Promoting Amateur Theatre & Amdram

21st Century Publicity for Amateur Theatre

Lets start by being honest

My "job title" (if you could call it that) is "publicity". It is a curious one. I'm made to think of that old proverb "If a tree falls in the wood, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Not that I'm comparing our productions to a huge tree falling over, no, our productions are usually much more dangerous.

Particularly where Luke (middle one) is involved

Having said that, a lot of amateur theatre is advertised by word of mouth, particularly in Codsall Dramatic Society's case. Being in a village, we often get our best publicity by people talking to other people, mentions from the Vicar and so on.

However, we are now moving into the 21st century. The internet looms large over us all, with Facebook, Twitter and many others becoming more and more prevalent. And while sites like eBay make buying that last minute prop much easier, we now find ourselves in the world of online bookings, online blogs (like this one) and more often than not, online messing around!

Combining The Two!

So we now find ourselves in amateur theatre needing to be aware of online presence as well as our presence on the ground. How can we do that you might ask? Well, for our last production, Puss In Boots, we decided to take a bit of a novel approach.

Trains late again...

The reasoning went something like this: We've got time to kill on a tech weekend, so lets get on with actually getting people to come and see the show by wandering around the village, in costume, and take some funny pictures so people will know there's a play going on!

So off I set with two members of cast, Puss and her best mate Dusty, with someone to hold their coats for good measure. We went into shops, to famous landmarks and to various other locations around the village to take a kind of "Where's Wally" type game (sorry Karen). Having wandered around town, I set these pics to run on Facebook, inviting people to like the pics if they spotted Puss. This worked brilliantly on two levels:

1. People in the village saw what we were doing and asked questions. In this way, we continuedthe word of mouth, getting people excited about the upcoming production.
2. The following online involvement proved a boom too, with people seeing the pictures in their friends newsfeed because they liked the photo. Many new people saw our production for the first time because of this.

In these troubled times

Let's be honest, times are hard for everyone. In this way, an amateur theatre production is good value, as long as the quality of show is always good. Thankfully for Codsall Dramatic Society, this has rarely been a problem. So it's about getting people to come and see these fantastic shows, available for a fraction of the price of a professional one, or even the cinema. This is just one novel way of letting people know about it.

Or like this blog, writing about it for a while to encourage publicity :)

Codsall Dramatic Society is performing "West Moon Street" by Rob Urbinati at Codsall Village Hall 12th-15th March, in association with Codsall Community Arts Fesitval! Tickets on sale 25th Feb! For more info, visit our website, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!