Show Your Impact Contest
The New York Theatre Experience Winning Entry
NYTE’s 7 interconnected websites highlight, nurture, promote, and
advance the work of thousands of indie/nonprofit theatre practitioners
making groundbreaking and foundational art in New York City and around
the US, and inform and grow theatre audiences. The oldest and largest of
our sites is nytheatre.com. Last year, it generated more than 7 million
hits: people use it to learn what’s playing in theatres in New York
City, how to get to those theatres, and how to buy tickets; then they
click on ticketing links and buy tickets (an estimated 1 million
dollars’ worth in 2008) and attend performances—and then they return to
nytheatre.com to use our venue listings, read interviews with artists,
or check out specific reviews.
nytheatre.com differs from other theatre sites by focusing on the
nonprofit theatre community. More than 90% of shows in New York are
produced by nonprofits; most of these are small companies struggling for
limited funding and audiences. Because their marketing budgets are
modest (or even nonexistent), it’s hard for these companies to get
noticed by media and audiences. And notice is what they need and
deserve: they are the laboratory and experimental wing of American
theatre, the incubator for new artists, new forms, new styles, new
ideas.
Our vision is to level the playing field within the New York theatre
community—to make sure that underfunded emerging nonprofit companies are
given ample, enthusiastic coverage to help them reach the public and
build the audience they need to survive. We do this by listing more
shows on nytheatre.com than any other website we know of (more than
2,000 of them in 2008) and by reviewing more shows than anybody else
(910 in 2008). Our success in serving the nonprofit/indie theatre
community was acknowledged last year when we received the Stewardship
Award from the New York Innovative Theatre Foundation.
We are a very lean organization (annual budget under $100K), with one
full-time staffer (Executive Director Martin Denton). He edits
nytheatre.com and our other websites, creates much of their content, and
handles all web/systems development. The rest of our content (there’s
nearly 56 megabytes of data within nytheatre.com right now) is created
by a team of volunteers, all theatre professionals in the nonprofit
sector. They give freely of their time, writing reviews and other
material, to spread the word about this diverse, inspiring, and
underserved community.
NYTE is a Microsoft shop. (TechSoup donations make this possible, and
we’re grateful for that!) We use Office Professional 2007 for all of our
administrative tasks: Word to compose documents and letters, PowerPoint
for presentations, and our entire accounting system is programmed in
Excel. We use MapPoint to geocode locations of more than 200 venues
listed on nytheatre.com (so that the maps on our website are more
accurate than the ones Google would automatically serve based on
address).
Visual Studio 2005 has proved truly transforming for our
organization. All of the data that drives nytheatre.com is on a SQL
Server Express database. Using T-SQL and Visual Basic 2005, we have
built a system that converts this data into XML files that in turn serve
as the back end to nytheatre.com.
We love the flexibility this approach enables, and our budget loves
its extremely low cost. Using XML means we don’t have to host SQL Server
databases on the Net and we don’t have to worry about administering or
securing them. We would have to pay people to do those jobs, or ask
volunteers to assist in these tasks in lieu of creating content for the
website—in other words, we would be diverting our very scarce resources
from doing work that directly serves our constituency (reviews,
listings, articles on nytheatre.com). We can’t afford to do that.
The SQL Server/VB 2005 system enables us to manage and mobilize our
volunteers more effectively too. One of the biggest projects we
undertake each year is to review every show in the New York
International Fringe Festival. We’ve been doing this since 2002, and
it’s a vital service that fills a need no other outlet has ever been
able to meet. FringeNYC is the largest multi-arts festival in North
America, bringing together artists from around the world, who present
about 1500 performances of over 200 diverse theatre, dance, puppetry,
comedy, and dramatic productions in 20 venues in Lower Manhattan during
a 17-day period in August. The festival attracts tens of thousands of
visitors and was last year recognized by Mayor Bloomberg for its
contributions to the city’s cultural and economic landscape.
nytheatre.com covers this festival comprehensively, starting with
previews a month before the festival begins and continuing with reviews
of every show, posted during the short span of the festival in August.
We accomplish our FringeNYC coverage with the same one full-time
staffer plus about 75 volunteers and with no addition to our annual
budget. How? We use a proprietary automated scheduling system, built
originally in Access and now being upgraded to SQL Server, which allows
our volunteers to choose shows online and submit reviews via email, all
the while being tracked by the site’s editor from his desktop. Producers
and festival staff receive automatic email notification when reviews are
posted. Using VB2005, we’ve been able to add features such as tagging
(to our FringeNYC previews) and direct ticketing links (to both previews
and reviews) with no additional investment in infrastructure.
Microsoft technology also enabled us to add the “Trip Planner” to
nytheatre.com in 2007. This feature answers a question many visitors to
NYC have: what shows will be running when I come into town? The SQL
Server database consolidates information from all of the ticketing
agents that service NYC theatres (TicketMaster, Tele-charge, TicketWeb,
etc.) to produce a customized page that shows the reader exactly what
shows are available during the period of interest. And the Trip Planner
results include shows at all price points—small nonprofit/indie theater
offerings as well as Broadway/off-Broadway hits.
The software we’ve received from Microsoft via the TechSoup donation
program has enabled us to build a user-friendly, feature-rich website
that promotes the work of hundreds of nonprofit theatre companies to an
audience of 3 million people annually. It’s enabled us to grow and
expand the site without having to invest thousands of scarce dollars in
software/development; this in turn enables us to provide all of our
services to our nonprofit constituents at no charge to them. The content
on nytheatre.com builds audience, sells tickets, and helps hundreds of
NYC theatre companies stay afloat and focus on their mission. Rather
than having to spend money and resources they don’t have on promotion
and advertising, these organizations are able to innovate, experiment,
and create new art, contributing to the diverse cultural landscape of
the largest theatre community in America.