Tuesday 28 January 2020

Paying What You Decide

I love Pay Way You Decide as a concept, and as a movement.

But boy does it make it hard to organise ticketing.

It's fine, of course, until you start selling out. Whilst you have room for everyone, there's no reason to turn anyone away, and if they decide afterwards that the performance was not worth anything, then that's no loss.

The problem comes when you have a limited capacity.

You can say "no advance booking, first come first served on the door". The problem with this is that if 200 people show up on the door and you venue has room for only 100, you're turning away 100 people who are presumably, if not your fans, then at least interested in what you're doing, and giving them a shit evening. Which is not going to fill them with warm feelings towards you.

So as we don't want this to happen, we might say "tickets can be booked in advance for free, pay what you decide on the way out". Which is fine, until your 100 seat space is fully booked for an event, but then it rains, and 50 of those people go "fuck it, it's raining, the tickets didn't cost anything, let's stay in", and you play to a half empty room (previously) when there WERE easily 50 other people who would have wanted to come in spite of the rain and they missed out.

The thing is, the money charged for a ticket isn't only about how the venue and performers get paid. It's also a commitment from the ticket buyer to show up - or otherwise they will have wasted their money along with everyone else's time. It's what makes a performance professional, and respectful, and stops people wandering in and out half way through and deciding to have a chat with their mates instead.

I really want to have an answer - to be able to say "yes, the system supports Pay What You Decide by doing X". And so I'm talking to myself here working out what X is, but part of the problem is that I'm not sure I know well enough what PWYD is for. 

Is it a way of minimising the consumer surplus, just another dynamic pricing strategy that maximises the total revenue by allowing each audience member to decide (based on their good feelings, rather than reviews and buzz) how much the show was worth?

Is it an audience development strategy, where the point is to get people who don't normally to go the theatre to take a chance on it, safe in the knowledge that if it's shit (or they completely fail to understand it) they don't have to pay, whilst avoiding giving such steep discounts that you fail to make any money off the nice middle class people who normally buy tickets and keep the doors open?

Or its it a radical rethinking of the role of the audience in 21st century performing arts?

Or perhaps Pay What You Decide just isn't a good fit for popular things that are going to sell out. Perhaps we should just accept that people who can't afford an expensive ticket paid in full in advance shouldn't have access to quality live entertainment.



Dropping coins in a hat is another thing that doesn't scale up terribly well. Lets assume we also have an interest in capturing data about our audience, and letting them pay by card.



So what can we do? Depending on the answers above, I propose some or all of the following:

1. Do ticket ballots for all performances - even ones that aren't going to sell out. Ticket Ballot winners will hopefully feel more special about having "won" tickets than people wbo advance booked PWYD tickets for free. This also allows us to capture marketing info about people who want tickets.

2. Charge a minimum ticket price for advance bookings, and only let people in with no minimum on the door, where entry is not guaranteed. It will be important to make clear that the advance fee is a minimum required to secure the booking, and the balance of "what you decide" is payable afterwards.

3. Charge a standard ticket price in advance, but offer a no-quibble money back guarantee for any reason after the show - as long as the ticket buyer is there in person. If someone says "I didn't like it, and I'd like not to have paid for it", then they get their money. But if they didn't show up then tough - no money back over the phone.

4. Have simple, contactless donation points available for people to donate after the show. This sort of thing: https://www.goodbox.com/



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