Getting the word out

   You could easily be forgiven for thinking that during the summer break, Nothing Happens.  In fact, for some people, rather a lot happens, and I shall be talking to a few cast members next week about their preparation for the show.  In the meantime, I thought I'd tell you about one of the behind-the-scenes roles in which I seem to have got myself personally involved.
   No show is worthy of the name without an audience.  Frankly, the cast would doubtless find it hard to perform with no-one sitting in those oh-so-comfortable chairs and I did wonder last week at the National what it must have been like for the cast of the Ibsen play we went to, confronted with a half-empty house at the beginning of the play and an even emptier one by the time the interval was over.  So one of the key things, surprisingly, is not the singing, the dancing or even the acting, but getting those bums on those seats.  In other words, publicity.
   All members of BCOS are encouraged to sell tickets to their families, friends, neighbours and vague acquaintances, but we can't rely on that to fill the hall for the five performances, so yesterday Rina and I whiled away a cheery three hours in Wyevale's coffee shop (it was raining, so there was no chance of checking out the plants!) working out who and what to contact to best promote the show.  Rina has done this before and has a file full of lists and listings, but I'm a bit of a novice at it, which was probably why it took us such a long time to go through it all.
   The best kind of publicity is free publicity, so Rina has a list of a wide variety of websites relating to local events, usually free to post to, and another list of magazines and other media.  Some of them charge, so we've agreed it's time for another survey to find out where our audience has come from, in the hope that we can advertise the shows where people are most likely to see them.  No point spending money on ads that yield no additional audience figures.  Parish magazines are another good location, though they generally need ads in specific sizes and by specific dates, none of which are the same.  That may sound as though it saves a mad rush, but actually it requires planning with a military-style precision.  Trying to get word of the show into the local papers can be done, best of all with photos of cast-members in costume and make-up, but that will have to happen a little nearer the time.  Radio, TV? There's not much local TV coverage but we will send out press releases and keep our fingers crossed.
  The other kind of publicity that has usually worked well in the past is the posting of flyers through letter-boxes and stapling laminated sheets of A4 to telegraph poles.  Of course, the materials and the printing cost, so decisions need to be made *now* about how many to print of each size.  Some of the flyers can also be stuck up in windows or on village notice-boards and members are also encouraged to hand a few out at work (just in case you're not friends with your work colleagues but are quite happy to entertain them - for a fee).
  Previous audiences have said they knew about the show because of the roadside boards.  This is a tricky one because the council tends to remove boards that aren't advertising their own stuff and then the boards have to be reclaimed from Deddington, not always convenient.  But the boards do bring in audiences, so we're going to persist in placing them and hope the council don't notice too quickly.  A more expensive draw is the banner, partly because of the increased public liability insurance that would be needed.  Rina's going to find out just how cheaply she could get a banner in the hope that the combined banner+insurance cost is still roughly the same.  Banners are eye-catching!  Of course, we would then need to talk a couple of chaps (or chapesses) with ladders to put it in place for us, but we're pretty certain that the society will rise to that particular challenge.  They've mastered (almost) the rhythm at the end of 'Sit Down', after all!
  And then there are the emails.  I often mutter quietly to myself when asked to provide an email address somewhere because I just know it's going to be used for marketing at me, but having said that, it's really easy to delete an email if you don't want it.  So being on the other side of the fence any day now, I'm going to start being more willing to provide my email address for marketing purposes.  I have a pretty good spam filter, even if it does keep sticking emails from my Chinese friend in there.
  And yes, all that did take approximately three hours to get through.  I have a little bit of work to do - a couple of phone calls to make, a website to check out and a press release to work on - but in the meantime we think we know how we're going to be getting the word out about our show in November.  If you have any other ideas - magazines or websites we may have missed, contacts with skywriters or the like - please let me know in the comments.
  Of course, there's also Facebook, Twitter and the blog! Like, follow, retweet, invite all your Facebook friends to the event - spread the word.  We know it's going to be an excellent show so we have to have an audience.  Tickets will be on sale via the website or from SHJones from 1st October...