Austin Improv

I was going to post this in another thread, but screw that, more people need to read it, and it needs it's own place for discussion. Please read and share your opinion, whatever you say I'll do my best not to be insulted *wink*.

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There is a huge need to bolster the treasury of the AIC.

In fact, I think that at this point and time there are only three ways to bring MORE income into the AIC (preferably in this order).

1) Membership dues.
2) Bring more audience members into the cagematch.
3) Host a fund-rasier (like the Rude Mechs annual "Eye Ball", this year it's the POP EYE BALL and it looks like a lot of fun).

Membership dues will allow money for advertising which will raise audience awareness and attendance which will present the opportunity for finding sponsors and fund-raisers.

If we are considering making large advertising pushes anytime soon (for instance: when UT students return) we need the money to create a really strong campaign. As the adage goes, you have to spend money to make money, and according to Erika May the AIC is making very little money right now.

Here's my proposal.

Membership:
Membership dues = $60/year [$5/month] (cheaper for sketch troupes maybe? since they are typically given less slots to perform in)
Membership is on a per-troupe basis (so that each troupe gets equal representation and pays an equal amount of money into the AIC).
Membership dues also include a required night of hosting once per every 2 month schedule rotation.

Membership Benefits:
Troupe members are allowed to vote in all general meetings.
Troupe members are allowed to participate in committees.
Troupes are scheduled to perform in the Three-fer and the Double Barrel show (not so sure how this would work with TNA).
A cut of the profit from every AIC show your troupe performs in.

Other Possible Membership Benefits:
The occassional free workshop (whether dealing with actual improv or with the intricacies of advertising, maintaining a troupe, applying to festivals, producing sketch shows, etc).
Advertising on the Austin Improv website and in Austin Improv flyers. (other promotion help)
A spot in the box office to sell merchandise during shows (in the future, when the audience is large enough to warrant this)
Perhaps an annual AIC festival (like Wafflefest?) in which every member troupe has a guaranteed slot.

If you only count the Three-fer and the Double Barrel, there are 20 AIC show slots per month. There are (right now) a bit less than 20 troupes continuously active in the AIC. Basically, you would be paying $5/show to the AIC in exchange for all of these benefits.

The cagematch would remain open to ad-hoc groups that would not have to pay dues (as long as they only have one cage-match run per schedule rotation). We'd have to work out a system where individual improvisers are given the opportunity to become members as well, if they are not in a member troupe. They would pay a discounted rate and enjoy the benefits of voting in meetings and participating on committees.

The % cut of the box is NOT making any money for the AIC. Sadly. We need to bolster audience, we need to advertise, we need to pay for that, and no-one should have to pay out of pocket unless we ALL pay out of pocket.

Some facts:
- $60 is the price for one Couple's ticket to the annual Rude Mechanicals fund-raiser (including food & entertainment).
- If your troupe advertises well, you could potentially pay for your yearly dues with your troupe's profit from only TWO shows. (and you'll ideally be performing in more than 10-12 shows with the AIC per year)
- Membership dues are very common in many arts organizations, and there is no reason we shouldn't be paying for the benefits we receive as members of the AIC.

Here's some ambiguous examples.
EXAMPLE #1: Mandy is in one improv troupe (Loose) and Loose has 4 members. They decided to split the cost of their troupe dues evenly. Mandy pays $15/year to be a member of the AIC.

EXAMPLE #2:
Karl is in two improv troupes. One improv troupe is named Squarekitten and they have 5 members, the other improv troupe is named Paper Dime and they have 2 members. Each troupe pays $60/year in membership dues and splits the cost evenly between the members of the troupe. Karl pays $12 for his membership in Squarekitten and $30 for his membership in Paper Dime. He pays a total of $42 a year to perform in multiple shows and help to shape the future of improv in Austin.

EXAMPLE #3:
The Foremost Labels is a troupe with 6 members, they decide that they will pay their troupe dues with their cut of the profits from AIC shows. No member of the troupe pays any money out of pocket, their dues come directly out of their cut of the show profits.

This is good for several reasons.
1) The payment of dues is decided on a troupe-by-troupe basis, allowing them to work out who will pay how much of the dues. (If your troupe has one rich member and one poor member, hope that the rich one is generous).
2) The amount of money you will pay into the AIC is somewhat proportionate to the amount of stagetime you receive.
3) This is still so much cheaper than renting your own space.

The bottom line is, we've let the AIC down. The idea (at least as I understood it) was that the AIC would take a % of the show profits, and that would encourage us to bring in more audiences so that the AIC makes more money. This hasn't really happened yet.

If 20 troupes pay $60/year to perform that's $1200 the AIC would be making. According to Erika's post (the AIC averaged $336/month in profit since December) that means the AIC would immediately be making 25% more money per year. That is a very good start.

Thus ends my proposal for per-troupe membership dues.

Thank you for reading all of it.
-Phil

At our last vote on dues (March/April) we agreed that we were going to make a decision on the matter and stop bringing it up every few months.

We could simply have a membership form people fill out to join.

Can we have a list of all issues that have been voted on, and posted somewhere please? Along with date and voting results.

If there is no such list, I'll start keeping track of it.

nadine.

deroosisonfire wrote:At our last vote on dues (March/April) we agreed that we were going to make a decision on the matter and stop bringing it up every few months.

What exactly does this mean?
What "decision" are we going to make on the matter and have we made that decision yet?
If we haven't made that decision why haven't we?
Has anyone else brought up the membership dues issue in detail?

Also, we NEED to bring this up now, when we realize that SINCE DECEMBER the AIC has been really tanking money-wise...

well, as a point of clarification, AIC has only been in operation (financially) since December.

meaning - there is no point of comparison to the current trend (which has fluctuated and trended lower for the summer months vs. all other months).

also, wafflefest money was included in dec, which is more of an outlier than an indication of averages.

i do think we need a membership structure however, although i am less concerned about dues as a part of that (which i believe we voted down in previous meetings).

erika

nadine wrote:Can we have a list of all issues that have been voted on, and posted somewhere please? Along with date and voting results.

I'll keep it in the future as part of my job as secretary. I've scoured the past meeting minutes for results of votes and had mixed results depending on the notetaker.

I know we spent a long time speaking fairly specifically about dues in March and then sent Roy and Bob A. off to research dues to present at the April meeting. My understanding was the same as Erika's - that dues were voted down. If everyone wants to discuss this then I won't get in the way, but dues is one of several issues that are continually brought up and debated in meetings and it seems like we need to make a decision and stick with it longer than 3 months.

deroosisonfire wrote: it seems like we need to make a decision and stick with it longer than 3 months.

I agree.
It's too soon since the last discussion for this topic to circle around again. I think the main reason it's being brought up is because those most interested in the idea weren't at the meetings in which it was discussed.
I'm with Erika, I'm pretty positive it was voted down previously.

I was at the meeting in which dues was discussed at first.

I couldn't attend the one in which dues were voted on.

I'm just expressing my sadness that the AIC isn't making as much money as it could, and trying to present what I considered to be a good idea to the community.

If it's been voted down in the recent past, then there's no point in bringing it up again so soon, yes, but sometime in the near future, I think we should re-evaluate this idea.

If we want the AIC to be as strong as it can be, and to be as popular as some other improv theatres, I think we need to focus first and foremost on making the money necessary to begin that quest, and that money needs to come from somewhere. And somewhere sooner rather than later.

And I still maintain that dues by themselves do nothing.

If we want to make more money as a theatre, and we decide as a group that purchasing purple flying monkeys will do that, then we need to price said monkeys, and then decide how to go about raising the money for the flighted simians. Then dues are a possible avenue for raising revenue.

This was the main argument I had against dues when I voted them down. Until we have a targeted, specific thing to spend the money on, dues will just make a number on a bank statement go up.

Why has this come up again? Why is there all of a sudden this feeling that we're all spiraling into oblivion? Ticket sales and show attendance slow down during the summer. They always have (as far as I've been told, and saw last summer.)

If we want more guaranteed sales, we do more genre shows, since they seem to sell rather well. We've said that in the past and then sort of given up on the idea. If we don't want to do that, we need to actually promote the hell out of our shows or hire someone who knows how to do that for us. Idly arguing back and forth about this every 6 months does nothing but irk the bile of members of the community.

I shall say no more on this subject ever.

(upon review, I think this has come up again because of needing to vote for president, and needing to know who qualifies as a voting member of the AIC, and how someone becomes a standing member with voting rights. The above still holds, though. There's a lot of discussion building to hysteria over sales and money and I'm not sure why)

phlounderphil wrote:If we want the AIC to be as strong as it can be, and to be as popular as some other improv theatres, I think we need to focus first and foremost on making the money necessary to begin that quest, and that money needs to come from somewhere.

No, I believe -- strongly -- that the focus should not be on money, or branding, or t-shirts, but on quality. We need to maintain consistent quality if we want to be strong and popular. I know this is a topic for another thread, but this fact gets lost in the details of all the AIC stuff.

I agree with you Bob, and I almost stuck that in, but feared deviating from my original intent. Quality is very important, but I think we should be focusing on both quality and have a small amount of money to work with when it comes to creating some general AIC advertising, buying an ad in the Chronicle, paying Bob A to maintain the website and servers, paying the scheduling committee a small stipend for the work they do.

I'm not going to argue for or against dues anymore, but I think a major MAJOR issue here is, how do we raise attendance at AIC shows?

It's not just low because of the summer months, it's been low overall since we've started. Since December, how many times have we come close to selling out the upstairs theatre for an AIC show (Threefer, Style Show, Cagematch). Whatever you answered, that's not enough. We could be doing more, and for some reason, we are not.

Why don't we have some AIC flyers with an updated schedule on them (Wes made the original "schedule" flyers with his own time/resources in January, and since then the only flyers I've seen have been troupe/show specific!) Why don't we have enough money to buy an ad in the Chronicle/Travesty/XLent (again, if this happens, it's going to come out of someone's pocket right? or the Hideout's money? or it's going to drain a lot of money out of the AIC's account?). Besides, we cannot just be resting on the fact that attendance will naturally pick up when school starts again, if we PUSH, then attendance could DOUBLE when school starts again. I get the feeling that some people are ALREADY becoming very troupe-oriented and are losing their desire to really push for the AIC...yes, we all love the community, but how much are we willing to do to really prove that.

As for quality, there are plenty of quality shows going on right now, and I can tell that the quality of our shows has been slowly rising overall. However, quality combined with the money to properly advertise our shows would be the ultimate combination.

How are you going to raise attendance at the AIC shows? that's my only question.

There is a huge need to bolster the treasury of the AIC.

Agreed.
However, if we are only applying dues to raise funds, I am completely opposed.
I believe in dues in order to define "membership" in a concrete way, to establish roles and responsibilities within the organization, and to settle problems that will become the elephants in the room as we move forward and grow as an organization. Voting on "Major" issues is one. Applying for funds from the grants we hope to receive. Getting listed in certain places. Prestige of association and community awareness. Access to new venues. Etc.


In fact, I think that at this point and time there are only three ways to bring MORE income into the AIC (preferably in this order).

First, I disagree with the order. I want dues to be the last way we "make" money.
Second, there are lots more creative and traditional ways to bring in money that we simply are not pursuing as zealously as we should. How about doing more out-of-house gigs? (I've still never been paid for the Blanton thing, which I assume means the Hideout was not paid either). The AIC could easily pursue these and despite several months worth of meetings on making a position to do just this we have done essentially nothing. What about creative things (like a birthday Maestro package where you get to come on stage and play in the show if your friends pay an extra $25 - that's a double whammy because not only is it more money, but people will want to come in large groups). Hell, we could simply up ticket prices for what its worth. Also, we could sell advertising on playbills and the like. We tried, but I couldn't get more than myself and 1 or 2 others to ask even their own businesses, much less strangers, to consider buying space. We could do more cross promotions with radio and television stations to get our name and faces out there; to create free advertising without having to buy it.
There are LOTS of ways to bring money into the Hideout and AIC. We just have to stop thinking about what's the easiest/laziest way for us to do it (people showing up and handing us money or giving up our own money is easy, finding sponsors is not).


If we are considering making large advertising pushes anytime soon we need the money to create a really strong campaign. As the adage goes, you have to spend money to make money

IF is the key word. Is this where the money will in fact be spent? We couldn't agree on a budget (not that we should all have even had our fingers in that pie anyway), but that unresolved action item had a percent for advertising. I don't know how long ago that discussion started, but I still have never heard word about how much I can spend monthly, if anything, on advertising.


Membership dues also include a required night of hosting once per every 2 month schedule rotation.

Pay to work? We're already doing it for free. Why pay to do it?
I agree this should be a responsibility, but it is one of the reasons I disagree with attacking this from the 'money-raising' angle. If I'm paying just to raise money, I want my pay to opt me out of required work.
Also, what is the flip side of this? There have been instances of people not showing up or being short staffed because only a few troupe members showed. Once you are a "member" is there some sort of official penalty for this? If this becomes a responsibility of membership, what is the punishment for failing to fulfill that responsibility? What if a member is caught giving away comps or discounted tickets that they shouldn't be? Once we have responsibilities, what happens when we fail to meet them? Who will ensure it happens? Will membership be as toothless as non-membership has been?


Membership is on a per-troupe basis (so that each troupe gets equal representation ...
Troupe members are allowed to vote in all general meetings.

This needs to be rectified because Get Up paying to get 2 voting members is not equal to YM&G's 3 or Pgraph's 5. Is it one vote per troupe or per individual? Or do different issues require different types of vote? File it under Details, Devil in.


Other Possible Membership Benefits:
The occassional free workshop...
Advertising on the Austin Improv website and in Austin Improv flyers. (other promotion help)...

Just like above when I asked what happens if you fail to fulfill your role to the AIC, what happens if the AIC fails to fulfill its role to us? What if we do sell this as "you get to be on flyers and have free workshops" only no one shows up to help hand out flyers? It wouldn't be the first time. What if no one offers to host a free workshop? Do we get a refund? What happens when the amount of stage time you get is NOT proportionate to the amount you pay in as you said? Membership IS a two way street and the AIC has to be able to offer something in turn.
(And don't give me that performing at the Hideout is offering something in turn because the Hideout NEEDS us performing there to make money as much as we need the space to perform on. Is it a privledge and are we thankful to perform there? Yes. But does it also need us as much as we need it? Yes. Performing spaces without performers make even less money than those with performers but small crowds. That guilt trip don't work.)


If you only count the Three-fer and the Double Barrel, there are 20 AIC show slots per month. There are (right now) a bit less than 20 troupes continuously active in the AIC. Basically, you would be paying $5/show to the AIC in exchange for all of these benefits.

Benefits that we either already get for free or that haven't yet manifested themselves? Plus, I have to pay essentially $5 a show to get on stage? The benefit of what, getting to volunteer on a committee and use up more of my sparse free time? A committee which may not even return results or when it does have those results overturned by some last-minute second whim of the community? What is the up side again?


The bottom line is, we've let the AIC down. The idea (at least as I understood it) was that the AIC would take a % of the show profits, and that would encourage us to bring in more audiences so that the AIC makes more money. This hasn't really happened yet.

We have? I think the AIC is just as culpable in letting us down in many ways. Meetings that get bounced around, or skip months entirely. Issues that go unresolved month after month. Simple projects that take months to reach fruition--if they ever do at all. Yes, some aspects have worked out wonderfully. Scheduling is a prime example of some people shouldering some tough responsibilities and shining in doing so. Erika does great with finance. But many other areas have not done so hot, and not even committees, but things like moving meetings around or second-guessing previous actions.
And if people aren't motivated enough to bring people in to make a % cut for themselves and their own troupe, why would anyone be suddenly and superiorly motivated to do it for the AIC?


I am for dues only in the sense that they would serve to solidify and define the community and one's roles, responsibilities, and benefits within it. But as I said, it is a two-way street and the AIC must offer up something in return. It must have benefits. It must have action plans. It must have methods to punish those that do not meet their responsibility.

Also, would there be a grace period for new troupes?

I just wanted to mention first, that I didn't mean to direct that at you specifically Phil. That was more a general reaction to things and just triggered by what you'd written.

But I really think that consistency combined with quality is how you get butts in seats. It will not happen overnight, or necessarily over months. It will take lots of time. And while I agree that the quality of the shows has increased, I think we can keep moving further with even better shows. I'm sure the workshops that have been going on will be good for this, but also will seeing other groups' shows, seeing other theater/art, and pushing ourselves to be as open, creative, and professional as possible. We can pay dues, have t-shirts, great show branding, video promos, etc. but if the show wasn't good, that is all the audience will remember.

Also, I think that any of the money distribution you mentioned (which I agree with) should come from a cut of what we make and not from dues. It puts the incentive on making more money from the shows and, thereby, on having more successful shows.

I think the AIC is one of the healthiest and most supportive communities around. People are generally very friendly and upbeat, especially in person (not so much in the forums).

I think it's not so much whether ideas are hysterical or shot down... people just need to hear it in different forms, and it's easy to attribute emotions to text.

And ideas are just ideas until someone takes it and does something with it. If you wish someone will do it, and complain about no one doing it. Then do it!! Or talk someone into doing it!! Phil, I really like the idea of the ad in the Austin Chronicle. I will take that as action item to ask around ways to get money to publish it and try to get an ad there if I can get money. Maybe I'll ask for donations of $60 per troupe. And I'll report back to the AIC by end of August whether I succeed or not. And maybe someone will notice that I made this statement and poke at me in the forum at the end of Aug if I dropped the ball I voluntarily picked up.

As for people being more troupe focus. Balderdash. People are the way they've been since last December. Jason from IFE keeps volunteering for stuff and getting roped into doing web and graphics for everyone. Pgraph is very active in the community. Leading Brands does awesome hosting (free pizza!). Troupe x still hang out by themselves most of the time, and only shows up for shows. Sure some people get burned out (like Jason if he's not careful) or more active, or get a girlfriend, but it's normal and not a lessoning of the community, hippy, happy feel of the AIC.

Which reminds me, I'm thinking of doing a beer and sausage party.

nadine wrote:Which reminds me, I'm thinking of doing a beer and sausage party.

Aren't all beer parties usually sausage parties?