Sam Freeman

Storytelling | Theatre | Arts Marketing

Tag: theatre

  • Tour Autopsy: Every Time I Close My Eyes

    Tour Autopsy: Every Time I Close My Eyes

    I’ve been touring my second storytelling show over the last month or so – Every Time I Close My Eyes (All I See Is You). Regular readers will know this is my second tour (the autopsy of that tour is here) and I like to take a little bit of time to evaluate what I’ve…

  • Exploring Data: Show Search

    Exploring Data: Show Search

    I’ve been writing arts marketing blog posts for what feel like a long time now. I decided in my 2023 New Year’s Resolutions to make a few changes to how and why I write them. Increasingly I felt like I wasn’t saying or doing anything particularly original – instead merely regurgitating some version of what…

  • A Beginners Guide To Theatre Pricing

    A Beginners Guide To Theatre Pricing

    I’ve not annoyed as many people as usual recently with my theatre blog posts – this one however will infuriate so many people because it’s a beginners guide and doesn’t mention a huge amount of complexity and data that underpins what I’m talking about. So, if you’re reading this and thinking “this is utter bullshit…

  • Arts Marketing: 50 Easy-To-Do Tips

    Arts Marketing: 50 Easy-To-Do Tips

    First things first – 50 tips, easy-to-do or otherwise, is a fuck-load of tips. I’ve been wanting to write a big tips list* for ages – I’ve a draft folder which has around 40 arts marketing articles in, all at different stages of disarray. I thought about combining them in this article, instead, reading them…

  • Arts Marketing: Preparing For What’s Next

    Arts Marketing: Preparing For What’s Next

    Or ideas of things to do over the next couple of months… I’ve been in a weird mood since Christmas – a kind of grumpy, unfocused, curmudgeon, working hard but also not feeling like, well, I’m actually making a difference. Now, of course, some of that is the destabilising effect of being in lockdown, missing…

  • Five Thoughts For Friday (19 Feb, 2021)

    Five Thoughts For Friday (19 Feb, 2021)

    I was reading a blog of someone who, since lockdown, has written down 7 things every day, keeping a record of their thoughts and how it’s all been going. Now I totally don’t have enough thoughts to reach 7, but I thought I’d give it a go! Some are about arts marketing, some are about…

  • Arts Marketing – Building houses on jelly

    Arts Marketing – Building houses on jelly

    I’ve been looking to see what proactive steps I and the team I’m part of can take while the jelly beneath us solidifies over the coming weeks and months.

  • Arts Marketing – So What Do We Do Now?

    Arts Marketing – So What Do We Do Now?

    So, I decided I’d write down some ponderings of where my head is at, what I think the direction of travel might be.

  • All my controversial thoughts about how to run theatre right. Not wrong. Like you might do it. Yeah you.

    All my controversial thoughts about how to run theatre right. Not wrong. Like you might do it. Yeah you.

    So, here it is, strap in, I’ve got some truth bombs to release, I’m going to let rip, welcome to the fast lane of opinions, the deep fat fryer of fact, I may even use CAPS LOCK, or maybe Randomly Capitalise Words for little or no apparent reason, underlining get ready, CRTL + U, prepare…

  • Holidays, Ideas and Ponderings

    Holidays, Ideas and Ponderings

    I’m currently on holiday in Lisbon having a bit of a break with my other half. I brought the mini-laptop along with all sorts of high aspirations to write a play, create some art or learn a new skill. Suffice to say we’ve nailed a good chunk of Netflix late at night. Anyway, I thought…

  • The Bigger Picture: Using Data In The Arts

    The Bigger Picture: Using Data In The Arts

    ****Please Note: This is unremittingly a blog about theatre marketing, data and being smarter**** How it all started About four months ago I was sat in a meeting at the theatre I work for as conversation bounced round the table. Every now and again a question would be asked or a statement stated – “how…

  • The art of the season brochure

    Today I signed off Unity Theatre’s season brochure – the last of my six year tenancy as Marketing Manager (I’m going to Theatre Clwyd and am dead excited as you will undoubtedly discover over the next 6 months!) – and I felt a wave of emotions briefly as I said “yes, print it”. The first…

  • Rain, driving and hills

    Today was an odd day with a smattering of driving pain, driving in rain, new dawns and sunrises. It was my first post interview visit to my new employers in North Wales, a pre visit before I start properly in Wales. I was at Unity in the morning sorting some brochure odds and ends before…

  • Arts Marketing: Six things I wish I’d known…

    I have been given two pieces of rock solid theatrical advice in the past 15 years and both I’ve used when directing shows. The first was from a now-acclaimed performer and creative who said the key to any show was to “get in quick, say what you have to say concisely and get out quick”.…

  • The right (& fight) to experiment in arts organisations

    The right (& fight) to experiment in arts organisations

    The last couple of weeks have been tough for me professionally at work. It’s the classic story, too much happening all at the same time, a feeling of helplessness, being overwhelmed and needing to find some order, some way of making sense of what appears unexplainable and undecipherable chaos. I think this is a pretty…

  • Cats, dogs and why we live.

    Cats, dogs and why we live.

    Firstly, before you read any further, let me drop a couple of truths before you read any more (then you can decide whether I’m going to waste your time or not). This blog post is heavily related to arts marketing and theatre It is also related to the idea of owning a dog (even though…

  • The Future Of Arts Marketing (and Theatre)

    On Wednesday I attended the Spektrix Conference at the Lyric Hammersmith which was, at it invariably always is, incredibly thought provoking. One of the lightning talks took a fictional look at how theatre ticketing might be in 2020, looking back over the past 5 years of innovation that is yet to happen. It was funny,…

  • Marketing DIY: Intermediate Heat Mapping (Genre)

    In the last Marketing DIY post (here) we talked about how you can do a basic heat mapping of your auditorium. We took basic data contained within your database to look at how long prior to booking people actually booked their tickets, used this as a basic measure of demand and then mapped it using conditional…