Planning & Management Methods

Defined Community: Young/new and old/long-time orchestra goers.

Our Hedgehog (Financial Sustainability Model): The vision of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra is “Great music in every life.” We are deeply passionate about increasing access of the orchestral music we provide to people primarily from Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, ultimately creating increased mobility and affordability measures to providing relevancy and interest to larger audiences. The PSO can set itself apart by attracting new audiences to classical music through progressive and equitable season planning practices while continuing to present exceptional performances of pieces from the traditional orchestral canon. We will continue to drive our economic engine through the support of these new audiences. We believe through these innovative programs which unite generations and uplift the underappreciated, we have the ability to bring many new people into the PSO family, bringing about more return visitors as well as incubating those who will become donors in the future.

Design Thinking in Season Planning: This season, we have implemented new practices to efficiently engage in season planning, while meeting the demands of the community. To begin, we held an executive staff meeting to determine what programming ideas/problems/concepts we desired to tackle this season. What was our primary problem? Increasing audience age diversity and forming coexistence throughout generational differences. Next, we used post-its and brainstorming to re-frame the problem in our minds, determining our desired impact, possible solutions, and manageable constraints. This allowed us to develop an aligned and deep understanding of the problem at hand and the role our organization can play.

• Problem: Increasing diversity of age and race in audiences and getting them to co-exist through an accurate representation of classical music.
• Desired Impact: Creating sustainable audiences and making the Symphony a staple of the community as a whole, by creating concert experiences both generations, while lifting up people of color and women in the orchestral world.
• Possible Solutions: Integrating a balance between new and old works, integrating more casual practices into shows, while holding ourselves to standards that reflect sophisticated concerts that would be seen as high-class events. Also incorporating more composers and performers of color and women.
• Constraints: Having older audience members who are resistant to change, the monetary risk of programmatic changes, and possible resistance from musicians who may not want to perform popular music.

Next, we’ve implemented the practice of story-boarding our seasons, allowing management to thoroughly think through the planning process in terms of implementation. Understanding what the audience experience might look like and seeing the timeline in this way allowed us to consider the speed at which we incorporate new experiences into the season and how we can do this at a rate and frequency that will not upset our regular attendees. It is through this process that we decided to balance the season between upscale concerts that our regular attendees are more used to and innovative experiences that we hope will attract a wider range of visitors.

In order to determine what non-typical elements we would add to the season (like adding dance, new music, and having a concert in the community), we held focus groups with community members of all ages and representatives of our own musicians during the planning phase. This allowed us to see our target audience’s interests and methods to engage a broader range of people. Additionally, it allowed the musicians to give input in the direction they would like the Symphony to take and to understand the needs of the community first hand, with the goal of opening them up to the idea of interchanging some more popular or new music and casual settings with the standard repertoire and experience.

Prototype/Testing for Our Season: The entire season will serve as a prototype of sorts. Each concert will try out a different format of concert, from being held in the community, to involving dance, to a concert with typical orchestral music, but with casual dress. After each concert, management will debrief on how it went, discussing ticket sales, return attendees, audience demographics, and conversations held with audience members in order to gauge how successfully (or unsuccessfully) the concert experience was perceived and if it is bringing a benefit to the community. After this debriefing, the team will then begin the sprint to the next concert. At the final performance of the season, we will have a table where we will ask visitors to put a blue marble in the jar representing their favorite part of the season, or a green marble for what they would have been most excited about if they didn’t attend any other events that season. At the end of the season as a whole, management will conduct a survey and a couple focus groups with visitors in order to gauge which concert experience they enjoyed or resonated with the most and if there were any aspects of the season that they felt negatively impacted their experience.

Measures to Determine if We’re Successful: Look at audience numbers to determine if a wider variance in age was present, with an overall increase in attendance and return-visitors. Talk with musicians and visitors to see if they enjoyed the season more or less than previous years and if it met their expectations. Compare number of works created and performed by women and Persons of Color to that of previous years.