Community Arts Support

By increasing the advertising of our concerts we hope to expand our audiences for both the Paramount concerts and the Summer Concert Series. The expanded audience for these concerts plus the nursing home concerts and high school outreach concerts should reach multiple demographics--elderly, who enjoy our concerts because the concerts stir fond memories, as well as their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who may be exposed to wind ensemble music for the first time and hopefully creating memories to pass on to future generations. We have also been attracting people of non-European heritage to concerts, and hope to expand the race and ethnic origins of our patrons as well. Having celebrated the 125th Anniversary of the Saint Cloud Municipal Band two years ago, we hope to continue to cultivate and expand community pride, which can be measured via attendance estimates as well as positive survey results. We strive for an average of 95% participation of musicians willing to play concerts, which demonstrates the enthusiasm that our musicians feel for the repertoire as well as for the conductor.To measure audience satisfaction, we include surveys in the programs provided at the Paramount, and pass them out during summer concerts and the nursing home concerts. Survey questions ask for zip codes to help estimate the market area of our patrons. We also ask musical preferences, success of marketing strategies, Contingency Valuation questions to try to determine the value the patrons place on the concert, as well as their potential ability to pay. The difference in these figures generally shows that the patron values the concert at a greater amount than they are willing or able to pay for the tickets, and this suggests that our music is indeed a local public good, and that tax funds are well spent to support this activity. Finally we ask demographics such as age and gender as well as comments. With such surveys, we can do cross-tabulations and using Chi-Square tests and other nonparametric statistical analyses, we can determine if there are statistically significant differences between the audience demographics and answers to the other questions. We not only take attendance at each practice and concert, but informally, we experience the excitement and buzz at the recital hall as the numbers of musicians staying after the concerts to chat with audience members expands.