Theatre tickets prove difficult to give away

A Night Less Ordinary (ANLO), the audience development scheme foisted on Arts Council England (ACE) following a speech by then Culture Secretary Andy Burnham at the Labour’s Party Conference in September 2008, managed to give away less than 80% of the free tickets earmarked for children and young people. £2.4m of direct funding from the DCMS was spent on the scheme, which ran from February 2009 until March 2011`, having been hastily launched by ACE after the Minister’s surprise announcement.

The final report examining the impact of ANLO, which ACE describes as a “pilot scheme to test whether theatre attendance by under 26s could be increased if price was removed as a barrier ”, reveals that only 397,000 free tickets were allocated from a target that was reduced from 620,000 to 500,000 as it became clear that take-up of the scheme would be lower than hoped (see AP211). A major barrier to the take-up of tickets was the lack of a “unified offer” and failure to introduce a single real-time online booking system from the start – the implementation of this in year two of the scheme led to a “significant increase” in the take up of ANLO tickets. After the first nine months, just 177,000 tickets had been offered and of them only 122,000 had been taken up.

An estimated 80,000 children and young people took advantage of the scheme, each visiting an average of five times, but the scheme failed to make much impact on the attending habits of non-theatre-goers: only 6,800 young people are estimated to have tried theatre for the first-time, and only just over a third of them said they would definitely pay to re-attend. The report notes that ACE’s requirement for venues to achieve quarterly free ticket targets “shifted the effort of some theatres away from non-attenders who required substantially more effort to reach compared to those who had already attended”. Many of those who benefited from the free tickets might have attended anyway, regardless of the discount – only 37% of those questioned said that they would “probably or definitely not have gone to the theatre if it hadn’t been for the free theatre tickets”. On a more positive note, 81% said ANLO has made them more likely to go to the theatre in the future.

Commenting on the scheme, ACE said ANLO was “a hugely valuable learning experience for the Arts Council and the majority of the venues involved”. 200 venues across England were involved in the ticket give-away scheme, which was the first time the theatre sector ACE had worked together on a single, nationwide audience development scheme.