appreciators in the community – and they already have a record of serving the community that far exceeds the record of organizations like the Tonys. Their institutional health and vigor should matter to us, and we should help them to make their vision and mission clearer and more achievable. The better our process for quickly recognizing quality work being done in town, the more our fair city can be seen by the rest of the world as a place where that quality work is nurtured. And that will mean that there will be more quality work to go around for us to work on and for our audiences to enjoy.

Winters are a bitch.

It’s cold as hell, and we have it easy. Try walking outside sometime and looking up into the dead, empty treetops on your street – you’ll probably notice clumps of leaves and twigs, high up near the top.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s your neighborhood squirrel’s home. They’re sqwunched up in that little ball of insulation, shivering through wind, snow, sleet and freezing rain.

The fact is, some animals make it through the harsh winter, and some don’t. But the squirrels do what they can to make sure that they make it.

There’s been some pretty disheartening news from storefront theater this week both Live Bait and the Bailiwick are in danger of collapsing and closing their space’s doors. I wish I was surprised, and I wish this wasn’t an annual tradition, just as predictable the new crop of newly-budding storefront troupes pop up just after graduation.

I’m not a social darwinist, but there’s something that fixtures like Bailiwick and Live Bait could have used to protect their institutional assets to fend off the climate change of a rapidly shifting cultural demographic: An infrastructure that is closely fitted to their institution, lightweight, simple, and powerful.

What do I mean by saying something that impetuous? Let’s look at Live Bait. According to the article, and consistent with what I’ve seen there, the problem isn’t money, it’s time. For over twenty years, the Live Bait space has been run by a husband and wife duo and often a third or fourth management overhire. This is just not enough people to sustainably run a mini-rental house. Trash piles up, strikes aren’t completed, repairs need to be made, bills need to be collected. Sharon Evans and John Ragir have put in their time and they deserve a change of focus and time to focus on their personal creative endeavors. The problem for the institution has been finding like-minded folks that they could trust to delegate the work. Now there’s no one who can run the ENTIRE theater infrastructure for them – from the minutiae that I mentioned to maintaining board relationships, filing taxes, and making long-term planning decisions about the building itself – and that’s like having no theater infrastructure at all.

Mission Paradox outlines the importance of valuing your own time in his blog this week, and I couldn’t agree with that sentiment more. But building your theater infrastructure doesn’t have to mean refashioning your organization in the image of the Goodman or Broadway in Chicago. It simply means using the resources you have at your disposal to build yourself a home that will last through the long dark winter that your organization will inevitably face.

Resource 1 – Your people. Build trust and a common vision with your company. Sustainable organizations don’t rely solely on the input from a single leader. Teach everyone in the company as many skills as possible. Encourage each others’ growth, value each others’ time, and only bring on folks into your company that are in it for the long haul. If you’re an individual thinking about joining a company, think about that long haul. Be honest with yourself, and each other, and you’ll find a lot more energy in that honesty. Earn each others’ trust and check in with each other to make sure you all stay happy. It’ll be okay if someone needs to leave someday – if what you’ve built together matters, it’ll keep going if someone needs to pursue other endeavors.

Resource 2 – Your stuff, your place, your home. These are the twigs that are around you. If you used a prop bucket in your first five productions, you’d save that bucket, wouldn’t you? Try not to rent something twice when you can own it once. Bigger ticket items in this category are things like your space. Don’t get a space unless you have deep pockets and a plan for using it, and the people power to keep that use going.

Resource 3 – Your audience. Build them up. Talk to them, a lot. Talk about your organization like you care about it. Build your organization so that you DO care about it, so when anybody walking on the street asks about your theater, you know what to say, and you know how to excite them and convince them in that moment to come to every show you do for the rest of time. Include your board in this category – share what you do with people, and they will want to help you grow it, because you’ve let them own a piece of your success. If you treat donors like audience and audience like donors, you have a simple relationship with everyone, and you’ll still be getting those donations. You’ll get those donations by caring about what you do, and letting the world know that you care.

Resource 4 – Your time. None of this stuff does anyone any good if you burn out. Burning Out on theater is a wasting disease killing our industry. Here’s the real secret to building infrastructure that will help you avoid that fate. You don’t need complex box office structures and subscription series and mailings and cold calls to your phone list unless the STRUCTURE of your audience and your organization demands those solutions. Remember, our world is changing pretty fast these days, and these are old solutions to old problems. You can save yourself a lot of time and effort by listening to your audience and recognizing what they’re actually responding to, not what you think they’ll respond to. You don’t have to search far and wide for effective innovations that save you time – Just build your strategies and procedures well, test them, measure them, and make sure they still make you happy after you’re done with them. Make those strategies and procedures as simple as you possibly can without sacrificing their effectiveness and quality. Put joy into your process. I’m serious – if you have a hard time enlisting your company members to run the box office or come to strike, make those tasks fun. Write funny box office manuals. Throw a strike party. Then, you’ll all have energy to keep it going and enlisting other folks that will help you keep it going.

Notice how money isn’t even on this list? Money is water. You don’t just need water, you need a big bucket so when it doesn’t rain for a while, you still have something to drink.

And even if they’re cold, don’t pet the squirrels. They’ll make it.

While the Chicago Opening Night Calendar project is chugging away, adding a few shows each day, I’ve dove head first into the actual production work that I’ve been carefully procrastinating on this month. The ideas are still bouncing around, but the time to execute them using the glorious tubes of the interwebs is running dry for the moment. That’s cool, right? We’re cool. Baby steps.

Some thoughts bouncing around this week:

- Our new sound intern at the Goodman is from the realm of sound, but is brand spanking new to theater. It’s been really fun to see him open his eyes to the possibilities while watching the process behind Shining City. It looks like he’s really falling for it, which is really great to see. Yesterday, I put the Opening Night Calendar to the practicality test and used it to find four shows – all in previews or early in the run to help his wallet – that showcased the variety of Chicago theater to a newbie with an appetite. It’s been a great reminder for me personally just how much is out there, and we’re not even done yet. Thanks to new adds Point of Contention, Theater W!t, Speaking Ring, Stage Left and Live Bait for being early adopters and Kris Vire and Rob Kozlowski, who both drove some traffic to the project over the weekend.

- Read this totally kickass analysis of why, systematically, the music industry is slowly drowning itself, and what other industries can do to avoid a similar fate.

- A spectacular cross-blog conversation on the importation of actors to regional venues has popped up here and here and here. I am grossly under-informed on the topic, or I’d join in. From my vantage point in the storefronts and even a great deal of the larger theaters, I see a lot of great local working actors, which makes me happy, and the imports don’t often last. I know it’s a major issue, and as Marc Grapey and David Cromer would say, we designers don’t have to deal with the import issue as much while we chew our bon-bons from atop our great piles of cash. Again, though… cross-pollination is a good thing, so if we can encourage it to actually happen and maybe balance the trade deficit a bit, we might be able to pump out a little lemonade from the situation. It’s losing actors to LA and NYC and other regions that I dread, but getting them to visit every so often is good for all. So while I have little to add, I think it’s pretty neat that the arguments are being refined right where you can read them, add to them… and now you can do something about it.

- The discussion of international theater festivals in the last post led me to try out a few great online resources, including the Chicago History Database which is operated by a history-minded English professor from Valparaiso University and assisted by Chicago Reader critic Albert Williams. The site’s mission is to track the founding, disbanding, archival materials, and key membership of all theater companies in Chicago, big and small.

The process of finding information on a now defunct cultural institution, the Chicago International Theater Festival, which last convened in 1992, proved to be more difficult and speculative than I would have thought. And finding information like this, which is key to a developing artist’s career and theater’s development. I think in Chicago’s scene there are a number of theaters that travel the same path as long-gone theaters because of a lack of institutional knowledge and community memory.

After all, one who does not learn from the past is doomed to repeat it. (Institutional Memory is one of those things that I mention at almost every company meeting. I’m a die-hard supporter of saving and processing the past and present for the benefit of the future in any organization.) Difficult and history-changing tasks like opening a new space or organizing an international theater festival leave traces of extremely valuable information and lessons that can be passed on to other theaters, or used in the pursuit of city law reform or improving public support. Plus, why do something twice when you can do it once?

Can you tell that I’m justifying the need for another crazy group collaboration project? It’s so crazy it just might work. (I’m so crazy I need to get to work.)

So the scarcity of institutional knowledge in storefront theater got me thinking: Just as our system for managing our collective scheduling might be insufficient to maximize the potential of Storefront Theater in General, how successful are our current methods for knowing just what work is being done in town right now, and knowing what work has been done before we even got here? Armed with that kind of cohesive knowledge, could we more easily notice trends, and use the lesson of the past to benefit the entire storefront community?

Like any possible project, it was time for me to survey what’s currently out there and what exactly was dissatisfying about it. Institutional knowledge certainly exists, it’s a question of where is it being stored, and who is storing it. There are a number of Chicago listing sites that also provide some insight into the wide kaleidoscope of the Chicago Theater Scene. The lists I was able to find when I first moved to Chicago just happened to be the ones with the top Google results: Centerstage’s largely comprehensive list of theaters unfortunately is usually quite out of date; Illyria’s Chicago Theater Homepages lists most current companies’ websites, but hasn’t been updated since February 2007; and Chicago Traveler has a good hit count but is by necessity driven by commercial interests. Other more recent sites try to get the list right, including a formidable recent attempt (powered by php, of course) by Theater in Chicago’s attempt to dynamically map every theater in Chicago.

Why are there so many lists, none of which are comprehensive? There’s several divergent motivations at work here for taking on the task of creating a comprehensive picture of the entire Chicago scene and the network of artists that work together to create it. The first motivation is pure Metromix: The commercial value of providing a listing service to audience members, and these sites are positioned to get the web browsing public to spend top dollar on glossy entertainment. As such, they leave out some of the younger companies and often do not update the information on even the mid-sized companies on a regular basis. Why not? Well, because that’s an overwhelming amount of information that changes almost daily. It may be valuable information, but it’s not valuable enough to these organizations to justify a full-time employee to seek the information out.

Another possible motivation? Positioning your site as alternative media source. You can easily feed your site’s content by the press releases of small companies eager for attention. Both Theater in Chicago and Centerstage position themselves as alternatives to larger media outlets that provide a different kind of coverage. It’s debatable how effective and sustainable those strategies are given the recent collapse of the Chicago Reader, and there’s a key problem with the information contained in almost all of these listing sites: Accessibility. These are all listing sites managed by lone gunman webmasters, who you need to email and rely on to have your information go public. The biggest problem with this strategy (and the working strategy of my Calendar project, for that matter) is the editor-in-charge off in a room somewhere that you need to know about and have access to in order to get your data published. It’s a lot of work to create a completely standalone site, and when you’re done, you need to work out how to cut out a chunk of the market share of the people looking for this information. When you’re talking about theaters who are so young they don’t really understand the context of the theater scene they’re operating in, how can anyone expect one of these listing services to ever be definitive repositories of our history and our progress?

So I realized that what I was really longing for was an improvement to the current Theater in Chicago Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia already has that kind of market share, and it’s going to be one of the obvious sources of information for the forseeable future. The entry is duly based on the definitive Richard Christiansen book, A Theatre of Our Own, but the list of theater spaces and companies is woefully incomplete. Some of the highlights of the ghosts of theaters past (Organic, but no Wisdom Bridge?) Anyone can add both their theater’s entry containing historical information like founders, artistic staff, production history, and mission, and they can also make their presence known in the greater context of the community in the main article. And anyone can edit (and hopefully not vandalize) to provide some measured balance to the whole picture, and create something worthwhile for history and public context. Most importantly, talent that is young, new to town, and wanting to see where they might flourish could easily see a more complete picture of the pieces that make up the world’s most vibrant theater scene.

Community projects move mountains. Many hands make light work, and by making the projects simple (post your theater and the theaters you remember on Wikipedia, everyone!), you can create big, intricate knowledge and labor bases that can help a lot of people with challenges we may not be able to imagine. This principle can be applied to any number of tasks, goals and dreams that seem unreachable now. If everyone in the neighborhood builds a park, everyone in that neighborhood will be able to enjoy that park.

So I’m gonna get on that… and you theater managers and activists should be proud enough of your young history to record the important points in the Wikipedia article yourself. Some savvy theaters have already done this – the history page shows updates from Boho and Sansculottes, for instance.

I’ll be getting on that right after I get these seven shows open. Because, well,… meta, real work, I’m in trouble.

Back to work!

It’s nice, when you set foot into country that you haven’t discovered yet, to know that others have been treading the paths ahead of you and noodling with the same kinds of problems….

In order to better educate myself about what’s out there, what’s being discussed right now and what different voices are already engaged in the discussion, I’ve subscribed to about a gajillion blogs from Chicago (including most of the available myspace blogs that us storefronters have been using to, New York, several other strong theater regions in the country, and most enlighteningly, several international theater blogs. I’ve been reading up on the past few months of activity, and it’s promising, especially the burst of activity that’s begun in the past few days. If you’re operating a storefront theater right now, it’s definitely worth your while to get in on the discussion and consider the possibilities.

To that end, if you’re already interested in the topics of this blog, I’m sharing the blog articles from other authors that are just utterly brilliant or taking a different approach to the topics I’ve been discussing and thinking about, and sharing them in a digest feed – You know, for the future. You can read the digest of the latest articles in the sidebar, or you can subscribe to the digest feed in your own blog reader.

Two blogs in particular have great voices and a deep desire and strategy to explore solutions to the every day challenges of creating theater as a living. Mission Paradox takes a creative and practical approach towards theater marketing, and Theater Ideas by Scott Walters thinks very strategically about how to best take on some of the biggest threats to theater as an industry and as an art form. Check out Scott’s post on the importance of considering trust when building an audience, which I also discuss here. They are definitely must-reads if one of your New Years resolutions, like mine, is to be more engaged with the entire theater community as well as our little local pockets of glory. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, and it’s inspiring – and strategic – to connect and discuss openly with people you wouldn’t otherwise connect with in the theater community.

Speaking of the entire theater community, thanks to the folks that are participating in the Chicago opening night calendar project… upcoming shows are both on the public Google calendar and on the sidebar. Go team!

Oh, if we only didn’t need money and could focus on art, right?

There’s been a number of creative web fundraising ideas floating around the storefront community – and theaters have been doing a pretty good job copycatting the ones that are easy to use (though it’s still unclear which ones are most financially effective for arts organizations).  There’s those good ol’ web marketplace affiliate programs like CafePress.com or Amazon Associates – where your patrons shop through your site for swag or targeted products or just plain anything – and the e-marketplace gives you a cut.

More recently, major search engines have gotten into the non-profit fundraising game and created programs like GoodSearch.com which donates a portion of its ad revenue to non-profits that send users their way instead of Google. And (perhaps in retaliation?) Google created Google Grants, which sort of works like free AdWords for non-profits and increases exposure. 

There’s never a truly free ride, of course. Affiliate programs are partially there for the benefit of the affiliate, but there’s a much bigger profit to be had in having minions convert their (high-value disposable-income-weilding) patrons into big, giant streams of fresh, flaming consumerism. As I described in Part I, these programs only generate reasonable sums of money for the affiliate when you start amassing a great big critical mass of users on your own, and before that happens, it’s just a trickle.  

But, Chicago Storefront Theaters don’t have a lot of resources to chase that money, so they participate in these programs on a small scale because they require very little effort beyond the initial setup. A little easy money is better than staring into the void of funding a show on the ensemble’s collective credit cards.

About five months ago, Chicago businessman (and actor) Steve Misetic decided to throw his hat into this ring.  Like most Chicago Theater cheerleaders, Steve was frustrated with the way that Chicago Arts Organizations often have to fight with the rest of the country for the attention of our local big businesses. He noticed that theater companies were throwing their patrons’ money to e-commerce companies in California, while local businesses spend ad money with national firms, and both seemed the poorer for it. The result of this frustration – his brainchild SaveChicago.org (which launches this Friday) – was modeled on the success of other affiliate programs and the success of locally powered sites like Craigslist and Angie’s List.  The basic idea, in his words:  

SaveChicago.org is the first online marketplace where local merchants and local consumers are able to find each other on the Internet.

SaveChicago.org mobilizes the audiences of non-profit organizations into a unified consumer demographic as members of SaveChicago.org.

Local merchants then pay to reach this first ever critical mass of local consumers on the internet.
SaveChicago.org then gives 50% of the money these merchants spend back to the non-profit groups who’ve helped us mobilize these consumers.

SaveChicago.org keeps local advertising dollars local and sustainable by re-injecting the money back into our local economy via non-profit organizations, instead of letting the money escape into Silicon Valley.

The website we have built is a completely state-of-the-art e-commerce site that basically does to local advertising what Ebay did to garage sales. We’re putting local businesses together with local consumers and splitting the money with non-profit organizations. No one has figured out how to do local advertising on the internet until now.

If this sounds at all convoluted, it’s because Steve is trying to bring together three very divergent groups together with a common marketing strategy – local merchants, local shoppers, and at this point, even the non-profits that the site is designed to support. His mission, other than the glory of saving chicago theater and culture forever, is to generate those deliciously sustainable and work-free revenue streams for non-profits on a local level – hopefully to the levels they require to turn off the fundraising (aka “begging”) bullhorn and regain some long-forgotten sense of dignity. He’s also learning the PR and marketing and e-commerce games as he goes (with professional PR support and a killer web developer), and trying to bring together two e-commerce models that haven’t worked together thus far – local savings sites like craigslist and national affiliate programs like Google AdWords – with the goal of creating a revenue loop that feeds back on itself and grows the local ad money pie for the benefit of organizations that can do some good with it.

All this wrangling, courting, and dreaming big has I think created a very interesting situation on the eve of SaveChicago’s launch – at least from my vantage point outside the down-and-dirty planning – and there’s a couple big challenges ahead for the site in its infancy. The first hurdle is to demonstrate a clear need in the community – not a need to support the arts, but a need for shoppers to find deals and for merchants to find those shoppers. Without this incentive, the whole growth mechanism falls apart – Google and craigslist built that kind of national name recognition after years of providing free, innovative services that were more convenient than the phone book and classified ads, respectively. In his initial planning, Steve envisioned companies like Starbucks spending their advertising dollars on his site to reach local shoppers. Put that way, there’s no reason for Starbucks to buy in to website marketing when they’re already reaching plenty of customers right on the street. To generate that need, Steve has created an Angie’s List-esque membership program for shoppers and promised deep discounts from member merchants that can’t be found elsewhere to those members. And Neo-Futurist and SaveChicago.org groupie Mary Fons points out, the merchants that will be the biggest beneficiaries of a program like this will likely be that mom-and-pop cafe down the street that need to get you to patronize them instead of Starbucks.

The second hurdle to make a system like this work is one that papa Google and uncle Craigslist actually created pretty organically, over time – a critical mass of market share. For merchants to want to give these secret, targeted discounts, they need to know that the people using SaveChicago.org will grow their businesses. That kind of patronage doesn’t grow overnight, which creates a third hurdle: To help grow the patron base, Steve will be leaning on the member arts organizations to help promote the site and drive traffic, patrons, and merchants his way, at least until the ad revenue is self-sustaining.

And the biggest hurdle of all? Convincing all three groups that SaveChicago is a brand worthy of their trust. Chicago Theaters are actually quite conservatively-minded businesses for the most part… their risk tends to be small (though proportionally huge to their income), and they tend to feed their creativity into the product, but not so much the actual making of money. The reactions from other industry types that I talked with to Steve’s initial volley of e-mails promoting the site were skeptical at best, and Steve’s language (which was still being retooled for branding and positioning, and of course betrayed his intense personal excitement) didn’t always help:

Subject: SaveChicago.org to make fund-raising obsolete: Launching November 23rd

Could you imagine getting checks in 2011 from a Fund-raising drive completed in 2008?
Take 5 minutes to register your non-profit with SaveChicago.org and earn recurring income from a one-time fund-raising effort.
no cost – no obligation
Launching on November 23rd, 2007

Savechicago.org is the first company in history to attempt to consolidate the supporters of non-profit organizations in order to create the “critical mass” needed to generate real advertising dollars. We want non-profits to stop begging local businesses for the 5% of their ad budget they feel obliged to donate to charity every year. We’ll get you access to the other 95%.

When the spam filters didn’t whisk away his audience, phrasings like “No cost – no obligation” sparked interest but didn’t inspire confidence, despite his best intentions. Since then, Steve has hired a PR rep and refined and focused his language a bit, which will make his merchant patrons a lot happier and his non-profit beneficiaries a lot more trusting. The first checks will also help to change that tune as well. Smirk.

So what does Steve have going for him? Some folks are already way on board, with a non-profit member list that already includes several high schools, hospitals and churches, hotshot neighborhood development organizations like Rogers Park’s DevCorp North, and a few representatives of the theater scene, including Barrel of Monkeys, Rivendell, The Artistic Home, and Raven, which has never shied away from closer neighborhood involvement. Steve’s also aware of what he’s up against. Which always helps.

Plus? I think his idea is truly innovative and creative. If he can manage to implement it, he will at the very least create a locally-based version of an AdWords-like system, even if that doesn’t immediately translate into flowing rivers of cash for his affiliates. That “local” part of the business model is huge – if you’ve ever bought or sold anything through craigslist, you know what I’m talking about. There’s a whole human, dare I say theatrical, element to the transaction because at some point you’re not just exchanging money and goods, you’re coming into contact with a stranger. The time I sold my old iPod to a craigslister was, while brief, an incredibly exciting day for both of us. I used the cash to upgrade to a video model, and I left most of my music on the old one. And I have A LOT of music, so the buyer pretty much jumped up and down at the deal he got. That kind of excitement can only happen on a local level.

There’s a spark of something here – local cooperation, a spirit of being neighbors – that I think needs to continue even if Steve’s web experiment doesn’t pan out. Steve is also going to need to work his butt off to build that trust and enlist help. I know I moved to Chicago because of idealism like that, and I applaud Steve for thinking really big, and taking the big risk. I think there’s a potential renaissance out there for Chicago Theater and interdisciplinary arts, but it will take a big spark and plenty of fuel – and that means we need to build that fire together and share the wealth.