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- Good morning.
So I started at Mu Performing Arts
about six years ago.
I'm on my sixth season right now.
It was August, 2007.
And, um--
I'll push that button there. Hold on.
Okay.
And I remember, before I took the job,
I was talking to some people,
and I was excited about this new position I was taking,
and these were patrons of the arts
who went to a lot of small theater,
and they said, "Yeah, Mu, you know,
"they're an interesting company,
but they're kind of hit and miss."
And right there I knew that there was a branding problem
with the organization that was gonna need
to be addressed and fixed,
because Mu does do interesting work.
We do great work.
And so we needed to work on--
There we go.
We needed to work on getting a better quality brand,
especially with the downturn in the economy.
I knew that we needed to do better community engagement.
And I also knew that-- Or, I'm sorry.
Increase our local and national profile,
and then also too, because of the downturn,
I wanted to make sure that we were relevant.
Relevancy for art, obviously,
is always the most important thing
for any organization,
because it makes your art immediate.
So how do we start to increase our quality and brand?
We didn't have any money
for a marketing budget or advertising,
so I thought the first thing we could do--
And I worked with artistic director Rick Shiomi on this.
The first thing we could do is improve our photography.
So the other thing we wanted to do
is improve our online presence.
And then, thirdly, we had a goal of joining Equity,
and I'll talk about that and why we thought
that was important in a minute.
So here's some of the older photos
that we had.
You can see there's some nice composition there,
but it's not really engaging.
And then in 2009, on a whim,
we contacted Michal Daniel,
who did all of Guthrie Theater's photography.
And I said, "I know you're probably
way out of my price range, but I love your photography."
And he says, "Well, I actually do have a special rate
for smaller nonprofits."
So just by asking, it was still more than double
what I was currently paying other photographers,
but I thought, "If I'm gonna start investing in marketing,
this is the place to do it."
So now we have this beautiful, lush photography
that's taken us several years to build,
kind of a repertoire of photos to use.
You can tell that all these photos
tell a story.
They're dramatic.
They show quality.
There you can see the one one the left there
is from "Ching Chong Chinaman."
The one on the right is from "Flower Drum Song,"
which is at the Ordway.
That's "The Romance of Magno Rubio"
and "WTF," which was at Mixed Blood Theatre.
And then this last one is from "Into The Woods,"
which we did last summer at Park Square Theatre.
So already, you can tell that the brand
and the expectation that our audiences
are gonna have are increasing.
So again, when I started,
this was kind of the template of our website.
Now, this is actually an update
based on some of the new photography
that we had started to have.
But I realized it just wasn't still enough.
So to increase our online presence
and to improve it, our brand quality,
I knew that the images need to be more up front,
more visible, and more powerful on the website.
There's too many buttons and links,
and you had to scroll down to see what was happening
underneath that.
So we did a major redesign of our website
based on this new photography that we invested in.
And this is the result there.
What's nice also about this website
is when you click on the show, there's a right side panel
that shows all the upcoming shows,
the little tiles, and you can click on those.
It's a great way to basically highlight
the investment we've made in the photography.
In line with that, we can use this photography
on our Facebook.
Just a few words about that:
We're currently at about 1,127 likes.
Because the analytics don't go back further
than 2011 of July,
I really wanted to try to figure out
where the peaks and valleys were
of where we got more likes or less likes.
But based on the analysis, we had--
Like, we were averaging, from the beginning until now,
.7 likes a day,
which, I think, is pretty impressive,
and it continues to grow.
And of course, it spikes during productions.
I'd also say too, our most effective post
that we've ever done on Facebook was during "Into The Woods,"
which had a very large cast,
and our marketing coordinator, Eric Sharp,
decided to go ahead and tag all of the performers
on the photo that was promoting the show,
and that got the largest reaction
and started the most viral conversations around the show
than anything we've ever done.
We did join Twitter.
That's all I'm gonna say about that.
[laughter]
Okay, so Actors' Equity, you know, you can say,
"Well, how is that gonna help your brand?
How is that gonna help your quality?"
or things like that.
One of Mu's mission is to support our artists,
and one way to do that is to join the union
so that when they work for Mu,
they can start acquiring hours to become Equity.
When they become Equity
and when they start getting hired at other houses
as an Equity actor,
that increases our brand.
When our artists start working at Park Square Theatre,
at the Guthrie Theater, at Mixed Blood Theatre,
that increases Mu's brand,
because those artists come back, and they work for us,
and audiences from other institutions see that,
and they want to come see them at our theater as well.
So some of the ways that we try to increase
the local and national profile,
I realize that, well, now that we had
the photography in place,
we needed to start investing in advertising dollars,
so we did that.
I find that the most effective is--
for us, anyway, has been "Star Tribune" online ads.
I don't think that when you have a very small budget
that print ads are very effective.
What just happened there?
Okay.
And the other thing we wanted to do,
besides increasing our advertising dollars is,
we wanted to start working at more high-profile venues.
So we started working more at the Guthrie Theater,
at the Ordway theater,
and we sought out Park Square Theater last summer
for "Into The Woods."
Again, these are very powerful brands.
People know what to expect
when they come to these institutions,
and we're essentially borrowing that brand
when we come into their space.
So it's quite an honor, number one,
to be allowed and invited to be there
but number two, to be asked to come back.
And so what we get is a lot of crossover audience,
and then they tend to follow us to other institutions.
And then we've been working on our national recognition
and national profile as well.
So we cohosted
the National Asian American Theater Conference here in 2008
with Pangea World Theater at the Guthrie Theater,
and we brought people in from all over the country,
other theater companies and things like that,
and we show that the Midwest has a presence in--
has a presence in the Asian-American theater scene.
That was kind of our big introduction
to them nationally.
And then recently, we published an anthology of plays,
and it was published by Temple University Press,
and seven out of the eight--
Or seven out of the eight plays in that anthology
were produced, workshopped
by Mu Performing Arts
or commissioned by Mu Performing Arts.
And so that was actually inducted
into the Library of Congress.
Along with that, on the book tour,
Rick went to Philadelphia,
he went to Washington, D.C.,
and he went to New York City
and also out in LA.
In doing that, he's been able to increase Mu's profile,
the kind of work that we're doing,
the kind of plays that we're producing,
and the kind of forward thinking we're doing in our programming.
Also too, we just had our 15th anniversary concert,
"Mu Daiko" concert at the Ordway.
We brought in international artists,
which is the most highest-profile artists
we ever had as guest musician artists.
I also--We decided to create a DVD
of that concert to sell
as a way to increase and promote brand awareness
for our Taiko programs.
On the DVD is also a documentary
that talks about kind of the making of
and all this.
So basically what I'm trying to cover
is outside of just promoting your shows,
we're talking about institutional marketing.
These are ideas outside of just the shows
that you can do to try to increase awareness
for your organization,
increase the profile for your organization,
and to get people talking outside
of just the work that you're doing.
And there's a picture of the book there.
So we have a number of community engagement programs,
and this goes back to the relevancy
and community aspect of what we wanted to accomplish
in the recent period that we've just gone through.
We started these community forums.
So three weeks before the production,
we would have a forum in which Randy Reyes,
our Community Liaison,
would get together a panel of experts
to talk about an issue that surrounds the play
that we're about to produce.
So we've done forums on things
such as "What If?: An Adoptee's Dilemma,"
about international adoption issues
from an adult adoptee's perspectives.
We've done supporting gay and lesbian youth.
"Before 'It Gets Better,'" I think is what we called it.
And we've done "Women in the Arts"
and empowering women in the arts
are some of the community forums we've done.
Those are very successful.
We collaborated with universities
in order to do those
so that we had an instant audience
in the students that were provided
by the professors that we collaborated with.
We've done our Stories Programs,
in which we've collaborated
with community service organizations
that work specifically with Asian-American youth.
So there's places like Hmong American Partnership,
Center for Hmong Arts & Talent, and other organizations.
And what we do is, we work with them
to tell their own stories,
and then we create them into a play
and have them perform them.
We've also done this in schools for ELL programs,
English language learner programs,
as a way for them to share immigrant stories
and things like that.
It's been very effective.
And as part of this relationship building,
we're inviting all of these youth
to come and see our shows for free,
and I think that's very important
as part of our creating kind of the next generation
of artists and audiences.
Rick Shiomi has also instigated a similar kind of program
at Augsburg College
and at the University of Minnesota
in which he's worked with college-age youth
on telling their own stories.
Those programs have been very effective,
and they'll continue.
Again, those students are invited
to come and see our shows.
And then we also did the backstage pass
in which we told teachers,
"Look, if you bring your class to our show,
"we'll send a representative from our theater
to come talk about the show."
It hasn't really been utilized or that effective.
I don't know if we just need to advertise it better or what.
And thirdly, I can't speak enough about programming.
Obviously, no matter how much marketing you do,
if the programming is bad, it's not gonna go anywhere.
So I give a lot of credit to Rick Shiomi's leadership
and his vision and foresight in taking risk.
Every year in the last five or six years,
he's taken a major risk per season.
And what that allows us to do is,
if one show doesn't do as well,
we have the big one coming up that we can talk about.
And I think that's always important, again,
when it comes to branding and all that kind of thing.
So I just want to talk quickly about pricing again.
Now, we've been actually increasing our price range
and also lowering our discount range.
So to those people that we want to target,
$10 tickets.
To everyone else, we've been bumping up the price.
It's gone from $18 up to $40 in the last four or five years.
So I'm running out of time here,
but I just want to show you the graph,
basically, from 2006 to 2012.
You can see the audience numbers.
You can see our box office totals right there.
And then you can see--
If you look in the far right,
that's the advertising dollars that we're spending.
In FY '08, that was actually from a grant that we got.
Most of that money went to a professional firm.
Other than that, the rest of those
are advertising dollars we're spending.
You can see the total increase,
audience increase.
And then, most importantly,
our Asian-American audiences
have actually increased quite a bit
in the last three seasons, which has been a goal of ours,
and I think that has to do a lot
with the engagement that we've been doing.
So in conclusion,
we've managed to increase our brand.
We've had lots of great response
from audiences, from critics.
Graydon Royce has recently declared,
"This is the golden era of Mu."
Dominic Papatola recently said
that it's not just good Asian-American theater.
It's good theater,
which in some ways is progress.
Also too, one of the things that's happening
during this time period is,
our board of directors went from 80% Caucasian
to 80% Asian-American,
which, I think, is very significant,
and I think it shows that the work that we're doing
is more relevant to the community
we're trying to serve.
Thank you.
[applause]