My mother had this to say to a 6-year-old’s tantrum: “I want doesn’t get”.

Whether or not you deserve recognition is not a relevant question. I know it’s hard work. I know it’s probably harder for you because I know that the degree of support that I’ve been given, support I didn’t earn or deserve, is a rarity. We are all born into this world naked and crying in need. At that red and wriggly point in our lives we have done nothing to deserve what follows except be.

Good things have been happening for me this year. I do not know how much I deserve, but I do know that everything I’ve done was made possible by the love of my Ma and Pa.

Beren directs some Inspiring action

At the beginning of the year I was chosen along with Lindelwa Kisana, Beren Belknap and Frankie Nassimbeni to take part in ASSITEJ SA’s Inspiring a Generation programme. It’s a collaboration with ASSITEJ’s Swedish chapter whose goal is to encourage more quality plays to be written for the youth. At the beginning of the month our counterparts arrived and we spent a week doing workshops lead by Karen Jeynes and Lucia Cajchanova. In three weeks we’ll be going to the Bibu.se Festival in Lund and will be presenting scenes and the first draft of our plays.

Whenever I need inspiration, or my process stalls, I turn to Robert McKee’s Story. I randomly opened it and got this:

“At last he [the writer] has a story. Now he goes to friends, but not asking for a day out of their lives – which is what we ask when we want a conscientious person to read a screenplay. Instead he pours a cup of coffee and asks for ten minutes. Then he pitches his story.”

The exercise of writing out the story inevitably leads us to write out what happens. But this is not story. The story is the distillation of what happens, the spine under the actions and events that gives them meaning. Telling a story is to select moments out of the infinite scope of ‘what happened’ (for in fiction anything is possible) into an emotionally moving sequence. When you tell someone your story out loud you’ll see if it works in their face and their body language. Then you’ll know if you have story that’ll hook your audience or just a list of things happening.

This time around Christine Skinner is handling the publicity and we’ve had a photo in the Argus and a give-away in the Cape Times. Here’s a link to an interview I did with Daniel Derckson for his newsletter, The Notepad. And on Sunday Briony and I’ll be interviewed by Jonathan Duguid on UCT radio at 1.30pm.

We’re very excited to be doing the play again and this run gives us a chance to try out some changes before we head up to Grahamstown.

The Kalk Bay space is very different, a wide stage with audience nearly 180° around it. This makes the blocking a challenge and we decided to have a bit of fun with it while opening up and simplifying the lights. But the biggest changes are to the text. Nothing fundamental – I rewrote one scene completely and added bits and cut others to try and drive the characters’ along more. Then I also put back a scene that sort of slows and shifts the mood, the exact reasons we cut it in the first place.

If you do see Owl for a second time, I’d be really interested in hearing your thoughts on the changes – you can email me or post on the blog.

Heeeey… so you’re a writer? You’ve been sitting in front of a computer screen, hunched over and away from natural light or maybe you’ve been sterilizing your baby-maker by perching a humming laptop on, obviously, your lap. I can tell these things. You’ve probably spent a couple of weeks or years working on your script. You’ve revised it, rewritten it, thrown it away and started over a couple of times. But now it’s ready. What do you do now?

Direct it yourself.

No, no, no! That’s what everyone tells writers not to do! You need another mind on it, you need a trained director to shape and mould it – someone who has experience, or a degree, or something.

And they’re right. A good script does need all of that to reach its potential.

But …

Have you ever heard a director say he has an idea for a production and get this advice: “Great idea, go find someone to write it for you. You need another mind on it, you need a trained writer to shape and mould it – someone who has experience, or a degree, or something.” I haven’t.

Writing is regarded as an innate skill in the Cape Town theatre industry. Everyone has it. While overseas the writer/director is a rarity, here it is almost impossible not find a director who is also a writer. And it requires very little to bring out this wonderful storytelling ability that lurks in the heart of talented people. You don’t need to study a degree or even read a book on it; after all you’ve read/watched /listened to stories your whole life. What if I was to say the same about directing or acting? UCT has 4 year long programmes for each of these. But not for playwriting, that’s something you’re meant to have picked up along the way.

When a person is a writer first they create opportunities for actors and directors. They often take on the role of producer too. Look around: Nicholas Spagnoletti and his play London Road; Duncan Bulwalda and Dream, Brother; Louis Viljoen just finished a run of his new script The Verbalists at the Arena; Amy Jeptha who is too prolific to cite only one example;  and, yes, me.

Directors generate jobs often – for actors, designers, techies and musos. Actors generate jobs too. But in all my wracking of my brain the only independent production I could think of where a writer was approached to write something is Damage Control. Well played Lauren Steyn.

Independent theatre doesn’t generate jobs for writers but writers generate jobs for independent theatre all the time.

This is an absurd situation.

I’ve been trying it this week and it is gold. There is a satisfaction in working toward the final goal where before there was only satisfaction in completing a task.

With the tagline and a firm idea of identity I went into step two: drafting press releases and covering emails, creating content for the website and material like posters and flyers. But how do you decide what to spend you money and energy on?

There is a formula I use to work out how valuable a certain strategy might be. I made it up based on common sense, high school maths and general reading. If you can spot any problems I’d love to improve it. Basically answers the question: How likely is it to pay for itself?

Stage 1: How many people does it need to bring into the theatre to pay for itself?

Simple version:

(unit cost x number of units) / (minimum ticket price) = number of tickets you need to sell

Then take that number and compare it to the number of units. How likely is it to bring in those audience members?

Ticket sale target / number of units

This gives us a ratio to compare

So Case Study time! The design stuff is pretty straight forward for me, being a designer myself. I decided to make a thousand business card format flyers and distribute them. I handed them to people who wanted to know what I was up to. I left piles at coffee shops, bookstores, back packers, and had the magnificent Mwenya hand them out to her students. Yusrah recommended a super cheap printer out in Kensington 7^th Avenue. They were R360 for 500, so we’ll plug that straight in:

R 720 / R50 = 14.4

Which means 1000 flyers need to bring in 15 people to pay for itself, sunk into a single value: 0.0015. We’ll call this number its minimum effective value. Of course this is pretty useless since we’re now just looking at it with our gut. Unfortunately until more people share their strategies and audience numbers it’s impossible to work out a statistically significant average effective value – and even then marketing is a remarkably tangled system. All we can do is rely on our personal experience to try figure out if the minimum effective value is greater or less than the average effective value.

Frustrating.

What we need is a Fermi formula – a means of organizing our ignorance and generating a logical estimate – to find the average effective value.

number of days x number of distribution points x (daily average traffic at distribution points x percentage of population interested in theatre x percentage of people who notice ad)* x percentage of people who intend to come and follow through**

* this cannot exceed the number of units per point if it’s a flyer.

** this is the ‘facebook event’ phenomenon – the percentage of people who rsvp ‘attending’ and actually show up.

This is roughly the way that websites and advertisers work out how effective an advert is, except that they have detailed numbers returned to them so they don’t have to guess.

OK, so plugging in the guesses:

7 x 10 x (70 x 0.05 x 0.6)* x 0.4

This gives us a total of 58.8 to 1000 flyers or an average effective value of 0.058

I’m not going to lie, this system is spotty and I may have missed some obvious modifiers but the margin between the minimum effective value and the average effective value is wide enough that we can safely say that flyers are good value for money.

Is anyone still reading? The point of all of this is that I can remember graduating and planning how to advertise my shows and doing things because they were what everyone else did. Really there is a lot to think about and you can go about it in quite a logical way. You can maximise your efforts by concentrating on improving one or two aspects of the formula. You could increase the number of distribution points, or pick points with greater traffic. You could discard the idea of flyers entirely and concentrate on more noticeable strategies with greater visibility but higher cost, like banners or posters. These formulas also help you to be realistic about free strategies like Facebook events or emails, which is what I’ll be covering next.

With these ideas in my head I chose to do business card flyers, 20 posters only, and to focus on free strategies: emailing, Facebook, blogging and Twitter.

I have spoken briefly about why I chose to do the PR myself. Finding myself in that position I still took all the help I could, like good advice and email lists. Marketing your show isn’t a single action or strategy; it’s the creation and management of relationships. That and many other things I’m going to be talking about I first read about on the Mission Paradox blog – an excellent resource of good advice and strategy.

I’m going to go through these marketing topics in successive posts: Identity, Getting Reviewers, Print Campaign, Social Media, the First Week, and the Last Week. This post will cover the first step of any marketing campaign: knowing yourself.

Just who is Jon Keevy? What does he stand for, believe in? I’m not trying to turn Jon Keevy into a brand – I’m trying to distil my own values and make sure they come across clearly. One of the most important for me is honesty. I’m not going to use buzzwords and throw around adjectives – I am going to be direct about the triumphs and problems of working in theatre. I am going to say things I wish people had said to me when I was starting out. This attempt at honesty is about trying to stay humble and recognising that there is always room for improvement. That’s in the production too. It’s in the process. It’s me. Marketing is not lying about who you are; marketing is letting people know who you are.

Having contemplated myself more than usual I moved onto making sure that the information is out there. I registered the domain for my blog so I didn’t have a “dot wordpress” to deal with and I made sure that I kept it updated with content. I tried to stay away from posting straight “when, where” and to make sure who I am came through. This goes for messages on Twitter and Facebook too – social media works when you use it to build a relationship and not when you treat it like an advertising space.

Briony and I then brainstormed, searching for a good tagline for the show. This is the under  10 word ‘hook’ you use to tell people what the show is about. It’s harder to write than the whole play because it needs to convey in a moment the tone and content of the show. We came up with:

“Climbing trees, punching boys, kissing girls”

This went on the posters and as a lead-in to our press-releases. It worked well. It’s serious but not emo. It has some swagger to it, an attitude. And each idea evolves and adds a layer to the image. We tried a lot of very ridiculous lines before we found it. I see many shows squandering their tagline with clichés like: “a sensitive and moving tale”. Others use quotes from a review – a perfectly legit method, sometimes it takes an outsider looking in to understand what a show is really about.

It may even take a sit down with someone else to tell you what you’re really about.

By far the most articulate of the commentary so far has been Mike van Graan’s defence of the awards. He uses good solid numbers to peel away the first layer of blame that Lara Foot’s speech unleashed. But he could have gone further.

In digging past the FdC panel he showed us the disproportionately white industry – “how can the FdCs show transformation when they must reflect this?” he argues. He raises an example of a mostly white company, the Mechanicals, as something that could offer great experience and training for young black actors. He raises questions about why there are so few. And then he doesn’t deign to do any of that research that made the rest of his article so compelling. He doesn’t ask them to comment on why, he doesn’t propose a theory and look at the available evidence.

Mike van Graan’s article is a successful attempt to exonerate Distell and the FdC awards. He is right. They are not to blame. So he looks around and vaguely gestures at the “theatre managements and independent theatre-makers” who need to be more inclusive, at “the Cape Town’s theatre sector” who need to rise to the challenge, and at “the people of colour across the theatre industry” who need to participate and have opportunities created for them.

In the end, despite Mr van Graan’s well reasoned and researched opinions, he can only cast the blame over everyone. I would appreciate if in the final paragraph he at least had the good grace not to refer to the Cape Town theatre industry as ‘it’ and instead owned up to his conclusion with ‘we’.

Sorry about that. I’m restructuring it so that it’s less ramble and more bang for your buck.

Expect it before Friday. I know you’re on the edge of your seat…

JK

First some  general thoughts…

Probably the most persistent brain tickler that Owl has brought up for me is the question of how success is defined. I’d categorise it under the headings of:

Personal – am I happy with how I did? My writing, directing, design, PR work. I am constantly plagued by the voice in my head telling I could have done better. I think a lot of us know that voice. I try not to ignore it and rather ask it, ‘OK, how?’

Critical – What did people say about the work? The reviewers and the people you respect whose brain you pick over a cup of tea two weeks later.

Financial – This is very much bound up with getting audience into the theatre. Looking at a budget, did I make back my costs? After that if divide my portion of the profits did I make more per hour than I did working as a store clerk? Do I have enough to do it again and also buy the groceries this week?

Professional – Thinking long term, has this helped your career? Did the Gatekeepers see it? Is it another line on a CV? Quite a tough one to judge as the ripples a production makes can sometimes only be discovered years later.

So here’s Part One of the report back on Owl.

The big facts of the production are two numbers: R3 131 and R13 980; Costs and Income.

Costs were kept extremely low – we operated on a profit share so the fees for Briony, Brydon, Fiona, Gabi and me are not included. Neither is the hire fee for the Intimate which is 10% of the door. The cost allocation looks like this:

The lion’s share was clearly the money spent on marketing. This included a professional photographer to take shots for the poster and profiles of the team, printing 18 A3 full colour posters, 1000 business card ‘flyers’, and the opening night catering – an area I will in future cut down on (more on this in Part 2). I think this is a fairly good idea of what proportions you should be spending in, even if you adjust the particulars for your strategy.

The publicity was done by myself, which I do not recommend (I recommend THIS) – but which had to be the case. I tried to find the dream publicist but the first marketer I sat down with simply couldn’t take on the project and turned me on to another, likewise unable to help. These two were my first choices as antidotes to the ‘usual’ publicists and my attempt to get new audiences in. When they fell through I tried one of the best theatre publicists in Cape Town who I have worked with before. Unfortunately she was on vacation. My fourth meeting and tenth cup of tea with a potential publicist really excited me and we agreed to work together. For reasons I’ll never really understand she left me hanging for ten days before I realised she was overcommitted and couldn’t deliver. By this stage I was desperate to get out my press releases. Rather than waste time searching for another choice (even a day would have been a waste as I was 2 weeks to opening night) I decided to do it myself.

I took it on because I have the resources, the energy and have spent a lot of time thinking about marketing. Even then I knew that a lot of the great ideas and tips I’d talked about with the potential publicists would have to fall by the wayside. That I got the audience I did is more a validation of the system and the building blocks of PR strategy than any credit to myself.

This is the audience I got:

Slow first week dominated by complimentary tickets. Skyrocketing the second week. Why? Reviews. All told, about 380 people came to watch Owl. Not bad.

For the next post I’ll elaborate on the Marketing Strategy and focus on the fundamentals – which I never go much beyond this time round.