This piece for the Spektrix blog highlighted the Mercury’s innovative approach to third party ticket sales, including white label websites and pop-up ticket sales for events. The Mercury have successfully found a new way of utilising the resource they already have within their box office, diversifying their revenue streams and bringing Read more…
These notes were taken from a panel I took part in as part of the annual Spektrix conference. Through offering a variety of upselling offerings, many of which are automated (using the Supplementary Events feature and automated pre-show emails), 15% of the Mercury’s online transactions include an up-sold item (over Read more…
This piece for Arts Professional was produced in partnership with the Mercury Theatre’s ticketing partner, Spektrix. A revised segmentation scheme was applied to customer data and used to design bespoke direct marketing campaigns based on the preferences and purchase behaviours of different customer groups. The cloud-based system has also made Read more…
Ahead of the Essex Digital Awards, I spoke to the organisers about the Mercury Theatre’s use of digital technologies in audience development. As we’re increasingly less constrained by cost-heavy formats like brochures and newspaper advertising, we can actually share much more content that’s of interest. We’re also receiving more feedback Read more…
This blog Q&A followed a panel I took part in at the Spektrix Conference in 2016 In an increasingly transactional world, audience members crave value for money. If you add value for the audience, they will respect you for doing so. If an audience member enjoys a production and you Read more…
Sometimes it’s the little campaigns that tickle my toes – and I really enjoyed coming up with The Bard in The Bog! “Colchester’s Mercury Theatre have come up with a unique way of helping prepare audiences for their forthcoming production of Macbeth. For those who struggle with Shakespeare’s language the Read more…
On holiday in Castellebate, we chanced on a Ferry to Amalfi. It doesn’t appear on Tripadvisor (or on the web at all much!) so here is a bit more information for fellow holiday-goers to this lovely village in southern Italy. The Travelmar ferry runs once a day in Summer. In 2014 Read more…
Here’s a slimmed-down version of my presentation to the UK Association Congress, on forming your own Facebook, tweating your own Twitter, creating your own community. Creating your own community from rfenwick
As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts, a CD and DVD is about to released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini – the little beans. It contains, among other things, two pieces of music for a phenomenal forty separate voices* (hence my attempt to get the #phenomenal40 hashtag off the Read more…
It’s a precious thing to hear a piece of music which never leaves you. To be absolutely confident that you know and may never forget every twist of the soundscape. For me there is only one work that has so comprehensively captured my soul, and burnt itself in to my memory. It goes by the title Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui Prater In Te Deus Israel – I have never placed my hope in any other but you God of Israel. More digestibly it is simply Spem in Alium.
Hearing that piece for the first time at the BBC Proms of 2005 ignited a musical love affair with the composer Thomas Tallis, that has stayed with me ever since. This coming week, BBC Radio 3 profile Thomas Tallis as their Composer Of The Week (thank you Scott). No doubt they will tell the story of Tallis’s masterpiece, Spem in Alium.
As direct historical records regarding Tallis are so sketchy, we often have to interpret and extrapolate from circumstantial evidence. Here, for what it’s worth, is my take on how Spem in Alium came in to being. My puny efforts at the British Library notwithstanding, Radio 3’s take will no doubt be better researched! Do have a listen.
The 16th century transformed the face of our planet, with repercussions still visible today.
As religious wars scorched continents, so too a fire of Renaissance arts and culture blazed out of Italy. Rome was devising a new “Gregorian” calendar – to all intents and purposes the calendar we use today. Time itself was changing, and the new calendar quickly spread its wings across Europe and beyond.
Burgeoning sea travel and the rapid expansion of trading markets saw many things spread faster and wider than they ever had before. Everything from the new calendar, to Smallpox. National boundaries were ever more hotly defended even as their lines, their power, and their meaning, were disintegrating.
(more…)