Scheduling Virtual Events

[blueeyesdesigns]

As the weather is warming up and people are itching to get outside, I find myself hesitating to recommend my arts producers schedule their streams when their live events would have been (typically weekend afternoons...) I would love some insight on audience trends from this group. What times seem to gather the most folks? Are weeknights better than weekends? Afternoon vs. evening? What's been your experience?

 

[DrewE]

If you can offer on-demand replay after the fact, perhaps only for a week or so, it seems to me you can make a lot of the scheduling concerns largely moot. For an in-person performance, a replay is obviously a rather poor replacement for really being there live; but when you're watching video on a computer or TV, it makes a whole lot less of a difference whether it's occurring live or is a replay. The one obvious exception is in the case where there's some interactive online elements to the production, but I suspect those are comparatively rare.

As for the best times and days, surely that varies a fair bit with the demographics of your audience. The one live streamed "event" (if it could be called that) which I have any practical experience at all with recurs every Sunday morning at 10:30 AM, and that time and day fits in very well with the expectations and schedules of the families in the congregation.

 

[TheaterEd]

For our past three productions we saw highest numbers on Saturday, then Thursday, then Friday. Not significant differences, but they went in that order for all three.

With the weather improving though.... Everyone and their kids were out and about on Saturday. Cabin fever seems to have hit extra hard due to covid restrictions and people want to get out of the house. Our next show is in June and I am thinking to do Wednesday - Friday.

 

[blueeyesdesigns]

Cabin fever seems to have hit extra hard due to covid restrictions...

Yeah, that's what I'm worried about, too. We do have the ability to leave things up to watch later, but I'm mostly in education and the students especially are always wanting to know how many people are watching live. I'd like to set them up for success as much as possible.