Minstrel Booking

From: The Minstrel <mike.agranoff@folkproject.org>

Sent: Saturday, September 29, 2018 2:12 PM

To: 'Folk Project' <fullboard@folkproject.org>

Cc: Gary Pratt <prattdiv@comcast.net>

Subject: Minstrel Booking Report, October 2018

Overall

A pretty decent month for the Minstrel in September. We averaged a paid attendance of 85 (113.3 avg. total attendance) for the three shows, and showed a $434 profit for the month. More importantly, it appears to herald a return to profitability for the Minstrel, a condition that has held since mid-July. And we finally broke into the black for the Year-To-Date with an overall profit of $291. I really can’t say what factor I attribute that trend to. Or to put it more accurately, I can’t say to what factors I attribute the poor performance for the early part of the year. Shows last Spring that should have been really solid draws like The Heather Pierson Trio, Jim Kweskin, and Toby Walker were woefully underattended. But this month, Bill Staines and Beppe Gambetta drew 105 and 91 paid respectively, which is more in line with what I would have expected. Beats me.

Concert Window

Concert Window viewership is slowly but steadily improving. And its reliability, with regards to establishing and maintaining a solid connection with their server is improving, although is by no means rock solid. I’ve attached the text of a couple of emails I got from expatriate Projectile David Waks, who praises the broadcasts to the skies.

Advance Ticket Sales

I met with Gary Pratt for several hours on September 18 to work out some overall approaches to establishing a system of Advance Ticket Sales at the Minstrel. We arrived at the following: rough plan

• We will use Constant Contact as our vendor. Ticket prices for the customer will be the same for advance and at-the-door. The Minstrel will absorb the cost of the associated fees. We decided upon Constant Contact primarily because the fees associated with those sales would be considerably lower than those of any other platform.

• Gary Pratt will administer the program, interfacing with me to get the concert schedule, and with Amy to get the appropriate information to the Door and Bookkeeper staff. He will post the shows on Constant Contact, and prepare the advance sales results to forward to the on-site staff. Details on how that transfer of information would be made are yet to be determined.

• We will institute advance sales starting with the show of January 18. (I would have liked to have the program in place for the Susan Werner show of January 4, but that one is likely to entail extra complications of a potential sellout. We’d rather get the routine shows squared away before tackling the special cases.)

• Advance tickets will go on sale for all shows starting January 18 as soon as we can have the system in place.

• We will sell advance tickets for all shows except Open Stages. We rejected starting out with a pilot program for just a few shows for the following reason: The major work would be in integrating the advance sales with the at-the-door sales, and running them through the Tally Sheet. We could do it manually without the Tally Sheet, but we wouldn’t learn anything by doing that, because we already know how to do that from Special Concerts. And once the system is set up, it’s no more work to do for all shows than for a few test shows. If we get no advance sales for some shows, it won’t cost us anything. And for consistency of operation, both for our staff and for our customers, it will be better to have the same procedures in place for all shows.

• Advance sales will close at midnight of the day before the show.

• All advance sales will be final. No refunds as long as the show goes on as scheduled.

• There is a potential problem of our not having enough cash on hand to pay a performer whose show has been largely sold through advance sales. Our current thinking is that we will solve that by providing an emergency fund, to be kept in a sealed envelope taped to the inside bottom of the cash box. But we are open to exploring other approaches.

• We have yet to fully work out procedures on what to do when the show is largely or completely sold out in advance, but we have a general approach, which I’m not going to detail here.

I would like to thank John Lamb, Lori Falco, and Chris Riemer, all of who provided invaluable assistance and advice in advancing our decision-making process on this program. Those three and myself will be meeting with Gary Pratt next Wednesday to work out some of the nuts-and-bolts details of the processes.

Redesigned Tally Sheet

Partly inspired by the changes required by the upcoming Advance Ticket Sales program, but also because the design of the Tally Sheet was becoming unwieldy in its original .php document format, John is re-designing the Tally Sheet to run in Excel. We have purchased a copy of Microsoft Office from Tech Soup (an outfit that supplies hardware and software to non-profits at extremely reduced prices) for $29 to load onto the Minstrel computer in order to run the new design sheet.

New bookings this past month

November 16:................... Multi-instrumentalist Russ Rentler opening for the Shockenaw Mountain Boys

November 30: .................. Frank & Hank opening for Reeds, Rhythm, and All That Brass. Both Frank Sole and Hen3ry Nerenberg are also part of the main act.

December 7:..................... Ken Schatz, Jerry Krantman, Carrie Cantor, and Mike Agranoff will be the song leaders on Chorus Song Night.

March 1:........................... Mike & Ruthy (of the Mammals). Ruthy is Ruth Ungar, daughter of well known fiddler Jay Ungar, and that apple did not fall far from that tree.

March 29:......................... Phil Ochs Song Night. Members of this year’s troupe will be Greg Greenway, Reggie Harris, Tom Prasada-Rao, and Pat Wictor. Phil’s sister Sonny Ochs will host.

Respectfully submitted:

Mike Agranoff

Program Chair

The Minstrel Acoustic Concert Series

Morristown, NJ. USA

www.Minstrel.FolkProject.org