A huge thank you to those of you who were able to respond to this year’s house theatre network survey which ran from 15 May to 7 June 2024.

The survey was sent to 145 house network members and we received 72 responses. Your feedback provides us with invaluable information as to how we shape our plans to best support you and the sector in our region.

We’ve summarised some of the key points and loved hearing that house helps you to take the feeling of risk away, allowing you to experiment with work that you would not have felt able to otherwise.

Growth and recovery

From both the survey and our six recent venue network meet-up events, there is a growing sense of stability and recovery across the network. Most venues reported stability, or growth in live performance programming, along with a renewed hope that they can start to experiment and become playful in their approach.

Programming
You told us that you mostly source your programme through recommendations from industry colleagues (89%), seeing live performances (85%) and re-programming theatre companies (83%).

It’s been exciting to see venues are focusing on accessibility, and whilst barriers remain, such as resourcing, budgets and short runs or single performances, 74% of those who replied are now programming relaxed performances, with 64% programming BSL interpreted performances.

Audiences

Your results showed the average attendance for audiences to performing arts shows has been at between 51-75% of capacity (this represents an upward shift year on year of venues reporting within this bracket, with 52% in 2023 showing audiences in this bracket 69% of you 2024).

Just over half of you said they had a current Audience Development plan in place, focusing mostly on growing your overall audiences and reaching new audiences. Barriers to having a current plan or one that is in progress, included a lack of capacity, confidence in creating one, or how to measure activity.

For those with Audience Development plans in place, they are working, hurrah! 49% of you reported a higher proportion of new bookers, and 40% reported an increase in audiences to particular activities and 34% an increase in overall audiences as a result of your plans.

This information will help us build a support package addressing the barriers to creating and putting in action Audience Development plans, so that we can help you grow your audiences and those across the region.

How and why you stay in touch with us

Most organisations (82%) engage with us through direct communication and our monthly email newsletter (76%). We were glad to see organisations seeing the main benefit of the membership is that we connect them with the wider industry (79%), and help you make meaningful relationships with other venues in the network (77%) and that we support you to offer a more varied and diverse programme of work (74%).

"House is a fantastic organisation - it raises our game in artistic programming and helps us stay connected with other venues in the region. We'd be so much poorer culturally and operationally without it." - house network member

What you are engaging with

The report shows that venues are mostly engaging with us to programme shows or to attend festivals and conferences as a house delegate. This is closely followed by attending our regional network meetings and wider network day.

Your training and development needs

Overall, there is a feeling that staff turnover has increased or stayed the same in the last year, with only a few venues reporting their staff turnover had decreased. The majority of organisations who responded have more than 10 volunteers working with them.

Marketing and audience development training needs came up high in the list of training and development needs, particularly around researching and understanding local population and audience data, creating plans to engage with particular audiences and creating a strategy. Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) training also featured as a particular need.

“We see people moving out of the arts, often seeking higher wages or wanting different working patterns. We had high turnover in the marketing team post pandemic for various reasons but this has settled down. We now attract a lot of applicants if we do advertise these roles. It is not a significant problem at the moment, but we see higher turnover in areas like Front of House.”

Your plans and policies

It is encouraging to see big upward shifts with almost all venues replying they now had an equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policy in place (an increase from to 76% in 2023 to 96% in 2024). Similar trends were spotted with environmental sustainability plans (a year-on-year increase from 54% in 2023 to 75% this year of venues having plans or policies in place); with the main resource for accessing information as Julie’s Bicycle toolkit

The largest barrier to venues becoming more sustainable is the lack of staff capacity.

What else you’d like us to offer

You shared thoughts on what else you’d like from the network. This included:

• Programming recommendations
• More curated networking events between venues of a similar size, or programming strategy.
• More marketing assets and content for tours.
• Support for creating organisational plans
• More staff training
• Regional networking days and more house led projects e.g. Take Your Seats, the Eco Way sustainable travel pilot.

Thank you

There is so much to reflect on from your insights to help us refine our package of support over the next year. With thanks also to Indigo Ltd for managing the survey and producing the report for us.

As ever, please get in touch if you have any thoughts or didn’t get a chance to complete the survey.