Two-Year Operating Support Grant

Lyric Opera of the North brings high quality opera to audiences throughout the Arrowhead Region, in a variety of formats and venues. Our programming has increased significantly in recent years. LOON used to perform one fully staged opera each year. Now, a season includes two fully staged operas, a children's opera tour, a summer concert, and several smaller events throughout the year in pubs, livings rooms, and senior living centers. We have recently taken steps to increase our administrative capacity to support and expand our programming, increasing our General Director's salary, and adding part-time positions for specific tasks. Our goal with this increased capacity is to ensure best experiences for patrons and artists, and to allow our General Director to spend her time less on daily administrative details and more on serving LOON's mission, goals, and strategy as set forth by the Board of Directors. The two new part-time administrative positions that have been created are focused on specific projects or tasks. These include: 1. Assessing publicity (print, social media, tv, radio) opportunities and helping to develop a marketing and publicity strategy. 2. Project Manager/calendar coordinator for the Little LOON tour. 3. Orchestra manager and artist liaison for main stage productions. 4. Box office supervisor and front of house volunteer coordinator. Our goal is as follows: with dedicated attention to these tasks, our General Artistic Director can focus her time on strategic planning, artistic programming, and development. Development work often gets pushed aside for pressing daily tasks (flight and housing arrangements for artists, answering phones, making copies, running the box office, etc.). Our goal is for her to be able to focus on relationships, long-term programming goals, and development, which should result in better efficiency, better ticket sales, more grant applications submitted, more donor relationships established. Essentially,we are freeing her up to do Executive-level work. The addition of Kailyn Spencer (administrative assistant) and Heidi Lord (orchestra manager and artist liaison) will also result in better patron experience, and better experiences for artists and volunteers. Ticket sales and donations are easily measured outcomes. Patron, artist, and volunteer experience will be surveyed at the end of the season.