BWW Blog: Diana Sanchez - How to Get Non Theatre People to Come to Your Shows

Once you have put your show together and you are ready to perform it in front of an audience, there is only one thing left to do: sell tickets. Now we all know the basics of selling tickets. You make pretty fliers to put up, you invite all of your friends to come, you make sure that all of your family will be attending. That's the easy part, you know that all of your fellow theatre nerds will be there, and that common show go-ers, friends, and family will mostly likely attend as well. But, how do you sell tickets to the people who aren't usually seen within a couple hundred feet of the auditorium? This is more difficult. Non theatre people will usually not stop to look at a flier and be interested to go to a show. To get people like this to go you have to do a little more convincing.

First off, when you approach people who don't normally see shows to tell them to come see your show, you can't just say "Hey, you should come see the show next week!" You'll mostly get the half interested "I'll see if i can make it" response, which by my experience, usually means you won't be seeing their face at any of the productions. When you tell people to come see your show, talk it up! Don't just tell them to come, tell them why they should come. Tell them what your show is about, explain the storyline to them a little bit, but leave them with a bit of a cliff hanger at the end and tell them they can't find out the rest until they come see the show. Furthermore, don't forget to mention what a great support to your troupe/club it will be if they come.

If this strategy seems like it is not working, then the next thing to do is to figure out creative ways to advertise your show. For example, my troupe found a creative way to get people to ask about our show during our spring show. The show that we did this last spring was Elephant's Graveyard by George Brant. For this show, about half of the cast had to speak in southern accents and most of this show is made up of individual monologues. So our director instructed us that every time we passed by another a cast member at school, we had to say one of our lines from the show, completely in character and with our accent if we had one. Now of course this felt really awkward at first. I mean, weren't people who weren't involved in the show just going to think that we were being really weird theatre kids? To my surprise, even though i'm sure there were many people who just thought we were really weird, I had many people curiously asking me why I was doing this and what I was saying these lines for. This opened a window that allowed me to then tell them that they would find out if they came to see our show. This made people curious and interested in our show in a different and fun way. And instead of me going up to people, people were coming up to me.

So basically, even though there's many different ways to advertise, there's not really a sure fire way to get non theatre people to come see your shows. The only things that you can do are advertise like crazy. I'm talking posting about your show everyday on all of your social media accounts. Put up fliers everywhere. Invite everyone you talk to, even if you don't know them. Try to come up with fun ways to advertise to different types of people, not just theatre people. And simply just be excited for your show! To get people to come see your shows, you have to be excited for your show. If you don't seem excited for your own show, then no one else will. Show your excitement every time you talk or post about your show. Your excitement will translate into how people think the quality of your show will be, and the better quality they presume it will be, the more likely they are to attend. As my theatre teacher has said before, "Every empty seat at a show is a wasted opportunity." So show your excitement for your show and save those opportunities from being wasted.

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