The Stolen Chair Theatre Company

Jon Stancato
Co-Artistic Director, The Stolen Chair Theatre Company
http://www.stolenchair.org

Jon Stancato is the co-artistic director of The Stolen Chair Theatre Company, a non-profit theatre collaborative based in New York.  Below, Jon outlines how the organization is utilizing social media to further build it’s audience and community of supporters and donors.

Connecting Audiences, Building Community, and Sustaining Art

New York’s Stolen Chair Theatre Company is a critically-acclaimed award-winning  non-profit collaborative theatre lab, now in its 7th season, dedicated to the theft, recycling, and reexamination of historical performance styles and to the creation of visually stunning and uniquely contemporary theatre where the earnest and the ironic happily co-exist. We have, since launching our first website in 2002, quite a few weeks before launching our first production, always understood the importance of leveraging the latest web technologies to enhance communication with our audience and community of supporters.  Casual supporters can browse our regularly updated website (which averages 3,000 visits per month and 4,000 visits when we have a show running), full of rich original content (like script excerpts, reviews, production photos, and reading lists), where they can sign up for our bi-weekly e-newsletters (we currently have over 3,500 subscribers) or make an online donation via Paypal.  For those who want go deeper, we use everything the Internet has to offer to give supporters the chance to virtually join us in rehearsal, peer into the minds of our creative team, get up to the minute updates, influence our project selection and development, and make a day-to-day impact on our fiscal operations.

• Blog: We started our blog in late 2006 and have nearly reached 200 posts, ranging from plugs of our latest shows, to fundraising appeals, from in-depth analyses of Stolen Chair’s rehearsal/development process, to exclusive interviews with some of New York’s most exciting theatre artists.  We make it easy for our supporters to subscribe to our RSS feeds and display our recent Twitter activity in a sidebar so we can complement our once-weekly blog postings with real-time activity.  We’ve just added an “Add This” link to each post so that interested readers can spread news about Stolen Chair via their favorite social networks
• Twitter: We’ve only just started tweeting away in early March but we couldn’t be more excited about how Twitter has empowered us to share the inner-workings of our collaborative with the outside world.  All seven of our company members tweet whenever they’ve had an administrative accomplishment (finishing a grant application, booking a Stolen Chair summer camp, etc), discovered something exciting in their research for an upcoming production, or read something related to our work.  We can share strategies with the other non-profits we follow and field questions from our followers about our organization and activities.
• Google Docs: When tweeting questions to our supporters gets too messy, we’ve used Google Forms to poll our audience.  Using these forms we capture vital statistics about the demographics that support our work and we receive valuable feedback about our productions.  With the support of The Field’s Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists grant (which receives funding from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund) Stolen Chair is currently developing a new membership organization of micro-producers inspired by Community Supported Agriculture, and we’ve used a survey hosted at Google Forms to solicit advice on this project (which we call the Community Supported Theatre or CST) from over 300 Stolen Chair fans. We currently use the online tools of Google Docs and Spreadsheets for our internal company collaboration, and as we develop our new CST project we will use these tools to solicit and open up collaboration with our CST members, such as crowd-sourcing the research for our next project.
• Picasa: Since 2007, we’ve hosted all of our production images, press photos, and rehearsal stills on Picasa so they can commented upon and shared more easily by our audience.  Browsing our Picasa public gallery (or on our website), our supporters can trace a production’s entire development through photos, from early creative retreats up until the last set piece has been struck.
• Facebook: Stolen Chair, like many organizations, is still trying to understand the new changes made to Facebook’s pages/groups, but we have long used our Facebook group to widen our organization’s reach and involve friends who may not have known about our work.  We post events and message our group’s fans.  The event invites make it easy for first-time collaborators to expose new audiences to our work.
• Craigslist: When we were unsure about what direction to take in designing our new logo and branding, we turned to crowd-sourcing via Craigslist.  We held a contest offering a free case of wine and season’s tickets to the graphic designer who could create the new look of Stolen Chair.  We received dozens of submissions and now have a new logo that fits us to a tee.
• Podcasts/YouTube: Stolen Chair participates in at least 3 podcasts a year (often through NYtheatrecast), giving supporters the opportunity to hear the voices of our creative team, often in dialogue with other New York theatre artists. In the coming year, we look forward to bringing our audience into the studio with us with weekly uploads of rehearsal highlights.  We’ll create trailers to build excitement for our newest productions and archive older works online, as well.
• Online Registry/Chipin: Though we receive donations from our supporters through Paypal, we plan on experimenting with two new fundraising options this fiscal year.  People will still be able to make general contributions to our season, but we will make it possible for interested donors to find out exactly where their money is going.  We will create an online “gift” registry where donors can sponsor a particular costume, set piece, advertisement for our new show, et al.  When we want to expand our budget beyond our initial projections, (like an increase in artist fees, an extra week of a production run, or an extra dozen lights) we plan to use the Chipin social networking program, integrated with Facebook and a widget on our blog/website, to generate small sums quickly and “socially.”  These two options will raise the stakes of our donor’s investment, giving Stolen Chair more solid fiscal support and giving supporters the satisfaction of seeing how much their contributions can affect the life of a small organization.

We use each of the above technologies as a tool to reach out to audiences in varying ways, knowing that potential audience members engage to different degrees in different kinds of ways — using all opportunities available, while being cognizant of the limits and potential of each technology, is a way to maximize contacts with an audience.  Each opportunity for contact will bring people closer to becoming a fully engaged audience member and perhaps becoming donor member.  Right now Stolen Chair’s donor base comprises about 1/5 of our audience base.  It is our hopes that by getting audiences involved with the company’s day-to-day activities through our extensive use of social media, more of our audience will be invested enough in the company’s success and give what they can to support it.  Even if our efforts to connect our audiences and build a deep community of Stolen Chair fans does not generate an increase in donations, they will most certainly increase the size of our audience base, boosting the box office revenue which supports our non-profit mission.