Victoria Symphony - a Local Orchestra

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Table of Contents

1.0 INTRODUCTION2

2.0 THE REQUIREMENTS3

3.0 ISSUES3

4.0 OUR APPROACH4

5.0 PROJECTS STEPS AND PROJECT SHEDULE4

6.0 CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS6

7.0 KEY DELIVERABLES7

8.0 THE TEAM7

REFERENCES9

APPENDIX10

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Our client, Victoria Symphony, is a local orchestra based in Victoria BC, which was founded in 1941 by members of the Royal Canadian Navy as an amateur ensemble. The mission of Victoria Symphony is to enrich lives through the shared experience of extraordinary music (Who We Are, n.d.). Currently, it consists of numerous prominent musicians and is led by Music Director Tania Miller who has gained a national reputation with her leadership skill and pursuit of innovative projects.  Each season, Victoria Symphony delivers various series of programs, such as masterworks, pops, classics, holiday concerts, and concerts to kids. To attract more people to enjoy classical music, this year the Victoria Symphony introduced a fun initiative, providing drinks and food while playing classical music live with “Happy Hour” concerts in a variety of venues downtown. The marquee event of the year for many Victorians is the annual Symphony Splash with more than 40,000 people attending on foot, and in kayaks, canoes, or dragon boats in front of the barge in Victoria’s Inner Harbor. As Victoria Symphony believes music is vital to the emotional and intellectual development of youth, it also offers diverse innovative, educational and accessible programs to create fantastic musical experiences, inspire young audiences, and outreach to the community.

2.0 THE REQUIREMENTS

The Victoria Symphony wants to undertake research to collect the following information: 

• Understanding the best practices of other symphony orchestras;

• Understanding the impact of their initiatives on tickets sales, subscriptions, donations and audience engagement; and

• How to compare these best practices given the difference in size of all the symphonies.

This research project is being undertaken in order to support the accomplishment of two strategic goals of Victoria Symphony in this fiscal year: 

-        To broaden, deepen and diversify Victoria Symphony’s audience; and

• To build Victoria Symphony’s reach into its community.

By fulfilling the two goals above, Victoria Symphony expects to add more value to the community, thereby increasing their influence in Victoria as well as in Canada. This, in return, will bring them an enhanced reputation, which could be leveraged into increased tickets sales, donations, subscriptions and audience engagement. All of these will help Victoria Symphony to gain an increased capability to meet its other two strategic goals: achieving sustainable financial growth, and continuing to raise artistic standards and support artistic aspirations.

Therefore, to achieve these goals, Victoria Symphony needs to expand its audience base and diversify its customer segments. Originally, senior citizens have taken up the majority of the audience base, but Victoria Symphony has successfully attracted some younger segments recently by launching a variety of new programs, events and activities. However, this is far from being enough. The Victoria Symphony wishes to launch more such activities to further diversify its segments and deepen its root in the local community. With this purpose, Victoria Symphony wants to gain an understanding of best practices that other symphonies orchestras in North America are using and to evaluate whether some of the best practices could be used by Victoria Symphony to produce a positive impact on tickets sales, subscriptions, donations and audience engagement. In addition, since symphony orchestras across Canada are of different sizes, Victoria Symphony is also interested in understanding how they can consider some of the best practices in terms of scalability.

3.0 ISSUES

According to the requirements documented in a meeting with Jill Smillie, the marketing director of Victoria Symphony, the following issues should be addressed to accomplish this project:

• Understanding what best practices are adopted by other symphonies across Canada and the impact of these best practices socially and financially.

• Understanding whether there are other criteria to define a best practice for a symphony.

• Deciding how to analyze and select best practices practical for Victoria Symphony to carry out.

4.0 OUR APPROACH

Key assumptions

The market will remain unchanged during the time when the project is conducted.

Information provided by the client and the interviewees is valid.

All recommendations will be in consideration of all known regulations of municipal, provincial, and federal laws and regulations. 

Methodology

The core of the methodology is to find an analysis model to select best practices for Victoria Symphony and to make sure the selected best practices will be attractive to the local people. This cannot be done without sufficient information. The following approaches will be adopted to collect all the needed information for the success of the analysis:

•  Business Environment Scanning

A business environment scan will first be conducted using the PEST model. Such analysis will help Victoria Symphony understand its context politically, economically, socially and technologically and how any changes might impact the strategy Victoria Symphony will develop. With the help of this analysis, Victoria Symphony could better align their best practices to the external environment. All the information will be collected through online research and academic literature review.

• Best practices review

The most important information supporting the analysis is data about best practices currently used by other symphonies all over Canada. In addition, the target audience of such initiatives and audience feedback (if possible) will be collected. Information will be collected mainly from official websites and social media. A thorough best practice summary will be very helpful in formulating a thorough understanding of the features of all the best practices. It will also serve as the fundamental database to select the best practices for Victoria Symphony.

5.0 PROJECT STEPS AND PROJECT SHEDULE 

Planning stage (from June 14th to August 7th)

In this stage, the 596 team will work with the supervisor and the client to develop an understanding of the tasks, goals and scope etc. The team will meet several times to develop a detailed step-by-step approach to address the issues of the project. This Statement of Work has been written to document this understanding. Once in agreement, the client representative, the supervisor, and all the team members will sign on signature page of SOW.

Initial Research Stage (from August 1st to September 1st)

The focus of the initial research is to gain a better insight of the programs, events and activities conducted by other Canadian symphony peers. According to our client, the symphonies with similar sizes are the top priority for this research, followed by smaller sizes and then larger sizes. To do this, we plan to collect information about their best practices through the following approaches:

Online-research

Most information will be collected from official websites, such as programs names, target audiences and event descriptions. Apart from that, a social media review will also be conducted to collect feedback about each of the activities.

Information about the best practices collected will be classified into the following categories:

• Community outreach - programs outside the concert hall

• Audience engagement

• Education programs

• Non-standard programming - like new music, festivals, concerts geared at young adults

• Social media presence

Stakeholder interviews

Stakeholder interviews will also be done with personnel at other symphony organizations to further deepen our understanding about their initiatives. A list of interview questions will be designed in advance. The client will assist with these interviews by connecting us with contacts in other symphony organizations to obtain richer data and gain better results.

Analysis Stage (from September 1st to October 11th)

In this stage, all the programs, events and activities collected will be analyzed to select best practices. Our client was particularly interested in knowing how the selected best practices impact on the following four aspects:

• Ticket sales

• Subscriptions

• Donations

• Audience engagement

The four aspects will also serve as important criteria to select best practices from all the programs, events and activities assessed. However, Victoria Symphony also wants to know whether there are other criteria defining a successful program, event, or activity. As this part still remains to be determined, we plan to first use the four given aspects to select best practices. As the research goes on, we expect that there may be other factors found. Therefore, the analysis will be built on, but not limited to, the four elements above. The result of the analysis will be used to compare all the selected best practices with those of Victoria Symphony.

Recommendation Development (from October 12nd to November 8th)

Based on the research conducted above, we will propose recommendations to help Victoria Symphony address the challenges that it is facing. The recommendations will identify potential new initiatives for Victoria Symphony by categorizing findings in the following format:

• A list of best practices that can be modified in order to become viable considerations for Victoria Symphony. Our suggestions on how to modify these initiatives will be included. It was agreed that our client will be responsible for further deciding whether they are able to carry out the best practices.

• (Potentially) A second list of initiatives will also be recommended based on any additional ideas generated by our team while working on this project, if applicable. It is possible that the 596 project team, after absorbing so many ideas of different best practices during the research, other practices may come to mind that could be beneficial for Victoria Symphony, even if not specifically undertaken already by another orchestra. If so, these ideas will also be presented.

Please see Appendix 1 for the proposed project schedule.

6.0 CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

There are five factors that we think are critical to the success of this project:

• The recommendations/solutions must be aligned with Victoria Symphony’s business objectives and effectively address the business issues.

The recommendations of the project need to add value to Victoria Symphony’s accomplishment of its strategic goals of. A thorough understanding of the strategic goals of Victoria Symphony is vital. What does the Victoria Symphony need to achieve? What are its priorities? The recommended initiatives / solutions need to align with these business objectives and effectively address the relevant business problems.