Check With Your Partrons First

Have your heard of Sliderocket? A new online presentation tool similar to a more advanced version of Powerpoint, Sliderocket allows you to embed polls in your presentations for immediate feedback from patrons and archive and embed your presentations on your website or blog for easy sharing and use as educational or training materials. Why is this important to the arts? As arts managers, we are always looking for more efficient ways to discern what our patrons want us to produce. Sliderocket's features afford us the opportunity to ask what our patrons think about a potential production before we produce it. Say, for example, an arts institution plans to commission a work from another theatre company to come and perform in its own space as a part of a theatre season. Imagination Stage did this recently with its production of Aquarium, a show conceived by Lyngo--an Ireland-based children's theatre. Using a tool like Sliderocket, a theatre could potentially preview stills or a video of a show they are interested in commissioning and poll its viewers with questions like: "Would you like to see a show like this at Imagination Stage?" or "What is your favorite part of this video? As commissioning a show can be costly, especially when dealing with a foreign company, a poll like this done early on can gauge interest from your patrons in a work you wish to produce.