Arts Activities Support
ACHF Arts Access
We hope to continue to reach and expand the audience served by these stimulating, high caliber, engaging coffee concerts, expecting an average audience of 90-100 people per concert. In particular, we hope to increase participation and enthusiastic responses from audience members under 50 years of age. We track audience attendance and ticket sales as a measure of how many people we reach. We also distribute an audience survey at the last concert of the season (with very high percentage response through connection with door prizes) that gives useful evaluation, demographic information, and open-ended feedback.
1: People heard great, varied performances. Repertoire ranged from 400 years ago to now. 2: Support for this series has increased. Over 1/3 of participants attend all four concerts. 3: These concerts build community. People greet each other and the artists, and take pride in these concerts that draw people from a wide region to experience what Lakeville and its Arts Center have to offer. We achieved our goal of sharing a wide variety of chamber music, from early instruments and music of Lyra Baroque to the Classical Contemporary music of Zeitgeist. The concerts went very well, were generally very well received, and the artists were pleased with the venue and the artistic outcomes. We had expected larger audiences, and had hoped in particular to attract larger numbers from teenagers through age 50. More work will have to be done in terms of contacts with area high school music programs. For future seasons we have made several adjustments – 1. Modified ticket prices so student prices are age 18 and under. (This season student prices applied to ages 12 and under.) 2. Be more realistically conservative in our audience projections in estimating ticket revenue as a match to the grant. We had hoped for 80-90 per concert, and actually ranged from 60-70. We reached the intended community. The community reached was similar to past years, with about 28% from the Lakeville area, 11% Apple Valley, 11% Burnsville, 11% from Minneapolis/St Paul, 6% Eden Prairie, with attendance reported from 13 different cities of towns from about a 50-mile radius. (13 survey respondents didn’t list their hometowns). The estimated population benefitting from the concerts closely matched estimates. As always, more would be welcome, particularly school age, 20-40 year olds, and from as wide a demographic as possible. We reached diversity of age and geography, and an observed, but unmeasured, smattering of different ethnicities. The percentage breakdown by age, as gathered in our end-of-season survey was: Ages 0-40, 8%; 40-50, 9%; 50-60, 8%; 60-70, 23%; 70-80, 34%; above 80, 13%; not reported, 5%. We succeeded in meeting our goals of making the event open and accessible. We will seek out new ways of reaching and inviting more ethnic minorities through announcements in Latino and other non-English news sources and calendar listings.
Other, local or private