Our Creative Director, Andrew Collier, wrote this article for this month’s UK Theatre Magazine

Audience experience is one of those buzz phrases that’s been doing the rounds lately (perhaps since audience development fell out of fashion) and I’m not sure there’s a consistent understanding of what it means. For me, it’s every interaction the audience has apart from the performance itself. It’s the website, the booking process and the emails people receive before and after the show. It’s the exchange policy, the latecomers policy and the photography policy. It’s the range of refreshments and souvenirs, and, yes, it’s the loos.

However good the work on the stage, most theatres deliver pretty poor audience experience. Buying tickets is often frustrating. It’s difficult – sometimes impossible – to find basic information like running times or parking costs. Foyers are crowded, queues are long and seats are uncomfortable. And all of these problems are amplified for family audiences. At the family arts conference last autumn someone tweeted that we should stop talking about loos and start talking about art, which would be fair enough if any of us were getting loo provision for families right. Very few of us are.

Putting the physical restrictions of Victorian theatres to one side, there’s still plenty that can be done to make families feel welcome when they come to see a show. But if we want to deliver an exceptional audience experience for families with children as young as 6 months we need to unlearn many of the things we think we know.

Normally we want to surprise (and delight) our audiences, and on the whole our audiences like being surprised. But the parents of toddlers have a different approach. Their motivation is different. An adult buys a ticket because they want to see a show; a parent buys a ticket because they love their kid. They’re often spending significant amounts of money to give their child an experience and to enjoy it together as a family. It’s an important event and they’re going to be imagining what it’ll be like. The emotional stakes are so high that if something on the day begins to diverge from the picture they’ve created in their head, anxiety will kick in and they’ll be unhappy.

So we’ve learned that the best thing to do is to give the parents as much information as possible about every aspect of their visit before they come so that their expectation will match what happens on the day. This means giving away all our surprises!

Much of this is practical information. As well as having comprehensive information on our website, including video tours of the venue, we send a series of four emails in the ten days before someone comes to the show. We include detailed information about parking (does the distance from the parking to the venue door merit getting the pushchair out?), our photography policy (take as many as you like, but no flashes please, and don’t hold your iPad up to record the show in such a way as to block the view of the family behind…), details of the loos and baby changing, running time, availability and prices of refreshments and souvenirs.

We also make sure families know what to expect from the performance itself. Video clips help create the parents’ expectation, help prepare toddlers not to be overwhelmed and mean that families can relive the experience online after they return home. I’ve come to the conclusion that our best marketing tactic would be to distribute DVDs of our entire show free of charge to potential bookers. Similarly, where many theatres prohibit audience photography, we encourage it.

It’s not just about managing expectations; we need to improve the experience too. Younger audiences have different needs from older audiences, and it turns out different needs from production companies too. At our shows, seating is unreserved and we tell our audiences that we’ll open the doors to the auditorium half an hour before the show. Unless there is a safety risk we’ll open the doors at that time whether or not the technical team is ready – if you’re a parent trying to manage a waiting toddler, it’s far more important that the doors open when we’ve said they will. Indeed, seeing a technician up a ladder changing a light bulb will actually help the next bit of the wait pass quicker!

We walk in our audience’s shoes and try to remove any friction. We hook all doors open because parents are often carrying their children and don’t need to juggle doors as well. Buggy parking isn’t controlled by cloakroom tickets because speed of retrieval would be too slow. The small things matter, and often with the really small things communicating that we’ve done something gets more results than the action itself. Some toddlers are scared of the noise from electric hand-driers. Every now and then our supplier sends portable loos with electric hand-driers fitted. We remove the fuses. But, more importantly, we put up a sign to explain why the hand-drier isn’t working. Not many people actually use the microwaves that are prominently displayed for audience use, but we get a lot of praise from people who see they’re there.

We measure our success (or failure…), every day. Everyone who comes to see our show receives an online survey after bedtime on the day they visited, and we take action straight away. One mum said it would have been easier if there had been a playpen in the baby changing room to contain her toddler while she changed her baby – we installed it the next day. The survey scores and audience comments are a key tool for motivating and managing our FOH team.

We’ve seen that if we improve the experience, communicate and create accurate expectations of it, and continually measure and improve the audience response then attendance will increase. Best of all, none of this is expensive to achieve. But if you need to find a little bit of budget for a microwave and online survey tool, see if the finance department still have a line for audience development…

@andrewcollier