Lin Larmer, a trustee of North Downs Community Orchestra, tells us how by following a Making Music webinar, the orchestra sold more than double their usual number of tickets.
Background
North Downs Community Orchestra (NDCO) was established in 2016 as an adult non-auditioned community orchestra where no one is ever turned away as long as they have their own instrument, can sight read, and fit in with the rest of the orchestra. Our other name is the Fun Orchestra, as that is our main aim!
At our first rehearsal, only 14 people turned up to play. Over the years we gradually built up membership, and successfully navigated the difficulties presented by the pandemic and lockdowns; we now have over 60 active members with more people continuing to discover us and our ethos and wanting to join.
There are many contributing factors to our growth and success over the past eight years, not least our Music Director, Sara Young. Having been a teacher for many years, Sara knew how to challenge and encourage the members to aim high and be the best we can be. After five wonderful years under her baton, Sara decided to step down in 2024 and move to new pastures. To celebrate this fantastic era with Sara, the NDOC staged a special concert called ‘For One Night Only’, on 26 May 2024 at the Millennium Theatre, Woldingham School.
The challenge
Prior to this concert, since 2022, the NDCO had staged two concerts a year at Bawtree Hall, Hazelwood School, which is essentially a large school hall with pull-out raked seating and a maximum seating capacity of 240. Following the pandemic, ticket sales improved and the last few concerts had sold out before the performance, sometimes with waiting lists.
The Millennium Theatre was a different proposition; a purpose-built theatre which seats over 500 people with excellent lighting and sound facilities, it is an integral part of Woldingham School, and only available for hire during school holidays. This could prove an additional challenge as the date chosen was half-term and we were concerned that our audience might be on holiday. However, we wanted Sara’s final concert to be extra special and to share the occasion with as many people as possible, especially the NDCO’s friends and families.
We were fortunate to receive a donation to cover the cost of the hire, but no one wants to perform to a half-empty auditorium, so it was vital that we sold as many seats as possible – ideally, all of the 530 available seats.
Millenium Theatre, Woldingham School and its 500+ seating capacity
What we did
We had always managed to fill our concerts with eye-catching flyers distributed by members, word-of-mouth and emails to members asking them to sell tickets. However, we felt that selling 500+ tickets might require some different strategies.
It was fortunate that Making Music was hosting a webinar called ‘Ticket Selling Strategies’ in February 2024. I signed up for the webinar hoping to learn about new strategies that would help the NDCO sell the additional tickets for our upcoming concert in May 2024.
The key takeaway I got from the webinar was how important it is to know who our main audience is and how we could reach them. For the NDCO, it had always been our members’ friends and families, and we felt that this remained our main target audience.
We adopted a number of strategies to help sell the tickets:
- First, and perhaps most importantly, we ensured tickets were ready to go on sale in January, several months before the concert – including ensuring that our website was ready to take bookings.
- We created an eye-catching flyer and had 2000 printed.
- The committee emailed the members a digitised copy of the flyer to share with their friends and family and personally invite them to our concert.
- We asked our members to let us know where they had left flyers in public places (e.g. in shops, churches or schools) so we could keep track and not duplicate.
- In our weekly rehearsals, we informed members how many tickets had been sold and encouraged them to further spread the word.
- NDCO always publishes concert announcements and post-concert reports in local parish newsletters and community publications, and for this concert we started contacting publications much earlier. We added the May concert date at the end of our Christmas concert report and asked people to save the date. We usually publish concert announcements once, in the publication ahead of the concert – but for this concert, we published twice with slightly different copy (the earlier version to ask people to save the date, the second version to remind them to buy tickets).
- We used Facebook and X to promote the concert.
- We encouraged other local music groups to advertise the concert to their members - in return, we returned the favour for their concerts.
- We encouraged people who had bought tickets to tell us if they were no longer able to attend so we could resell the tickets.
Pre-concert rehearsal, conducted by Music Director Sara Young
The outcome
Our ‘For One Night Only’ concert on 26 May 2004 was sold out!
We sold all 530 tickets two weeks before the concert and had a waiting list of people who still needed tickets; in fact, so many people were requesting tickets that we had to close the waiting list! Many of them asked to join our mailing list to be informed of our next concert so they don’t miss out again.
The concert was a huge success, enjoyed by members and audience alike and we learned a lot from the experience about selling tickets. We were lucky on this occasion that, because of the donation, we did not have a financial risk, although the sell-out meant that we would have covered all our costs without it. However, we do not plan to hold all our concerts in such a large venue; we plan on saving this wonderful theatre for special occasions - the NDCO’s 10th birthday is in a couple of years, so who knows?
What we do know is that we will carry on having fun making music under with our newly-appointed music director, Anna Tabor. We are, after all, the fun orchestra!
Find out more about the North Downs Community Orchestra on their website and follow them on Facebook and X (Twitter)
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