How to Produce a Successful Culture Show (Part 2 of 2)
Note: Ten steps to producing the best culture show ever. Last five steps. View previous five steps.
Step Six: Surround Yourself with a Reliable Staff
A culture show, no matter how small the production, is too large of a project to micro-manage from the top. This is why delegating tasks to reliable people is a critical part to executing the show.
Before creating positions and delegating tasks, you must have a good sense of what needs to be done. Don’t create positions just for the sake of creating them – make sure that you have a real need and can actually find people to fill them. Since logistics – the process of reserving, sourcing, and scheduling various components of the show – is at the heart of the production, you will need to have one or more people to help you in this area.
(Step Six continued along with the rest, after the jump!)
For our Columbia show, I put a great deal of faith into our Production Coordinator, who was in charge of making sure that the space, lighting, and equipment were in place as well as all the action on stage during the performance. He had two assistants to help him, and he gave me daily updates so I knew what was going on. This freed me up to play a bigger role in shaping the publicity campaign and fundraising efforts. If you find yourself more inclined to stage production or actual performance, then you should delegate the task of marketing, fundraising, or programming to someone else. It’s all about finding the right people for the right task.
Production team setting up stage prop
To give you an idea of how tasks were delegated for our show, I’ll list the other culture show board positions and their responsibilities:
Our board numbered over twenty people including assistants and board members working exclusively on the fashion show. The Associate Director, Finance Manager, and I shared five “generalists” who were flexible underclassmen up for any task. They were very instrumental in soliciting sponsors, making space reservations, and even lending a hand in flyering. A dedicated group eager to excel at even the most menial of tasks is a rare luxury - we were lucky.
Not all shows will require such a big support team. The key is to scale according to the size of the show so that everyone has a manageable amount of responsibilities. And be sure to hold everyone accountable - you don’t want any flaking out in the eleventh hour.
Step Seven: Promote Early and Often
Many people miss out on an event simply because they don’t know anything about it. Increase your chances early by publicizing the basics of your event: Event name, date, time, and location. There are a number of ways to promote the show and the more persistent you are, the better your chances of attracting more people.
Poster and postcard flyer from 2005
Some methods that might be useful:
Teaser grahpic of gayo performers on website
Pasting flyers all over campus will not guarantee higher attendance, but it can be part of an overall publicity campaign that creates buzz. Get people talking about the show so that they’ll be curious and compelled to go. Have a really good video skit planned for the show? Post a short trailer on YouTube. Put up funny or interesting photos of performers on the front page of your website so people ask questions or make comments. Hype and the attention it brings is as important as a good show - because what is a good show if nobody is there to watch it happen?
Start promoting the show early, let people know when and where it is, and don’t let up until the moment the show begins.
Step Eight: Sell Tickets Aggressively
Ticket sales make culture shows possible (at least financially). The way to maximize your gains on ticket sales is to sell aggressively. Don’t wait until the night of the event to hope that enough people come and buy tickets. Try to take as many tickets off your hands in the weeks prior to the event, even if it means giving buyers a discount.
At Columbia, we held an Early Bird one-day special for tickets five weeks before the actual show. Discounts were as steep as 50% off the at-the-door price, and we even gave away a free iPod Shuffle to generate interest. By selling a good chunk of our tickets early, it relieved some of the pressure of having to make more sales later on. If you are planning on holding advance box office hours for ticket sales, be sure to publicize widely through your club e-newsletter or through flyers.
Tip: One way we generated extra revenue with our tickets was to divide our seating areas into VIP and Regular sections. We charged extra for the VIP seats and also used the VIP area for our special guests (administrators, sponsors, club leaders, etc.). This arrangement also allowed us to manage the seating assignments for families of performers who wanted to reserve big blocks of seats.
Step Nine: Prepare for Wandering Eyes
When people are asked to sit patiently for two or three hours while amateur performances are taking place, it’s important to remember that not everyone will be fully engaged with what’s happening on stage. Your best wish is for the acts to capture everyone’s attention, but a more practical solution is to take advantage of wandering eyes and offer different versions of the show so that as a whole, the show is a complete experience. Two things come to mind when we look off-stage: the details of the space and the show program.
Although the main action will take place on stage, it doesn’t hurt to have well-designed artwork all around the auditorium (or whatever performance space you use). At Columbia, to echo our forward-looking theme of Generation Four, we covered the walls with fancy skyscraper silhouettes. We also had large cut-out lettering in our display cases as nice backdrops to photos that people might take before and after the show. We also had tables for collecting donations (we had an elaborately designed wooden box) as well as tables selling Korean snack boxes. Each box had a well-designed sticker label that explained the contents as cultural tidbits, enhancing the overall feel of the snack. We sold all our boxes in a matter of minutes.
Attendees flipping through the program
Front and backside cover
The amount of resources and hours poured into our program reflects the importance we placed on the program as a part of the show and as a lasting memento. Our program, 48-pages in total, was printed offset in full-color on matte finished paper and saddle-stitched. It was our most expensive program ever, but it also carried more pages of advertising than we had in previous years (22 pages total), which covered all the costs of printing and left enough money for other expenses.
A sampling of sponsor ads in our program
The key to our program was strong photography. We spent many hours thinking up effective ways to photograph our performers in interesting settings. We rented fancy camera equipment and took hundreds of photos before selecting a dozen or so for the final layout. Our goal was heighten our audience’s anticipation for each act by giving crisp descriptions with vivid, dramatic photos that would linger in their minds during the act and even after it.
Drum Troupe photo take in Central Park
Spend enough time on the program so that it becomes an item on its own – let it be something that the performers, their parents, and other audience members take home as a reminder of how great the show was. (Download the 2005 Culture Show PDF)
Step Ten: Document and Finish Strong
The greatest injustice you can do to a culture show is to do a poor job of documenting it. By documenting the event, there are several options such as video recording or filing important documents, but nothing as important as taking good photographs.
Photography is the most important element since photo images have such instant impact and can be used in various ways. Hire professional photographers or assemble a volunteer group of talented photo enthusiasts. If you need to rent equipment and your budget permits, go all out! A wide-angle lens or extra CF cards for more shots are perfectly justifiable expenses. Be sure you use an SLR camera and not just any digital camera. Have photographers take pictures from all angles and distances. Send someone backstage to take photos of performers getting ready or looking nervous. A journalistic approach to taking photos (i.e. with an intent to tell a story) will always capture an event more effectively.
After taking the photos, be sure to organize them and start compiling a selection of 50 or 100 best shots. Even if you take more than a thousand photos (which we did), you’ll notice that only a few dozen photos will really stand out at you. That’s just the nature of photography – even with talent, quantity gives you the best shot at finding quality images.
Once you have these photos organized, cropped, and post-processed (adjust lighting/contract in Adobe Photoshop if necessary), you will have a gold mine to use for the next year: showcase your accomplishment for the year, use it to attract new freshmen members in the fall, and print them on fundraising packets for next year’s show. The possibilities are endless.
If you are ambitious and want to go a step further, spend money on hiring a video recording crew and find someone who can help to author a DVD after the show. A well-packaged DVD can go a long way towards pleasing performers and attracting new talent for the next year. Or if you’d like to save money, create something online for people to view (here’s what we did for our 2004 Culture Show).
And lastly, don’t treat the culture show like it’s the last that’ll ever take place. Many people, because this may be the only culture show they participate in, will be glad to get things over with and out of their lives. Before you do that, be considerate and gather up any files or materials that were of use to you and also jot down some notes about things you learned along the way. Put all this on a CD or a ZIP file and be sure to leave it to someone who can pass it on to the leaders of the next culture show. This is how you can keep your legacy going – not through a one-night spectacular, but through a willingness to instill a tradition of success for many culture shows to come.
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