It's a problem Matt Lehrman says he heard about all the time: "People would say to me, 'If I had known so-and-so was going to be in town, I would have gone.'"
At the time, Lehrman was marketing director for Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. He saw a need to connect prospective audiences with the arts events they had opportunities to patronize, and left his position to create Alliance for Audience, a nonprofit organization designed to raise the visibility of the arts in the Valley of the Sun.
"All arts and culture organizations in the Valley have the same basic challenges: limited resources, limited money and limited time," Lehrman says. "They have barely enough to sell the next event in their calendar, but no one has enough resources to bring new people in on a regular basis."
Alliance for Audience began with a founding grant from the Virginia G. Piper Trust. Today, more than 150 local arts and culture organizations are now Alliance for Audience members, and Lehrman is the executive director of the group.
The organization's central product is the Web site ShowUp.com, which debuted in late 2004. Gov. Janet Napolitano bought the first discount ticket from the site, Lehrman says. "And she went to the show," he adds. "We have a governor that really supports the arts."
Today, ShowUp.com is a cultural marketplace with comprehensive listings for all types of goings-on. Thousands of events are categorized by genre, including theater, dance, literature and more, with special categories for children's and family events and gay and lesbian events. The category titled Unique AZ is devoted to Western- and Native American-themed events. All arts and cultural organizations can list their events, although Alliance for Audience members have the opportunity for their events to be spotlighted within the Web site.
Lehrman says that new organizations appear on ShowUp.com all the time.
"I get calls every week from new theater companies, new dance groups that would like people to know about their shows. I'm glad to be of service to them."
Consumers can use ShowUp.com in a variety of ways. Besides the calendar listings, the site also has a discount ticket marketplace where customers can buy reduced-price tickets to select shows.
A free e-mail subscription list titled "You've Got Shows" sends arts and culture information to almost 13,000 people. Users can choose to receive any or all of four lists: "Special Offers," for discount tickets; "Family Fun," for families with young children; "Hot and Cool," for news about alternative theater and emerging art forms; and "Out There," for events in the gay and lesbian community. Lehrman says that more lists will be added in the future.
The newest addition to the products offered by ShowUp.com is the Show Up Now pass, which debuted earlier this year. Marketed to tourists (and the Arizonans who show them around town), the pass entitles the holder to free admission at a variety of Valley attractions, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, the Phoenix Zoo, the Heard Museum, the Desert Botanical Gardens and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. The passes are marketed in conjunction with the visitors' bureaus of cities around the Valley.
One-day, two-day and five-day passes are available for $18, $34 or $49, respectively. In comparison, a tour of Taliesin West alone costs $18.
"When a visitor is coming to the Valley, there are certain places that they need to visit," Lehrman says. "To come to Arizona and not go to the Heard Museum or not see the Pueblo Grande Museum, it would be a shame. Our job was to bring everything together and make it easy."
After almost three years of ShowUp.com's existence, "the response has been terrific," Lehrman says. "There is a very large market of people who don't know the main venues downtown that we kind of take for granted that everyone knows about. There's also a lot of things going on around the Valley with small neighborhood theater companies, dance groups, choral groups, chamber groups.
"If you can bring someone in to try an organization or a place they haven't been to before, it is an opportunity to bring them back in the future. That, for us, is audience development."
