Arts Activities Support

More audience members took advantage of the Suggested Donation policy, with 30% of audience members paying the minimum suggested donation or less. 10% more audience members stayed for both performances than in previous years. While this evidently demonstrates financial access to the program, the level at which attendees donated jeopardizes my ability to meet budget, and grow the project. I would have liked more artists to apply to the project. This year I will extend the submission/application period. The artists uniformly created successful works. This year there some artists had expectations that were not a good fit with the project, and so for the coming year I will create an Artists' Information document so that each artist applying understands the capacity of the project. This year there were way too many comp tickets given, due to the fact that I was offering comps on a more informal basis than I probably should have. In the coming year I will only offer a set number of comps per artist. Additionally, artists included free tickets as part of their individual fundraising campaigns, and this led to a loss in income. I will no longer allow admissions as part of the artists; individual promotional activities. Audience numbers were strong, commensurate with each individual artist's promotional efforts, so those who put more effort into promotion had bigger audiences. Unfortunately, there isn't the budget to do more marketing than I am already able to do. There was artistic diversity, in both the artists chosen and the audiences who came. However, too often the audience for one artist would leave prior to the performance of the second artist. This is because I have set up the program to be "a la carte", hoping audiences would stay for both shows. Next year I will schedule the performances to prohibit audiences leaving after the 1st performance. I approached a number of people to be the Diversity panelist, and literally no one accepted the offer. The individuals I contacted either turned down the offer, or didn't respond at all. I'm not sure what to do about this, except to keep trying to connect with non-white artists to find someone willing to take on this role. I did make efforts to make the program accessible, advertising accessible options through social media, website, and printed materials.