September Archive Highlight - “Pay Up - pt 2 (UPDATE); “Management Plays the Long Odds”

This is the second in a series of posts about my experiments in different payment Systems across my projects The Telelibrary, Fair Trade, and Undersigned). If you missed the first, I recommend reading it first then coming back. I’ll wait, I promise. I ran an analysis in 2022 after the first 50 performances - this edit represents updated information after crossing 250 performances 2 years later. The body of the essay is focused on the four principles for assessing my payment systems, whereas the numbered (endnotes) go running off chasing tangents and getting into the weeds on the numbers. Choose your path, and read as you like.


The payment System for Undersigned is meant to address and achieve a few things, but it was largely born out of a distinct experience:

A dear friend and I were on a road trip, but we knew tickets would be released soon for a very hot show we wanted to see, and so we set an alarm on our phones and pulled into a parking lot. Sure enough, tickets went out and quickly started disappearing as others booked. We selected a date, and added tickets to the cart - and then we both stopped, waiting for the other to proceed. Eventually, we put a name to the trepidation that was now sitting on the center console between us: “it feels like such a risk.”

Tickets were about $100 each; not cheap, and less so for artists, but soon the show would become even more expensive. The show was several hours long, which does some to explain the high cost, but also in some ways increases the risk (anyone who has considered chewing off their leg to escape hour 4 of a Robert Wilson piece can testify to this). We talked a bit about this feeling of risk, and about the strange ways we come to value an amount of money; take-out for two in NYC is easily $40, $50 with a tip if someone splurged and got a beverage—aren’t we as performers better positioned than anyone to agree that a transformative experience is worth cooking at home 2-3 times? But we still found ourselves asking: “what if it isn’t good?” By the time we quelled that fear and resolved to bite the bullet, there were no rounds left in the chamber; tickets had long since sold out.

More than anything else, the eventual Payment System for Undersigned attempts to speak to that moment, to acknowledge and respect the leap of faith someone has to make to sign up for any immersive experience—particularly one for an audience of one——and particularly one from a creator who provides hardly any details at all in a bid to be “vague enough to be interesting.” Here’s that attempt, as found on the website:

“For Undersigned, participants are asked to make a "Down Payment," rather than buy a ticket.

What does this mean?

 

Getting a reservation for this experience is a risk. This risk is certainly your money, of which $100 is no small gamble. It’s also your time, of which 50 minutes may be an equal or greater risk (saying nothing of commuting). Finally, this risk is also your participation; you will be taking a distinctly active role in your invocation, and you stand to gain as much as you are willing to venture.

While Management certainly supports the business of risky business, in recognition of the gamble you are taking, the management of the Undersigned will join you in risk: at the venue, there will be an envelope with your name on it containing 30% of your Down Payment— in cash. When your experience is complete, should you feel you got more than you bargained, you will have the option to add money to it. Should you feel otherwise, you will also have the option of taking money out, and walking away.

The Management of Undersigned bets that you won't.”

It’s not bad copy, if I say so myself: the tone and premise do a decent job of piquing interest, and of laying down a kind of dare—both of which are key framing if I want to turn not knowing anything about the piece from a liability into an enjoyable part of the experience. But does this System work? Well, since I’ve finally got almost 50 paid shows of Undersigned under my belt, let’s take an early look at the 4 goals I described in my previous post and see what we find.

#1 - Payment as a Lowered-Obstacle to Accessibility

The ticket prices my friend and I found ourselves scared by are certainly fueled by demand, but they also reflect a truth that my return to in-person theater delivers to my doorstep every day: this shit is expensive to make and operate. Even applying my normal practice of minimizing production elements and building props, sets, and scale iteratively over time, the high-degree of care called for in Undersigned leaves me committed to some choices that raise costs. As such, from a strictly financial standpoint, I’d say this is not the most accessible Payment System.

There are some cheaper options available in this model. Since raising the price from $60 to $65 and eventually to $100, I’ve committed to offering at least 25% of our performances with “flexible downpayment options,” as detailed on the website:

“Management believes firmly that risk should not only be available to those with means, and is committed to creating accessible paths to appointments. Currently, we are offering “matinee” appointment times for those with unconventional work hours; a limited number of $85 appointments will be made available in each appearance for Artists, Students, and Creative Professionals, along with an even more limited number of $65 appointments for Artists, Students, and Creative Professionals who are hard up. No matter what Down Payment you offer, we will wager 30% of it in an envelope after your experience.

Management employs no means testing; instead, we trust our participants to discuss frankly with themselves which resources are for them and which are for others.”

It’s a bit of a clunky system, prioritizing trust but not optimizing flexibility. And since this discount functions on an opt-in basis, there’s a distinct ‘results may vary’ factor at play. Despite offering flexibility for approximately 25% of our shows, when looking at 109 ticketed performances since this system was put in place, only 14 of those purchasers selected a $65 or $85 ticket (approximately 12.8%). And while it’s possible that this represents an irrepressible consumer urge to pay me full rate, I think it much more likely that it’s a result of the notable disparity between demand and supply; folks booking “flexible downpayment” times do so not because they’re looking for accommodation, but because they are looking for any available time remaining (after describing the situation to a collaborator, they described it all rather succinctly: “sounds like you’ve replicated the New York Housing Crisis”).  

As another accessible entry point,  “Standby Tickets” can be had day-of for $15, creating a “second chance” for folks on the waitlist in the rare event of last-minute cancellations or no-shows: in a study of 260 performances, I found only 7 instances of this. Finally, we’ve also had four participants opt to “pay forward” a session, allowing us to distribute free tickets to those who reach out looking for a way to see Undersigned without straining a difficult financial situation. It can be time/thought intensive to develop and operate these options (finessing a good Standby Ticket experience in particular has proved challenging in such a small venue), but I remain committed to keeping some more affordable paths open.

That said, I do think this model for payments does a good job addressing the larger cost of admission; by clearly addressing the potent blend of investing time, money, and good-faith engagement, it seems to successfully invite participants to make that risk a choice, and thus one they can make more meaningfully and enthusiastically.

#2 - Payment as a Form of Direct Feedback & Gathering Data

Many of my dear collaborators know that I generally hate a curtain call—I find the convention of clapping to mark the end of something so often chases away the feelings and thoughts an experience may have given me (I paid good money for this existential crises, please don’t take it off the table like a half-drunk sprite!).

And while I acknowledge the role applause has in expressing gratitude (more on that in goal #3), I’ve never been too convinced by the idea that clapping is how an audience can respond to a work. The convention is too locked in and expected, too culturally and socially laden - how many times have you been at a show and given a standing ovation mostly because everyone around you stood to clap? And to withhold applause entirely feels as pointed and confrontational as leaving no tip at a restaurant. Add to this the diffuse nature of applauding in a crowd, and the sum of it is something that may function well as a ritual, but really doesn’t work much as a choice.

Enter the eloquence of cash in an envelope. To me, assessing the price you want to pay for an experience is much more direct and specific than asking merely was it good? Having cash on hand is meant to make the seemingly impossible choice of taking money back quite tangibly possible (the instructions on the envelope include the phrase “If you feel you have given more than you received, use your hands.“ A take-home QR code also provides digital payment options along with a digital copy of the credits.

So what’s the verdict so far?

As of the time of this writing (early September, 2024), we’ve completed over 260 performances of Undersigned. Let’s start by setting aside any standby performances, PWYC offerings, press shows, invited dress or playtests, or anything else that doesn’t represent what you might call the “standard” participant experience; that leaves us looking at 203 performances taking place from 2022 to August of 2024, in which participants either paid full price ($60 until March of 2023, $65 at the Overlook Film Festival, or $100(1) ) or used one of our $65/$85 flexible booking options. Here’s what we see:

2.96%   of participants lowered their contribution by taking money out of the envelope

38.92% of participants raised their contribution by adding money to the envelope

58.13% of participants made no change to the envelope

Data often can surprise you by challenging your anecdotal experience; without running the numbers, I’d be inclined to say adjustments happen often, but not frequently. Yet the numbers tell us that almost 40% of participants made some move to increase their contribution. Aside from being a promising indicator that this might be “good BUSINESS” rather than just “the Business of Good”(see #4 below for more on that front), I also take this to be an encouraging sign that many and possibly even most participants are experiencing this a real choice they could make. Hopefully that means many of the 58% who made no adjustment did so by choosing not to change the amount, rather than simply not choosing (philosophically, arguably similar; experientially, very different).

That said, the REAL surprise of this dataset was that it took months to get our first grabber; personally, I was astonished that 38 shows came and went before anyone took any money out, and in those 203 performances, we’ve only had 6 people ever take even $1 (two of those took exactly one dollar, 3 some portion, and one person took it all). This may be a testament to the quality of the piece. It may also refute my earlier idea that the choice feels possible. The numbers alone can’t tell us the why of people’s choice here; for the 6 who did withdraw, did they take cash because they hated it, because they needed the money, or because they simply could? Those $1 withdrawals feel key here - is that a symbolic amount? A souvenir? And what about the people who left the money unchanged: did they leave the money because they felt they got their money’s worth?

However “eloquent” cash in the envelope is, it has limits as a tool for communication; There are so many confounding factors. Fortunately, the moment of making this decision is thoughtfully crafted with something else in mind:

#3 - Payment as a Space for Meaning Making

At the end of Undersigned, participants are left alone in a room with their envelope, and given time for a number of considerations, payment among them. This means participants have often written us notes explaining why they made their choice; reasons range from the cryptic to the heartfelt to the clear and direct: “I feel like what I got was worth what I gave.” This act of assessing value also evokes many of the themes of the piece, which asks participants to consider what they desire and how much they respect, dismiss, or fulfill their desires: “what is the worth of your Wants?” The final choice of adjusting their payment invites participants to have “the last word” on not just their experience as product but also on the narrative they have just created. I’ve been very pleased to see the ways people have played out their story (and the role they’ve chosen for themselves) through their payments. This seems to potentially create a shared incentive: the more both of us work to make a compelling experience, the more a participant will be inclined to increase their contribution, and to feel that doing so doesn’t detract but rather enhances their experience.

That’s an “investment structure” I find exciting, and a relationship to risk that feels meaningful to claim.

So has it been making any money?

#4 - Payment as a Path to Profit (?)

As I mentioned earlier, this shit is expensive to make (both in terms of energy and pieces of magic paper). It’s important to me that works like this be sustainable without devaluing my time (or especially, the time of others). So in 2022 as I committed to exploring a one-one set up and saw how tight the margins would become, I considered raising the price. However, after seeing adjustments from our first trial runs in July (not included in this dataset(2)), I spoke with my collaborators on the piece(3), and we decided to leave the price as is for a while and see what would happen.

Specifically, this happened:

From September of 2022 through Apri of 2023, the piece took in a gross of 113.40%% of the Down Payments, creating an average ticket cost of $69.34. At this point I raised the standard Down Payment to $100 to better reflect the value of our time, while maintaining some more accessible appointments. Under this new payment system, our ticket gross was 112.11% of our Down Payments, with an average final price per performance of $105.98. Looking at the 203 performances all together, an average Down Payment of $80.20 was increased by an average adjustment of $10.05 a person, yielding a final payment of $90.25 per performance.

A 13% increase in revenue may not be earth-shattering when it occurs for a piece this small scale (and I’m always the first to insist on “results not typical”). What’s more, this increase does not go at all towards improving the show’s bottom line — I feel strongly that adjustments are a relationship between the performers and the participants, and as such, all adjustments go directly to the performers(4). But however much this is not a panacea for arts funding, I do feel that these numbers suggest that a Payment Model of this kind can raise profits while also expanding accessibility, inviting deeper audience buy-in, and facilitating more meaningful and transformative experiences.

As I continue to revise these thoughts and update the findings from my studies on Undersigned, Fair Trade and The Telelibrary (which will get an updated data-dive once I pass 2000 shows in the next few months), I want to continue to hold open the door for your perspective as participants. What did these payment systems feel like for you? If you have already tried Undersigned, I’d love to know how it felt to add money to the envelope, or leave it the same (and if you’re one of my 6 takers, I’d die to hear your thoughts on what your reasoning was). Feel free to leave comments below, or reach out by email.

~

END NOTES

(1) 

“Those are some noticeably different price points - wouldn’t those numbers be quite different from each other?”—you might ask, were you conspiring with me to legitimize my urge to squeeze in extra numbers into everything I write. I’d agree with you on the first point, but we might both be surprised to find that among the different case studies, only one group stands out as having strikingly different behavior from the aggregate (copied for reference):

If you set aside the flexible downpayment appointments, there’s a lot of symmetry here - and conveniently, almost exactly the same number of “full price” performances between the new and old systems. I’m not surprised to see that most flexible appointments don’t see any adjustment at all (it is after all a ticket option structured for those for whom the cost may be prohibitive). That being said, I’ll be curious as we continue to accumulate performances to see whether we pass 50 “flexible” shows without any “takers” — which would suggest that something about the accommodation squarely disincentivizes taking some money back at the end.

(2)

Readers of my first draft of this study saw those results, which were 9 of the 49 first performances studied in 2022, included here for reference:

By end of October 2022, we had completed 49 performances with this Down-Payment model, including 1 Standby performance (see methodology note (a), at the end of this endnote).

For those 49 performances, the piece took in 116.49% of Down Payments, creating an average ticket cost of $67.87. It’s worth noting that 10% of shows were sold at a lower Down Payment (Fringe shows were $50, and the one Standby was $15). Looking just at shows at the “full” Downpayment of $60, the average was actually $$72.17/appointment. At the time, I genuinely wasn’t sure if adjustments would have become more or less favorable were the Down Payment increased, but after almost a hundred performances of data, we have some indicators—which would be a whole other tangent that I’d be happy to explore, but weren’t you in the middle of reading an essay?

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Oh good you’re still here. Okay, so does raising the price improve the adjustments? Let’s start by comparing that initially studied run of 49 to all the performances at a comparable full price ($60, $65 at Overlook Film Festival, and one time I accidentally input $70 on the website and someone bought it anyway):

Looking pretty comparable. Here’s how that compares to the new pricing system, in isolation:

At a glance, what we appear to see is a fairly steady rate of participants adding any amount, larger adjustments on average, and a higher rate of participants taking money back;  clumsily, we could summarize that as “more risk and more reward.” That same trend emerges when we visualize the data of all the adjustments made so far. 

Still, we’re including folks who had flexible down payments of $65 or $85, and while that may be higher than the cost before, we can get even closer to answering whether the higher price point produces substantially different behavior. Let’s look at only the $100 shows:

What I see here is the same trend but a little more so: smaller proportion of folks making any adjustment, higher percent of folks taking money out, and larger adjustments on average. In brief; more extremes. 

I don’t think this data is sufficient to say definitively that raising the price caused our average adjustment to go up; there are far too many conflating variables, including changing cities, locations, staff, and of course the possibility that I might just be getting better at doing this show, and delivering a stronger experience over time. But I do think this as a case study can at least strongly suggest that our previous price was under market value, and that the audience and the relationship established by the payment system were able to support a higher ticket price. I’d also say nothing here negates the old axiom “when you raise the price, people tend to assign more value”.

methodology note (a) - of the original 49 performances studied, 4 were done at the Philadelphia Fringe with a ticket price of $50 instead. Mostly this was in deference to the Cannonball Festival, where most shows were offered as “Pay-What-You-Wish” and the highest suggested contribution for shows was $50. Of these 4 performances, 1 participant added to their contribution, and no one lowered it.

(3) 

At the time, this referred to McKenna Parsons, who helped build and perform the attendant role and in the time since has trained and now performed as facilitator as well, and Jacob Ford, who provided production collaboration and consultation for hosting Undersigned at the City Reliquary. In the years that have followed, other credited attendants have included Mary Widow,  Morgan Taylor, Taj Rauch, McKenna Parsons, Ang Bey, and Leah Ableson, and we’ve had audio design contributed by Josh Davidoff. We’ve also had 260+ participants co-authoring, but the decision to reveal their identities lies with each of them.

(4) 

Specifically, I offer any attendant who works with me more than once the option of either setting a higher, stable base rate or of lowering their base rate and instead taking a share of the risk of adjustments, outlining a split of the total change up or down proportioned based on our roles, So far every single attendant offered has taken this deal; I always offer them the current numbers and statistics to inform their choice, so I think the math pretty easily makes the case, but from speaking with my performers, they have made it clear that the spirit of the exchange feels more interesting and more closely aligned with the spirit of the piece. Everyone involved in every performance takes a material risk on each other.