Austin Improv

Dammit! My computer at work cant open PDF files! Booooo! But I talked to you briefly last night Bob. Even though the supercool back text may not have worked out, I'm sure you came up with something equally amazing if not more so. Hopefully we can get at least 80 or so for tonight's run, and see how they go! I should be there tonight to help out Mr. Hunt with some tech stuff, so I can help hand them out if we need someone to do that!

Chris: My bad on mislabeling Wooden Nickel as Hoover's Blanket on the 10th. I misread the original calendar.

I'm running 200 copies now so we'll have them for this weekend's shows. I'll add Andy & Chris' changes for the next run. In the meantime if the troupes performing this weekend want to run off some half-sheet inserts, plus an errata sheet for the missing classes and shows, we can have a program stuffing party before things kick off tonight.

I want to thank the Scheduling Committee for getting me the calendar so quickly and keeping me updated - they rock! Since they're the keepers of the One True Calendar, I want to encourage people to report material changes (missing & wrong info) on the calendar to both me and the Scheduling Committee so that the One True Calendar stays accurate. I'll take care of cosmetic stuff and non-calendar content, but there should never be a time when I have more recent schedule info than the Scheduling Committee. And since there's always going to be a time lag between when they get notified and when they update me on the One True Calendar, it helps a lot to get your availability and schedule stuff to them as early as possible.

Looks good, Bob! Thank you!

This part is for the benefit of Erika & the Advertisting Committee:

Let's do a quick bit of arithmetic. 250 copies cost me $25 at St. Ed's copy shop; we may be able to get a better deal elsewhere but for the sake of argument, let's assume $0.10 per program. If we make double-sided half-sheet inserts for surveys, troupes, classes, Cagematch ballots, etc., those are $0.05 each. Say we put at least two inserts in each (survey plus ballot/troupe bio)

We're now running 7 shows a week (1 Thursday, 3 each Friday & Saturday) and assume that all but the Saturday Jam need a program. What's our average audience size? 20? 30? Four weeks of programs containing two inserts is (30 people * 4 weeks * 6 shows) = 720 programs @ $0.20 = $144, $36/week, or $6/show.

If we're asking for a $10 contribution per show (not counting Cagematch & Maestro) to the AIC, around 3/4 of that is eaten in program costs ($36/$50 ~ 72%.) If the Heroes/Hideout kicks in $10 per Maestro, we're down to 60% ($36/$60) but it's still a significant chunk of AIC's cash flow.

The upside is that we reach about 720 people a month with programs and we know our audience is primarily in the 18-24 demographic (surveys!) who go downtown for theatre & comedy. We can approach (say) Opal Divine's or McCormick & Schmick's, whoever, and offer them ad space at $10-25 a month. Once we're a non-profit, I think they can donate to us deductably and we can acknowledge them as sponsors but for the time being it'd be cool to defray our monthly printing costs with a simple sheet of ads. It's something to think about...

I'm all for advertising to off-set cost, build relationships, and even add a degree of validity (not only are we doing our thing, but businesses want to pay money to reach our audience). Anyone else a good contender besides Opal's?

Plus, until we start packing them in every show, we won't waste as many as we have been, so cost should stay relatively affordable. (I assume the plan is for the box or ticket taker to give out the programs directly to patrons? Then we won't be putting them in empty chairs to be stepped on and wasted and couples will only take one most of the time and people seeing multiple shows won't take more than one.)

Programs should get handed out as part of the "take ticket, give program" duties of the door person. I agree that putting them on seats is liable to get them tossed around, stepped on, and left to be picked up when we turn over the house. I'm making the assumption that we should even have programs, if only so we have a current calendar to hand out. After the fact, I realized that I was saddling us with another cost, so I figured it was only responsible to ballpark it and see how much it's likely to cost and try to figure out a way to pay for it...

FWIW, when I was dropping off the first batch of programs last night, I talked to Greg briefly in the coffeehouse. He asked what was going on tonight and I told him about the Tight show and I gave him a calendar. He seemed pretty happy about that and I got the impression he hadn't seen one of our schedules in a while. I wonder if he'd be able to schedule some fast-track beer people now that he knows when our shows are...