Jane’s Best Tips for Outreach Concerts

1. Be proactive, not reactive. Decide where YOU want to sing as a chorus in order to work at your mission, expand a segment of your audience or whatever motivator you have determined.
2. Ask your singers what their priorities are for reaching out to the community. Get them invested!
3. Start small. Sing for one classroom or after-school event. Some of our best connections have happened when while song-sharing with a school choir during their rehearsal period.
4. Plan ahead. Negotiate at least 2-3 outreach concerts and add them to your performance calendar so that singers have those dates at their very first rehearsal in September.
5. Create ways to connect with students: serve food at every rehearsal, sing together, create mingling moments, go back to the same school several years in a row, give comp tickets to your next concert.
6. Collect quotes from students before and after your concerts with them.
7. Identify core rep to use in outreach concerts (simple to learn, audience appeal, sing-along music, music with parts for students, mission-related themes, repeatable without driving singers crazy).
8. Form a Production Team to help you manage the logistics (buses, stage managing, props, counting people, negotiating routes, etc).
9. Collect stories: pass a clip board in the bus, hang large paper in the green room, set aside time at the next rehearsal to share stories and record them. Document, share and archive!
10. Let your patrons/donors know what you are doing! Talk about your outreach in concerts, tell stories in your newsletter, talk to donors – get the word out.

But how do I make connections to schools?

• Ask teachers in your choir if the chorus can sing at their school
• Treasure Map: Take 10 minutes in rehearsalfor singers to brainstorm ideas for connecting with schools/teachers
• Attend professional choral events and broach the idea with teacher colleagues
• Attend choral and arts performances in your community and introduce yourself to school and other arts groups that might want to connect with your chorus
• Talk to pastors of supportive congregations to see if they have teachers in their church or synagogue
• Offer comp tickets to school choirs and school choir conductors/administrators/teachers.

One Voice Mixed Chorus
ArtisticDirector@OneVoiceMN.org
651-298-1954
www.OneVoiceMN.org

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