Photo: Arts Professional
Theatergoers can buy tickets at a Heron Foods store’s pop-up box office in the United Kingdom.
There’s a UK publication in which people who are in the arts write articles on initiatives their organizations have tested in case other groups want to try something new. This one is from a theater troupe in Hull. (Prolific arts and culture blogger Amelia in Hull is sure to know all about it.)
Magda Moses writes at Arts Professional, “Hull Truck Theatre’s pop-up box offices are part of our community engagement project called Community Dialogues. The project works to develop deeper relationships with people from areas of low arts engagement and high deprivation in Hull, encouraging them to come to the theatre, often for the first time.
“My job is to get out into the local community to build relationships between community organisations and the theatre, and to better understand the barriers that might stop people attending the arts. …
“As our community relationships developed, we recognised that barriers to engagement with the arts include time, cost, lack of awareness of what’s on, childcare and a sense of it being ‘not for me’. We realised that we could work with retail chain Heron Foods, which has busy stores in the areas in which we work, to learn more, build personal relationships and start to address some of those barriers. Heron Foods is already our main auditorium sponsor and offered us space to trial our visits. …
“I asked shoppers to share their past, present and future experiences of theatre, linking that with A Christmas Carol, our Christmas production. People’s experiences were extremely varied – some attended often, while others were unsure of why the theatre might be relevant to them.
“Members of our box office team then joined us, enabling customers to buy tickets from an iPad. We now run these pop-up box office and community engagement sessions in four Heron Foods stores once a month, and having other staff in attendance has helped the project become more embedded across the theatre. …
“We continue to ask people why they don’t visit the theatre. Some have told us they feel intimidated by the building, let alone by walking up to the box office to buy a ticket. Some are worried they don’t know the conventions of what to wear or how to behave. …
“One of the biggest barriers is ticket price. Why should they spend £15 to see something they don’t know if they’ll enjoy? We sought to address this barrier last November through the marketing campaign for our production of ‘The Last Testament of Lillian Bilocca’ about the women of Hull who campaigned for fishing industry reform in the 1960s.
“We held back 100 pay-what-you-can tickets to the production, which were only made available to the targeted communities via the pop-up box offices. These tickets were popular and we received positive feedback that people were thrilled to be able to afford to see a play that was directly relevant to their community.”
Read how Hll Truck Theatre’s community-engagement efforts have worked, here.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
Such creative thinking about how to engage people!
It’s a good thing that people in the arts are by definition creative — in addition to executing their art, they need a lot of creativity just to stay afloat.