Harnessing Digital
We had the opportunity to catch up with Ella Lewis-Collins, Head of Marketing & Sales at the Royal Opera House for a Q&A on how they are using digital to support ticket purchases, engage audiences, develop education, improve accessibility and more.
‘Digital’ is a broad term, so what does that mean for the Royal Opera House predominantly – how do you harness digital?
Digital for us means ways that audiences can interact with us through digital products or platforms – whether that’s buying a ticket on our website, interacting with us on our social channels or streaming our productions on our new streaming platform. The purpose that digital serves can range from practical/transactional purposes – to new ways of experiencing our extraordinary productions and artforms.
How has the role of digital changed for Royal Opera House, and do you now consider this to be core to your offering?
The pandemic had a massive impact on how customers were able to interact with us and digital became even more crucial at a time when we were closing our physical doors. Our social media following and engagement grew significantly (we now have a following of over 5.2 million across our channels) and we started streaming recordings of our productions as pay per views, with a campaign called ‘Our House to Your House’. The success of this led us to build our own streaming platform, Royal Opera House Stream, which is now a core part of our public offering. The platform is a subscription model, which allows access to the ROH’s back catalogue of productions, as well as special behind-the-scenes insights and features, for a fixed monthly or annual fee.
On a more practical/transactional level, we are also just embarking on a major project which will look at the end-to-end customer ticket booking process and how we can improve this to deliver the best customer experience and to encourage people to continue to engage with our offering and to increase their loyalty over time. We will be looking at how we can make the process more streamlined for our customers – improvements are still in the scoping stage but we are looking at a range of things – from notifications on WhatsApp on your upcoming bookings, to seat upgrades and being able to add tickets to your phone wallets etc. We are also looking at how we can make customer comms more personalised and relevant to increase customer satisfaction and to upsell and increase revenue.
Does digital form part of your ongoing strategy?
Yes, absolutely. Digital is key to meeting our overall organisational objectives.
Digital is an important way for us to reach beyond Covent Garden and grow audiences across the globe. Our streaming platform is now part of our core ROH offer, allowing audiences across the world to experience ROH productions. Digital also provides access to our art forms for people who may not ordinarily be able to engage with us (e.g. those with access requirements, or who live far away). And it opens up the ROH to new potential audiences through reaching them on the channels that they are using, the success of our TikTok channel is a good example of this.
Digital is crucial to our educational mission – allowing us to interact with and bring together schools as part of our learning programmes – and to broadcast adult learning events.
Digital also allows us to tell the story of our brand and give access to things that our customers wouldn’t experience through attending a show in person – such as the chance to hear from performers and creatives, get special access to behind-the-scenes and understand what ROH is doing to develop talent and audiences for the future, through our various programmes.
What impact has streaming had on your attendance/audience numbers? Is this now part of your permanent programming?
Stream is now part of our permanent programming. We haven’t seen any negative impact of streaming on attendance to our in-person theatre performances. We know 50% of our Stream subscribers also purchase tickets for shows in our theatres. These are likely to be core audiences who want to relive the experience of seeing their favourite shows and/or want to see different casts performing etc. The other 50% are non-ticket buyers who are likely to be unable to attend due to location – around 40% of our subscribers are international – or for other reasons, including lifestyle or access reasons.
What is your biggest barrier when it comes to digital?
Needing to keep up with innovation in the space and how customers are interacting with different platforms. And being able to respond in a quick and agile way to changes.
And what would help you most overcome this?
Making sure that we are constantly keeping informed on what is happening in the market and how audiences are consuming content is key. In a rapidly changing environment where there always seems to be a new platform, whether that’s the Metaverse or Threads, we need to ensure that we are horizon-scanning for opportunities and also assessing whether these opportunities are right for our brand and what, as an organisation, we are trying to achieve. Jumping on the bandwagon when a new platform comes to market isn’t productive if this doesn’t align with your overall objectives – so making sure conversations are being had about the right places for us to invest our time and resources in order to help meet our objectives is crucial.
And finally, an organisation’s willingness to embrace change and to test new things. The way people interact with content, and what they expect from their experience, is constantly changing, and the ability to move with this, test new things and learn is important for us as a sector to prioritise in order to build our future.
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Image Credit: The Royal Opera House Auditorium ©2016 ROH. Photograph by Sim Canetty-Clarke