Intrinsic impact

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a new study by WolfBrown looking at the impact of the "Free Night of Theatre" program:

Free Night of Theater, the 4-year-old national audience development program administered locally by Theatre Bay Area, succeeds in attracting new audiences and in contributing to their "aesthetic growth," according to a study released Tuesday. The study, announced at a news conference at New Conservatory Theatre Center, was conducted by Alan Brown of the consulting firm WolfBrown.

The key finding, bearing out earlier follow-up surveys in the months after previous Free Nights, is that giving away tickets works not just to attract new theatergoers to a free show, but also to convert a significant number into future paying customers. A full 28 percent of Free Nighters expressed strong interest in seeing the company's future shows, with another 37 percent showing milder interest.

The Chronicle doesn't provide a hyperlink to the study, because why would a newspaper bother to do something cheap and easy that makes their stories more useful to readers...it's not like they are at any sort of risk of going broke or anything.

But after googling around a bit, I tracked it down here. The key finding related by the Chronicle is on page 25, and it's not quite as optimistic as the Chronicle suggests - 28% said they were "more likely to follow the work of the theatre" and another 37% were "somewhat more likely", but "following" and "seeing a company's future shows" are not exactly the same thing.

That said, the WolfBrown report is very good at generating data on the traits of people taking advantage of the free tickets before the show and after. I haven't completely absorbed the whole report, but one thing the data do suggest is that it's not so much lack of knowledge of theatre or discomfort with the experience that keeps people away so much as not having friends who attend (see page 16).

So more evidence that the social networking people are on to something...