As you reflect upon your year and look to the next, now is the time to set goals for your theatre for 2025 and beyond. By cementing your aspirations early and creating realistic pathways to reach them, you will avoid the age-old problem of running out of steam mid-year. The last thing we want is, ‘Ah, we’ll try again in 2026…’ 

There’s no better day than today to take your program to the next level. On The Stage presents a few attainable goals for your organization to reach in the next year and exactly how to get there.

Getting SMART 

To succeed and progress as a theatre, you must set specific, incremental goals, stay resilient, and hold your team accountable along the way. The best way to do this is to set SMART goals. To delve more into this philosophy, let’s review what SMART stands for: 

  • Specific: Your goals for 2025 should have clear targets or hit upon specific KPIs (key performance indicators).
  • Measurable: There has to be a way to measure the success of your goals and reroute the strategy if you aren’t hitting your benchmarks. 
  • Attainable: Don’t make your theatre’s goals entirely out of reach, but don’t make them too easy. Challenge yourself, but remain realistic. 
  • Relevant: What is your theatre’s overall mission? Make sure your goals are helping you live out that mission. 
  • Time-bound: Make sure to clarify the exact hard deadlines for specific objectives with your team. This will not only motivate everyone to work harder but will also help you in staying on track and on-task. 

Top Goals to Consider

While every theatre is different, there are some common goals we should all strive for. We break down some of the top objectives to reach – and a few tips on how to succeed in your mission.

Sell More Tickets

We all want sold-out shows every night. But how to get there? In an oversaturated market, where you compete with streaming platforms, movie theaters, other school programs, and community theatres, you may notice fewer people buying tickets to your show. Increase your ticket sales through: 

Subscriptions

You may be thinking: I’m having a hard enough time getting people to buy tickets to one show… Why would they buy an entire season ticket subscription? Well, all you need to do is incentivize these larger purchases, and people will flock to them. Additionally, patron behavior is shifting. Buyers are no longer happy with a one-size-fits-all subscription approach and instead want to choose the exact shows, dates, and seats they want. This means that your subscription model, in turn, needs to shift with the times. A few types of subscription packages to consider include:

  • Traditional Pass: The traditional pass grants you the power to choose the shows, the dates, and the number of tickets for each production. Patrons, in turn, choose where they’d like to sit. While it’s true that many patrons value flexibility, the traditional pass is popular for a reason – it’s simple, requires little effort from the patrons, has an effortless purchase flow, and ensures patrons get access to all the shows in your season. 
  • Ticket Pack: With a ticket pack, patrons can choose their own show mix, dates, seats, and number of tickets to each production. Allowing maximum flexibility, ticket packs allow patrons to choose the exact shows and dates they want and the number of tickets to each. 
  • Flex Pass: You choose the shows, and patrons select the dates, seats, and number of tickets to each production. With flex passes, you’re able to customize your marketing by bundling productions with a particular theme or appealing to certain audiences. 
  • Custom Pass: In this instance, you’d build the package from scratch with your preferred mix of controls for shows, dates, seats, and number of tickets. 

Custom Purchase Flows 

To provide a first-rate ticket-buying experience, you can leverage custom purchase flows that meet patrons where they are. But what, exactly, is a custom purchase flow? It’s a unique checkout experience that is tailored to your patrons based on their known preferences and behaviors. This is accomplished by pre-populating promo codes to automatically reflect discounts and promotions, auto-filling known patron data, and showcasing the most relevant add-ons and upsells to patrons.

Here’s how they work:

  1. Define Your Flow: Determine the information you want to be included automatically. This could be a specific promotion such as early access, discounted tickets, free or discounted merch or add-ons, or access to particular blocks of seats.
  2. Define Your Audience: Specify which patrons should receive the flow. It could be anyone who clicks on a social media post, your entire mailing list, or a specific subset of your patron base. 
  3. Build Your Custom URL: On The Stage makes it easy for customers to do this right within our platform using our native custom purchase flow builder. 
  4. Distribute Your URL: Build targeted marketing campaigns to showcase your promotion, captivate patrons, and drive traffic to the custom URL.
  5. Analyze Results: Assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by comparing sales and engagement data with previous campaigns.

Increase Your Average Order Value (AOV)

Along with selling more tickets, a great goal for 2025 is increasing that average order value – or, more simply, how much each patron spends at your box office on average. And hey – we know running a theatre isn’t easy. Between declining subscription sales, budget cuts, and the challenge of attracting new audiences, it can feel overwhelming to keep your theatre thriving. But there’s a way to boost your revenue without raising ticket prices—and it starts with understanding that AOV. 

A few ways to boost your AOV at the box office include: 

  • Enacting Various Pricing Strategies: It’s imperative to straddle the line between maximum revenue and minimum gatekeeping of your content. In short, your tickets should be expensive enough for you to make a sizable profit but not too expensive and inaccessible for some of your community members. After all, theatre is for everyone! You can also consider tiered pricing options, allowing more people to view your work and letting your more affluent patrons purchase the most expensive options. 
  • Enacting Upgrades and Cross-Selling: There is always an opportunity to increase your AOV by cross-selling and encouraging people to upgrade their experiences – either by purchasing a ticket closer to center stage, buying concessions in a bundle, or opting for VIP experiences that can be purchased at the box office itself. Make sure that the upgrade is worth their money and easy to enact! 
  • Creating Promotions and Discounts: While you may think creating promo and discount codes would be counterintuitive to increasing an AOV, people are statistically more likely to purchase more if they feel they’re getting a great deal. That’s why offering up time-restrictive and exclusive promo codes is an excellent idea.  

Expand Your Patron Base 

Another excellent goal for 2025 is increasing your reach and getting more demographics to attend your theatre. While it’s a great idea, it will take some work. But here are just a few ways to expand your patron base in 2025:

  • Utilize Audience Segmentation: Audience segmentation is a nuanced marketing tactic that divides your target audience into groups based on specific characteristics, preferences, and behaviors. The goal is to deliver those groups more personalized messaging, leading to stronger connections and improved engagement. 
  • Expand Your Marketing Efforts: Perhaps your social media marketing fell by the wayside in 2024, or you didn’t do much to interact with your newsletter subscribers. Make it a point to expand your marketing efforts in 2025 with multi-pronged approaches to reach as many people as possible. 
  • Partner with Community Businesses: A great way to spread awareness about your theatre is by partnering with local businesses. You can even get them to become sponsors of your theatre, leading to stronger community ties and greater networking opportunities. 

We all want to be more popular… especially businesses that rely upon patrons to keep their doors open! That being said, striving to get more patrons, social media followers, and season ticket subscribers should be a primary goal for 2025. 

Define Your Organization’s Brand 

Getting a steady brand identity for your theatre should also be on the 2025 to-do list. After all, a stronger, more well-defined brand leads to more community recognition and increased loyalty. Aside from hiring a branding manager, here are a few ways to define your theatre’s brand: 

  • Build Out Professional Show Sites: When people search the internet for your theatre, your organization’s site should be at the top of the queue. Even more so, your website should be easy to navigate, up-to-date, and filled with relevant information about your theatre, your shows, how to donate, and what’s next on your agenda. 
  • Work on Your Social Media Presence: This goes back to that aforementioned marketing goal. In a digital world, your social media presence is a huge piece of your social capital and reputation. Ensure you regularly post content, hop on recent trends, and interact with your followers. 
  • Improve Your Branded Merchandise and Add-Ons: Once you’ve gotten a better idea of your theatre’s brand, improving your merchandising offerings should be another top priority in the coming year. After all, it’s always a great time to launch a new line of merchandise for your patrons to support your program. You can also enact new add-ons, like photo and video sales, backstage tours, workshops, and bundled concessions, to strengthen your brand and elevate the experience for your patrons. 

Increase Your Fundraising Efforts

Generating more funds for an organization is likely the most common and most important goal for theatres around the world. After all, with more funds, you’ll see better productions, more staff and cast/crew bandwidth, and higher engagement from patrons. This will lead to a greater reach for your work, an extended network, and greater success. 

Fundraising is a case-by-case process, but remember to tap into your community’s interests and remain timely with fundraisers, which can include:

… and so much more. The sky’s the limit regarding fundraisers, but remember: people will be more likely to donate if they enjoy what they’re doing! 

How On The Stage Can Help

If you’re ready to level up and reach your 2025 goals, partner with On The Stage and our free, all-in-one offerings. Our main objective is to empower your theatre through an easy-to-use, intuitive, sophisticated technology platform. Additionally, don’t forget to download the 7 Attainable Goals for Your Theatre Program eBook. 

We can reach our 2025 goals together by booking a personalized demo with On The Stage today.

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