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Let’s start with the plaudits. Congratulations are in order to Arts Council England (ACE) for securing an extra £2.5m for audience development. And we should hail the DCMS for flying in the face of the credit crunch and committing this new money to extend young people’s access to the arts.

Also it makes good sense to target young people. All the research suggests it’s an age when people are trying all kinds of new experiences. These experiences forge attitudes and opinions, shape and express self-image and establish patterns of future behaviour. So introducing theatre to this mix could be potent.

What is self-evident is that conventional arts marketing largely fails to engage those who don’t come. So the conclusion that something new should be tried, something that’s game-changing, that arrests attention and drives attending behaviour, is both logical and compelling. Enter the Free Tickets scheme. An offer they can’t refuse. Surely, it’s a no-brainer. But read on, because the devil’s in the detail.

It’s not about price

First, let’s tackle the much misunderstood issue of price. Undoubtedly, there are people in our society, old and young, for whom a choice between a full-price theatre ticket and heating their homes is very real. The only way for theatres to address this poverty barrier is to permanently restructure pricing to offer some availability at an affordable price point. Most do this already with a range of means-tested concessions or limited universal offers such as preview nights.

But the vast majority of young people already buy tickets for other live events (clubs, festivals, gigs, sport) that are considerably more expensive than the prices being offered by theatres. So, for them, it’s not about the actual price, it’s about the perceived value-for-money being offered. They simply don’t believe that what we’re offering is worth the asking price. Why? Because we haven’t convinced them it will give them what they want and need. Reducing the asking price, even as low as zero, will certainly match their low valuation of theatre but, in doing so, it validates this low valuation. A £20 ticket sold for £10 is worth £10. A free ticket is worth what you paid for it. The proposed scheme persistently uses the word ‘free’ and, at a stroke, wipes £millions from theatre’s equity.

Trial experiences work

But removing the actual cash transaction doesn’t need to devalue the product. Product tasters and trials are proven commercial marketing tools, but those that succeed are at pains to stress the product’s monetary value and make you feel special. Crucially, their aim is to convert you, as quickly as possible, from trial experience to full purchase. Those test driving a Mercedes or taking up trial membership at the local gym know that both will soon pop the purchase question.

The hugely successful Test Drive the Arts programme uses the very same principles to reach tens of thousands of new attenders and, famously, routinely persuades 35% to come back and pay within a year. Test Drive avoids the devaluing ‘free’ tickets by offering ‘guest tickets’ and ‘VIP invitations’. Recipients are constantly told the face value.

Theatres from Australia to Sweden have adopted Test Drive the Arts enthusiastically and are busy raking in thousands of new attenders and actually making a profit at the same time. But it’s been all but forgotten in the UK and by the very Arts Council that funded its development. Research (ironically also funded by ACE) shows that its success is because it’s not a free ticket scheme. It works because the persuasive, personal invitation cuts through recipients’ inertia and creates a compelling high-value proposition and a value chain that leads directly to re-purchase.

No exit strategy

And there’s the rub. The Free Tickets scheme has no proposed exit strategy. Its eye-catching offer will undoubtedly result in more young people attending more performances. But while ACE will police the targets for giving the tickets away, there are no targets for retention. Is it going to convert recipients into paying customers and if so, how many? Will it get a certain number of non-attenders to attend? How many existing attenders will come more often or try something new?

There’s no plan to wean these young attenders off the discount and into the box office. Worse, it’s not concerned if the same people are repeatedly given free tickets: we may create a culture of non-payment. But perhaps the biggest own-goal is that it will tell existing paying customers to put their wallets away, cannibalising the box office. Individual theatres may set their own targets and find ways to retain new attenders, but this is not central to the scheme.

It’s at this point that the Free Tickets scheme begins to look more like a short-term stunt than a long-term strategy. Of course, if this was just a draft proposal, there’s plenty of experience, research and knowledge out there to help the ACE improve it. But it’s not a draft. And the derisory one-week consultation window was closed before most people knew it was open. What’s the indecent haste?

But rather than be doomed to failure, the scheme is now almost certain to vaguely succeed. Any positive effect it has – and it surely will give some people some wonderful experiences – will be incontestably worthwhile. But whether it is efficient or effective we may never know as there are no targets for retention of any new audiences and no requirement on theatres to track the impact. If we don’t accurately monitor all recipients’ subsequent behaviour then how will we know that audiences have been ‘developed’?

Lessons learned?

This is déjà vu. It’s not that long since ACE spent millions on the New Audiences Programme. Lots of great (and some not so great) projects were funded. All were required to count the number of people reached by the scheme but then, like now, measuring retention was not a requirement. The result? Well, we’ll never know… DCMS and ACE say they want to learn from this ‘pathfinder’ scheme to inform potential future programmes. But after 20 years and over £20m worth of audience development ‘pilots’, you’d think that by now we might just know what works. And what doesn’t.