Attending: Brighton Fringe Julian Caddy
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Venue Manager Meeting Agenda Tuesday 23 February 2021, 10:30 - 12:30 Attending: Brighton Fringe Venue Managers: Julian Caddy - CEO Philip Gandey – Gandey Productions /Lady Sarah Perryman - Head of Operations & Boys of Bangkok Development Ross Drury – Living Record Festival Amy Greenwood - Venues and Companies JD Henshaw – Sweet Venues Manager Sarah Johnson – Sweet Venues Rosie Blackwell-Sutton - Marketing Adrian Bristow – Brighton Spiegeltent Manager Alex Petty – Laughing Horse Amy MacGregor - Office & HR Manager Charles Pamment - SpaceUK Josh Jones – Marketing Coordinator Ross Ericson and Michelle Yim - Rotunda Cameron Brown - Participant Services Will Mytum - BOAT Coordinator Paul Musselwaite - Komedia Peter Massera – Gandey Productions /Lady Boys of Bangkok Board Roger Kay – Rialto Theatre Jamie Arnell - Chair of the Board Nicky Haydn – Otherplace Productions Jenni Lewin-Turner - Board Member Emma Willcocks - Grace Eyre/ Purple Playhouse Tom Arr-Jones – Otherplace Productions 1. CRF contingency planning - who is this ‘make or break’ for? BF plans either way. Nicky Haydn: Not sure. Adrian Bristow: Not sure. Roger Kay: Didn’t get the funding, has heard back – heard yesterday via email to let you know there was correspondence on the account. Philip Gandey: Ineligible because received over max in 1st round. 2. Feedback on Brighton Fringe 5 year plan. The 5 year plan can be viewed here. Jamie Arnell: A lot of this is quite obvious – some things being a bit more revolutionary that you’d think. The two main ones are – the Fringe is very deliberately putting itself second in all of the considerations, rather than trying to drive ticket sales through our own box office. On the marketing side will be looking for more targeting of audiences. What’s vital if this strategy is to work is to get as much data from you so we can see what umbrella marketing is doing to audience numbers. We need ticket information - more info, better decision making Julian Caddy: Virtuous circle aim is bums on seats across the board – everything we do goes towards driving that objective. Leads towards audience numbers. It’s not the objective to be as big as Edinburgh. Adrian Bristow: The whole approach is like the ABCD plan – which I’m not a fan of. I’m hugely disappointed. Some new people have come into this process and talked amongst themselves and decided. JA: This is for BF as a company and not for everyone else. We need the exchange of data and feedback on whether this is inconsistent with what you’re trying to achieve yourself. Are these metrics accurate for measuring what we should be doing ourselves? AB: The fact remains I don’t see how you ‘you’ holistically can have come up with the strategy without understanding the eco-system. Disappearing venues, outdoor spaces. How could you do this without consultation? JA: The idea of this meeting is to get your thoughts. We couldn’t do a full survey of the eco-system. This is about what we can do as Brighton fringe. If we put artistic diversity at the core of the strategy – would you have said the core was wrong? We’re saying we think the most important thing at the moment ‘bums on seats’ AB: Not sure that’s the general feeling JA: And that’s what we’re looking at, and what the core question is. If we were looking at artistic content over ticket sales we’d be looking at awards/bursaries over marketing. Not what we’re proposing, as we don’t have that luxury right now. Those are the sorts of trade-offs we’re seeking to explore. AB: You’ve said quite rightly you can’t, but you could have put some venue managers into a zoom meeting to knock some ideas around. JA: We aren’t trying to define your strategy, only ours AB: Far too much on growth. It’s not what we need in my opinion and colleagues spoken to. We desperately need to improve quality of the experience. Support venues, support artists and audience. Growth is something we focus on after. JC: Improving the quality of the experience is in there. JA: What people need from us if people are in serious financial risk, and nothing stops us revisiting this in the future. AB: But we’re not going to be here! JA: The only way we can help you be here (apart from lobbying – which we do) is by trying to bring your revenue however it comes to you – by your own box office or ours. I don’t know what the right balance is but we do sort of have to choose what we focus on now and I’m hearing that that’s not the right focus. AB: That’s my opinion – I think we understand each other. JA: If others feel the same we can revisit AB: my average sales are 60%, if they were 90% perhaps I’d want to grow. The massive problems for me and the Fringe is there’s no demographic out there, there’s too much going on. What we need is to hunker down and improve the experience, start bringing more audience holistically into the fold, because we’re delivering a better product at a better time JC: That’s part of the plan. We need to develop that audience base. We want to bring more people in from London for example, and other places further afield and across the south coast. People who wouldn’t have heard Brighton fringe was on and of course core audiences too. Just look at how events who’ve been successful at bringing audiences in from further afield have done. Say, Philip Gandey, to try and increase our reach in a similar way. This is the beginning of a conversation not the end of it. JA: If there are things you think are missing or you don’t agree with please let us know. We have more events as part of driving the circle which goes against what you’re saying, Adrian. The view we’ve taken is there’s a critical mass that if you create a bigger souk, everyone in the souk does better. Getting a critical mass whereby you’re tapping into more audience because there’s more on offer. It’s very challengeable. Feel free to take shots at the bits around the wheel. AB: How do we do that? The fact that we have a forum of several respected creative practitioners and we’re not able to have an active debate suggest it isn’t the best forum, so ‘we’ need to find better ways of consulting with the stakeholders. JA: Best way is through the board observer – for everyone else listening, if you do have thoughts then we would really welcome them. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing here please contact us. AB: Who do we email? JA: Julian. If we see particular themes arising we can address them. Similarly with the venue observer. If we have a subset meeting people might feel excluded. AB: If I’ve been asking the board for something for 8-10 weeks without response, who do I go to then? JA: Hopefully that won’t happen. We on the board have a responsibility to you and the Fringe. The board observer will be there, in part, to hold us to account if we’re not doing something you think we should be doing. The board is there to make a decision and by definition not everyone will be happy with decisions made. The butt stops with the board. JC: This is an open discussion for everyone who wants to continue it. Please do email me with any feedback and we can take this further. JA: We want to avoid the pitfalls that come with pursuing audience growth. What the fringe does need is a clarity of purpose. A bad outcome would be to write a really long wish list and not to choose where to prioritise and to focus. The organisation is small and has limited resources and can only pull so many levers at once. It’s about pulling the key levers as the Fringe (individuals may pull other levers). I don’t think wise to incorporate every inconsistent view and manage an organisation to all of those, it’s an impossible task. We’ve made a guess as to what’s going to be most important going forwards. We can change that but we have to choose otherwise we won’t be able to hit any objectives JD Henshaw: I raised issues when we first saw the circle a couple of meetings ago, I completely agree we need to grow our audiences, 60% means plenty of room to grow. I am cautious of event number growth when we don’t have audience to sustain it. The fixation on commercial growth in that way, when we’re an artistic endeavour, we need to find a better balance. Right now it’s about audience growth. Brighton Fringe is in the top 5 in the world regarding number of events, its idea is having more events to create more of something else. Development of audiences feels like the priority. JA: The thing I’m asking myself is; in order to improve an audience relationship, you’d need a certain amount of turnover in the offer: new events and venues. And, within that there needs to be a vibrancy in the offering in terms of things coming and going. Balance between finding fresh content and operators and moving sales for existing venues. How do we strike a balance? JD: There’s an organic nature to that balance.