[FASS] FASS needs your help! And badly!

[FASS President]

Hello FASSies!

tl;dr: The Board is looking for 1. feedback on our thoughts below, 2. creative
ideas to fill our expected budget deficit, and 3. creative ideas for Winter
show venues. Please send your feedback and ideas to me at
htbroadley at gmail.com or DM FASS on Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/uwfass> or Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/fass.theatre.company/>.

The FASS Board has yet to vote on dates and a venue for our Winter 2024
show. Venue-wise, our top choice is Theatre of the Arts (TofA), which
hosted FASS in Winter 2023. However, we expect to lose between $1,500 and
$3,000 on a Winter show at TofA, even if we raise ticket prices to $20 plus
taxes and fees. We think that future shows at TofA would lose similar
amounts of money. FASS has about $8,500 in the bank, so we can’t continue
using TofA in this way indefinitely.

We’ve considered several strategies to increase revenue, including:


   -

   Recruiting more people to grow our audience
   -

   Promoting merchandise sales
   -

   Soliciting donations from all of you FASSies
   -

   Looking for arts funding and external advertisers and sponsors


However, we don’t think we can make enough progress on these to break even
on the Winter show.

To make matters worse, we’ll probably only get two weeks of rehearsals when
we do shows at TofA. We've heard loud and clear that FASSies would like to
go back to three weeks of rehearsals.

We’ve considered several other venues: Humanities Theatre, Studio HH 180,
and several lecture halls on UW campus; Kitchener-Waterloo Little Theatre
(KWLT) in Uptown Waterloo; the Registry Theatre in Downtown Kitchener; and
various cinemas, community centres, and event spaces in Kitchener-Waterloo.
No venue is perfect. Some are more expensive than TofA. Some are small
enough that it’d be a challenge to fit our audience and Company into the
venue. Some are too difficult to access from UW campus for the students who
make up most of our Company and audience. Some are unavailable for our
preferred show dates in early February. And some don’t give our Company the
experience of putting on a show in a real theatre.

So, here’s our tentative plan. If we can limit our expected budget deficit
this Winter to $1,500 and get three weeks of rehearsal, we’ll use Theatre
of the Arts. Otherwise, KWLT is a good alternative for us, providing three
weeks of rehearsals and a realistic chance to balance FASS's budget.

The main drawbacks of KWLT are 1. a limited backstage area for a cast of 15
to 25 that will require extra planning, and 2. that it isn’t on UW campus.
We know that hosting FASS off-campus is a departure from tradition. But a
company that runs an annual loss of over $1,500 with only $8,500 in the
bank has a life expectancy of five years. It’s important we turn this
around before we lose our hard-earned financial buffer.

This is where we need your help! The Board is looking for 1. feedback on
our tentative plan, 2. creative ideas to fill our expected budget deficit,
and 3. creative ideas for Winter show venues. Please send your feedback and
ideas to me at htbroadley at gmail.com or DM FASS on Facebook
<https://www.facebook.com/uwfass> or Instagram
<https://www.instagram.com/fass.theatre.company/>.

Thanks for reading this far. I hope to hear from you!

Yours in FASS,

Thomas
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/fass-mod/attachments/20231102/fdf9f2f8/attachment.html>