Learning from the lockdowns
In the pandemic lockdowns in spring 2020 and spring 2021, there were basically three ways arts organizations reacted concerning the following season:
- We don’t know if we are going to be able to have performances next season, so for legal or customer care or other reasons we wont offer subscriptions at all. Perhaps half of the organizations made this decision.
- We believe in subscriptions and offer them, but we don’t market them actively. Perhaps a little less than half took this approach.
- We offer subscriptions and we market them, perhaps even very actively. These were probably a marked minority.
The StillArt team had the opportunity to work with Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in both seasons and with Musikkollegium Winterthur in the second. To everyone’s surprise it turned out the lockdowns were magnificent periods to sell subscriptions. OSR gained 1.150 new subscribers for 20/21 and 850 new for 21/22. MKW gained 600 new subscribers in 21/22 and their subscription concerts have been totally sold out.
The numbers are not as clear for spring 2022 but some had significantly better numbers when starting marketing subscriptions in March when the lockdown threat was still partly there, than they are getting now in May and June.
We can only speculate about the reasons. One possibility was psychological: people wanted to demonstrate support, looked to leaders expressing belief in the future or wanted themselves to believe in the future. In addition, very important aspects were also that nobody else was marketing and above all that people actually had much more time to read and reflect on the offer.
So if and when we have a new pandemic, or in any case a lockdown, it might make sense to have courage and aggressively market subscriptions. For instance OSR and MKW exited the pandemic with full halls throughout the season.
