In the current climate of the performing arts, one of the greatest obstacles that marketers face is the constant challenge of boosting attendance while reaching a diverse audience that reflects the full spectrum of the community. With national attendance of live theatre performances on a steady decline over the past decade, the question on every performance art marketer’s mind: How do we innovate in marketing and programming in order to engage broader audiences?

Mixed Blood Theatre, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a harbinger in the enterprise of innovative performance arts marketing. Started in 1976 by starry-eyed 22-year-old, Jack Reuler, Mixed Blood surpasses expectations of a traditional theatre by focusing on the cultural production of stories of marginalized peoples in American society – all with the ultimate vision of cultural pluralism and societal equality in the performing arts. In a move that would function as one of the theatre’s major core competencies, Mixed Blood instated a gutsy initiative called “Radical Hospitality” in 2010, which offers free admission to any patrons of their mainstage shows.

Founder and Artistic Director Jack Reuler, shed some light on the organization’s changing priorities, beginning at the turn of the millennium when the theatre’s organizational staff began to reassess the target demographics of their audience. “In 2000 we had a significant shift in our thinking about audience and retention,” Reuler told us.

“For each show we do, we ask ourselves (and the playwrights) ‘Who needs to be in the audience for the show to ignite?’ And then we put our energies into finding those target populations.” In undertaking this research into their potential audience, staff at Mixed Blood discovered that the main barrier to participation and attendance was admission fees. Reuler speculated, “that there is a financial barrier to participation seems to have leapt from theory to conclusion.”

At the core of Radical Hospitality is that it was borne of a genuine interest in the audience’s experience –the theatre employed Free Speech programming – an initiative to generate discourse around the content of their productions by means of candid open discussions, live tweets of performances, and salon discussions led by panels of experts.

“The staff expressed belief that curating the entire attendance experience – from arriving in the neighborhood to entering the theatre to getting to seats to leaving the building and neighborhood – is important,” Reuler shared with us. “The post show discussions and salons, established by producer in residence Jamil Jude, is an important part of that curated holistic experience.” Free Speech is a further expression of the theatre’s instinct to involve greater audiences at a greater capacity by tearing down barriers to engagement and welcoming patrons with free entrance and a space to express themselves.

So exactly how much money does Mixed Blood lose as a result of free admissions? In reality, none – it breaks even. In early drafts of the proposed model, staff realized that implementing Radical Hospitality would not actually induce a weighty shift in the budget – in fact, the infrastructure of staff and data that would be required to charge $5 tickets would ultimately cost the theatre much more than free admission. In predicting the financial outcome of Radical Hospitality, Reuler explained that Mixed Blood had to first acknowledge that “the more reliant on box office income an organization is, the more risk averse it also is. Before Radical Hospitality, Mixed Blood relied on ticket sales for no more than 18% of its revenue.

The overall financial shift has been from 40% of the budget coming from earned income to 27.5%” – as the theatre still retains other revenue-generating programming. As a result, the theatre is responsible for replacing around $180,000 in ticket revenue. This has been restored every fiscal year by government, corporate, and individual funding sources, which have been attracted by the social value that Mixed Blood initiatives have generated. Reuler divulged that individual funding has both shrunk by 1/3 in average gift amounts and tripled in number since the instatement of Radical Hospitality, thus resulting in flat line totals but conveying the democratization of donation.

As the initiative gains traction, the theatre expects steady increases in the number of individual donors: “In numerical terms,” Reuler told us, “we anticipate that individual giving will yield $10,000 more in the 2015 fiscal year than in 2011, but that the number of donors will be much higher. We hope to benefit from lapsed donors and current givers, lifting the gross giving strategically.” With the implementation of such an experimental program, Mixed Blood immediately took great care to evaluate the affects of Radical Hospitality through documentation and measures of their resulting patronage. “We survey often and to great return,” Reuler explains.

“We survey – anonymously – all patrons before many performances and, simply put, don’t start the show until we have retrieved the surveys.” The results of the theatre’s thorough demographic surveys have exhibited remarkable changes in the diversity of the traditional theatre-going audience: over 50% of people attending Mixed Blood shows through Radical Hospitality are under 30 years of age, while 37% of them make less than $25,000 a year, 30% are people of color, and 9% report never having attended a live play before – and this is at a return rate of more than 92% of surveys. “We demystify the use of the survey and ask for nothing that would reveal the identity of the person being surveyed,” adds Reuler. “Because of the high rate of return, we are not extrapolating our results, but they are real.”

So as arts marketers, what can we take away from Mixed Blood’s success story?

Take the time to research and identify barriers to entry.
Mixed Blood’s epiphany from investing time into learning about their community was that admission fees were one of the sole discouragers of attendance. As a first step towards diversifying audiences, we need to investigate our target market’s needs and motivations. If we shift our focus from simply maintaining current audience numbers towards using active discourse and feedback to engage in our larger communities, we can identify what aspects of our programming might hinder community interest.

Define a concrete mission.
Perhaps above all, we can begin to grasp the importance of an agency’s long term, well-defined mission and values – whether they are social, environmental, economic– and how they can bridge our cultural production with the community. As arts professionals are well aware , performance art can be difficult for popular culture to digest in its intangible and ephemeral nature. What better way to connect with our audiences than by sharing a common purpose?

Define concrete initiatives.
Mixed Blood achieves a direct association between their values and their initiatives, and they benefit from it too. They address their values of egalitarianism and pluralism in an immediate way by using Radical Hospitality to revolutionize access and the Free Speech initiative to allow every voice in the audience to be democratized. Think about your organization’s core values – how can they be translated into programmed initiatives?

Reach out, be loud, and be proud.
Like Mixed Blood, we can learn to be unreservedly outspoken about our mission. The key to this gregariousness lies in outreach: if we can learn how to articulate a specific and ambitious vision to our community, we can effectively make null traditional, arbitrary departmental delineations, blanketing them all under the operation of outreach. “I wholeheartedly agree that programming, marketing, and development are one effort, not three,” explained Reuler. “We ask ourselves, ‘To whom do we want to speak?’ and then determine what programming best accomplishes that, how to best access those audiences, and how to support the makers and seers of that programming. That linkage is as radical as the hospitality itself.”

Don’t be afraid to reinvent and experiment.
Radical Hospitality would not have been a successful initiative had it not been radical. In implementing creative and innovative solutions to our arts marketing obstacles, artists and organizations gain traction and publicity and are able to extract program design elements essential to future marketing success. “Every organization of any kind can stand from significant self exploration, listening to its own realizations and conclusions, and acting accordingly,” Reuler proposed. “We all really hope that theatres will examine the models by which they operate and question them. Reinvention at a time when old models no longer work is healthy evolution and maturation of an institution and of the field.”