EC PAPERS NOVEMBER 2017

6

Liberating Arts

The new ticket offer and the FB marketing had an immediate effect and sales started to rise. Then on 12 th October we were faced with an unexpected crisis. During the TUC conference and unbeknown to the GFTU Gen Sec or the Producer, an email had been sent to the third party hotel booking agency, Red Meet , telling them Liberating Arts had been 5 cancelled. In turn they had cancelled all the hotel rooms. Subsequently realising the event had not in fact been cancelled they tried to rebook the rooms but now could only get a rate of £65 per person per night and to secure this rate the bill would have to be paid in advance. So on that day we were faced with committing to spending another £7500 on hotel bills when a decision had not yet been made about whether the event was actually taking place. At this point ticket sales were approaching 80 but had plateaued and our estimate was that we would be lucky to reach 100 in total. With the new hotel bills the costs of the festival were approximately £35k. Ticket sales at this level were going to bring in £5k. So the GFTU were looking at costs of £30k for an event serving less that 100 people. If we cancelled we would have spent £11k, which was unrecoverable. So the worry was that with numbers at less that 100 the event would ‘feel’ and perceived like a failure and yet cost the GFTU £30k. Yet if we cancelled we would have spent £11k on nothing and would suffer the reputational damage of having cancelled a high profile event that had been widely publicised. In preparation for this situation the Producer had prepared a plan for a reduced 1-day event that would cost the GFTU under £20k and yet still fulfil the aims and objectives of Liberating Arts. This plan involved offering tickets at a much lower price and 6 concentrated on filling the venue rather than generating income. If we were able to do this we could save the day by running a successful event

Red Meet were a third party hotel booking agency employed by the GFTU to book 5 accommodation for both artists/presenters and for delegates. See below.

Based on the prices of The World Transformed here . 6 6 Producer’s Report 06/11/2017