BOURNEMOUTH LITTLE THEATRE CLUB

Bournemouth Little Theatre Club was formed in 1919. This is not a history of the Club. But with regard to its present position in the local community it is useful to recall that, by the 1930s it owned its own 450-seat theatre in the centre of tourist Bournemouth. Its heyday in that form was in the 1950s and 1960s, with 1500 members and a waiting list to join.

By 1972 it was all over, and the theatre had to be sold. We were entering the long period when amateur theatre no longer made a profit. It took until 1975 before we could find a new home in the largely working-class area of Bournemouth called Winton, where we were lucky to get the upper floor of an industrial building at a cheap rent, the ground floor of which is now devoted to hauling in wrecked cars.

About 10 years ago we were once again in the unhappy position of having a losing theatre and, by about 1996-7, we were annually in the red to the tune of about £4,000. We were (and are) a membership club, but happy to be open to the public for the six major productions we put on each year. However, we were sometimes going up with only 30% of the seats occupied.

We seriously thought of giving up our lease, but decided to fight back. We were already taking the names and addresses of all non-members who came to see the shows. We now developed a rolling mailing database. We built a raked auditorium with tip-up seats. And we developed a newsletter. At first it was merely a letter sent to the members, which we had always done. Then we made it more like a newspaper, and sent it to members and non-members alike.

Today we send out seven newsletters a year, one in support of each of six productions, and the seventh every June to announce our coming season’s shows and to solicit - with brochures and application forms - for old members to rejoin, and for patrons to consider applying for membership.

The first modern newsletter was composed in August 1997 using a Microsoft Word ‘wizard’, on two sides of an A4 page. After that we switched to Microsoft Publisher for a number of editions, stretching to 4 pages in an A3 landscape format. We then transferred to the more sophisticated but relatively cheap application CorelDraw, which is an easy-to-use program if you want to include lots of pictures.

Then, when we changed to a new print shop, we began to use the publishing industry standard program, QuarkXPress, the same program as that used by the local print shop, as well as all major newspapers. We are currently writing the paper in Version 5, on a Sony Vaio laptop computer. We take all our own photos of performers and directors using advanced digital cameras, but we also ask for and receive by email photos from the press and publicity departments of companies such as the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe. We get other photos from the Internet. We are currently using Adobe Photoshop 7 to enhance and edit the photos to make them suitable for use in a ‘greyscale’ medium. Friends draw some cartoons and we get other humorous items from many other sources.

For those of a technical bent, for our images we generally use the TIFF format in greyscale, which means we can fade down the photos in Quark to provide faded backgrounds behind promotional text. Some images are mounted in colour to save time. The version of our June 2003 newsletter that you will find here is in .PDF (you will need Acrobat Reader to view the file) has had the images deliberately degraded to enable a low resolution file to be sent over the Internet. They look reasonable on screen, but are not printable.

We also use a good scanner when we are provided with a photo or cartoon that we would like to use. Most people with an old scanner imagine that all scanners are the same. That is not so. We have given away our original scanner and are now using an Epson Perfection 1240U. The difference in the ability to provide good photo reproduction is amazing. We also sometimes scan in newspaper or magazine photos, which can be problematical because of the dots that newspaper photos use. The newsletters are litho-printed from disks that we provide to the print shop. The latter allow us to sit with the computer technicians to iron out any small problems - a privilege not provided to any other customers!

And the result? Simple: we mailshot to about 800 patrons plus partners per issue. Apart from the odd unusual show that we put on to balance our more populist productions, we generate over 95% bums on seats - the name of the game. Even with the odd offbeat show we exceed 90%. Obviously, choice of plays, competent directors, fine actors, and a general aggressive approach to the marketplace are all factors.

What we do is possibly not applicable to all amateur companies: but a mailing list - taking names - is not beyond any group, membership or not. Nor is the creation of an attractive newsletter. All it requires is someone with a computer and an interest in doing the job.

My name is Tony Orman. I am Membership Secretary of BLTC and I currently produce our newsletter. My email address is tony.orman@talktalk.net. If you want to contact me for help in setting up your own paper, or if you would like to swap information, I shall be happy to pass on to you anything I have learned, and am continuing to learn every day. We nerds must stick together!