Why We Ask
Because the Inside the Classics series is meant to be something of an incubator for new ideas, we tend to do an awful lot of audience research, and we spend a lot of time discussing things like how to attract newbies to Orchestra Hall, how to be responsive to audience concerns without completely turning the series over to the tyranny of public opinion, and how to balance the needs of one concertgoing demographic against another.
Orchestras (or at least, the staff and managers who run the off-stage part of the operation) have these discussions all the time, but as a musician, it's been a new experience for me to be involved in that side of the business. At first, I found it somewhat off-putting, not because of the occasional negative comments I had to read about what Sarah and I were doing, but because I just didn't understand the point of constantly asking audience members about every little aspect of the concertgoing experience, when all we really needed to know (or so I thought) was whether they'd had a good enough time to buy a ticket to the next show.
What I was missing, of course, was that, despite the fact that symphony orchestras are the ocean liners of the arts world (massive, unwieldy, and glacially slow at changing direction,) you can make a big difference in the quality of experience you give your customers without making massive, systemic changes. Little improvements can have a big impact, but only if you know which little improvements people want. And you won't know if you don't ask.
Still, it can be difficult to parse the data we get when we do ask. For instance, every time we do an ItC concert, we always get a few comments that go beyond simple dissatisfaction and border on quivering rage at the talk/play format of the concerts, or the purposefully casual tone we've cultivated for the first half. And while those commenters are entitled to their point of view, there's really not a lot that we can do for people who just hated everything about the experience, other than to point out that the Minnesota Orchestra plays close to 200 concerts every year during which I don't say a word. (I'll admit, I find it a little bit funny that some people manage to get so worked up about a series that takes up approximately 3% of our annual concert schedule.)
Other times, we'll get comments about aspects of the experience that we literally have no control over. Probably the most frequent one of these is people who find parking in downtown Minneapolis to be inconvenient and expensive. Since we don't own, operate, or control any parking ramps, and the city of Minneapolis doesn't care about our opinion on such things, all we can really do is sympathize, and point out that certain concert subscription packages come with parking vouchers. (And actually, I'll toss in an extra tip: the underground lot at the Hilton hotel on 11th Street, right across from Orchestra Hall, will run you about half the cost of all the city-owned lots during evening hours...)
But even if we have to wade through a raft of comments that aren't terribly helpful to us in planning the next concert, we usually happen upon quite a few that are. And from my perspective, individual comments tell me less than the trends that emerge across all our audience feedback. For instance, every time I interview a member of the orchestra on stage during an ItC show, a bunch of people tell us it was their favorite part of the evening, which is why you're seeing it more often now than you did in our first season.
And when a whole lot of you told us after season one that you wanted more contextual music and less of the featured work on the first half, we made a point of trying to do that. (Though judging by some of the comments we got last weekend, we're still not quite nailing that balance - rest assured, we'll keep working on it.)
All of which is to say, thanks for allowing us to pick your brains after all our concerts, and for understanding that we can't possibly respond to every suggestion we get. (Quite frankly, a lot of your opinions cancel each other out.) The constant tweaking and adjusting that we do in this series is one of the really fun parts of putting it together every year, and we hope that it keeps the experience fresh for you as well.
Orchestras (or at least, the staff and managers who run the off-stage part of the operation) have these discussions all the time, but as a musician, it's been a new experience for me to be involved in that side of the business. At first, I found it somewhat off-putting, not because of the occasional negative comments I had to read about what Sarah and I were doing, but because I just didn't understand the point of constantly asking audience members about every little aspect of the concertgoing experience, when all we really needed to know (or so I thought) was whether they'd had a good enough time to buy a ticket to the next show.
What I was missing, of course, was that, despite the fact that symphony orchestras are the ocean liners of the arts world (massive, unwieldy, and glacially slow at changing direction,) you can make a big difference in the quality of experience you give your customers without making massive, systemic changes. Little improvements can have a big impact, but only if you know which little improvements people want. And you won't know if you don't ask.
Still, it can be difficult to parse the data we get when we do ask. For instance, every time we do an ItC concert, we always get a few comments that go beyond simple dissatisfaction and border on quivering rage at the talk/play format of the concerts, or the purposefully casual tone we've cultivated for the first half. And while those commenters are entitled to their point of view, there's really not a lot that we can do for people who just hated everything about the experience, other than to point out that the Minnesota Orchestra plays close to 200 concerts every year during which I don't say a word. (I'll admit, I find it a little bit funny that some people manage to get so worked up about a series that takes up approximately 3% of our annual concert schedule.)
Other times, we'll get comments about aspects of the experience that we literally have no control over. Probably the most frequent one of these is people who find parking in downtown Minneapolis to be inconvenient and expensive. Since we don't own, operate, or control any parking ramps, and the city of Minneapolis doesn't care about our opinion on such things, all we can really do is sympathize, and point out that certain concert subscription packages come with parking vouchers. (And actually, I'll toss in an extra tip: the underground lot at the Hilton hotel on 11th Street, right across from Orchestra Hall, will run you about half the cost of all the city-owned lots during evening hours...)
But even if we have to wade through a raft of comments that aren't terribly helpful to us in planning the next concert, we usually happen upon quite a few that are. And from my perspective, individual comments tell me less than the trends that emerge across all our audience feedback. For instance, every time I interview a member of the orchestra on stage during an ItC show, a bunch of people tell us it was their favorite part of the evening, which is why you're seeing it more often now than you did in our first season.
And when a whole lot of you told us after season one that you wanted more contextual music and less of the featured work on the first half, we made a point of trying to do that. (Though judging by some of the comments we got last weekend, we're still not quite nailing that balance - rest assured, we'll keep working on it.)
All of which is to say, thanks for allowing us to pick your brains after all our concerts, and for understanding that we can't possibly respond to every suggestion we get. (Quite frankly, a lot of your opinions cancel each other out.) The constant tweaking and adjusting that we do in this series is one of the really fun parts of putting it together every year, and we hope that it keeps the experience fresh for you as well.
Labels: audience feedback, marketing
posted by Sam at
10:07 AM
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