Arts Activities Support
ACHF Arts Access
50 artists will participate in artistically excellent presentations. 300 audience members will attend. 90% of participating audiences will express an interest in returning to participate in a future season. The Board and Staff will evaluate the outcomes, using audience numbers from the box office; and artist hospitality and production staff numbers and feedback from the artists. The Board and Staff will evaluate artistic quality and will take into account audience, media, and artist input.
We hoped to serve 50 artists, and served 102. We hoped 90% of the participating artists would express interest in returning, and 100% of them said they want to return (We are most proud of this). We had hoped to serve 300 audience members, and actually served 338. Artistic goals were achieved. All groups were of high artistic quality as evaluated by the curators, board, staff and audience response. Staying in the new space for the entire season really helped us artistically. We had dependable equipment and a space that wouldn't cancel without notice. The equipment and space issue has been a struggle, and having insufficient equipment to support the artists impacts artistic quality. This season, we didn't have to make any emergency runs to rent equipment, which used to be costly and embarrassing. Not having the right equipment at load in impacts the trust that our artists have in this company, and not having to struggle with that issue has helped us to build trust with the artists. We are glad to be in Landmark Center. We would like to start reaching out to season staff earlier next season and getting curators to visit more groups earlier so the season planning and execution wouldn't be so crunched. We are reaching the intended community, and we are working to do more research on our audience. This season, when working with a marketing person, we have decided that our target community (the community served) is actually the artists we present because our mission is to build their audience base. We are doing a good job of reaching out to these folks, as evidenced by our wait list. Our Community Liaison continues to do outreach to artists of differing cultural backgrounds, and that is successful, although not fast. We have a diversity of arts genres and cultural artists on stage, so we are happy with that and will continue to reach out to make the stage welcoming to all artistically excellent artists. The difference in articulation of 'audience' that we are starting to talk about is 'ticketed audience members' as opposed to 'artist audience served'. We started to do surveys last season to 'ticketed audience members' and are currently working with a marketing person to try and see how we can increase ticketed audience members. We have applied for some grants to do a better evaluation of these ticketed audience members, so that we can increase their numbers in the future. We are in an accessible building now (even the stage is accessible at Landmark Center, and it wasn't at History Theater), and we have increased signage and added ushers to the ground floor entrance to help people find their way. We have a fairly comprehensive ADA plan, which includes all that we are capable of doing now. We have accessible seating and a staff that is trained to offer to make accommodation to anyone with special needs.
Other, local or private