The operation of domestic national and public cultural and art organizations has become an independent corporate body gradually. With this trend of establishing an independent corporate body or a foundation, securing stable financial resources has com...
The operation of domestic national and public cultural and art organizations has become an independent corporate body gradually. With this trend of establishing an independent corporate body or a foundation, securing stable financial resources has come to the fore as a managerial task. In this regard, it is necessary to study their membership system, namely a means of creating financial resources. Membership system is a very basic means of creating financial resources as well as a traditional method with which an art company forms continuous relations with audience. The operation of a membership system does not have a great effect on national and public performing arts organizations' fiscal self-reliance ratio, but it can be a prerequisite for an organization to develop potential audience, secure loyal audience, exert its artistry and creativity, and expect its stable operation and fiscal self-reliance.
In this regard, the purpose of this study is to examine the membership activation of national and public performing arts organizations. For this, the current status of the membership system of each organizations were examine through literature, cases and interviews with persons in charge of the systems, thus trying to work out a membership activation plan.
The analytic frame was established based on the types, promotion methods, benefits, revenue types of membership systems, after analyzing each cases of Seoul Arts Center, Sejong Center for the Performing Arts, National Theater Company of Korea, and other performing arts organization which had a huge group of members, earned much from its membership systems and have been holding more then 10 performances annually. Study findings are as follows:
First, the membership system should be classified according to each targeted audience. Because annual fee could not be an obstacle factor for audience to visit an art company, domestic national and public performing art companies divided their membership system into free membership and charged membership. Their members were classified by ages and occupations.
Second, it is necessary to establish a marketing strategy in order to secure and maintain members. A performing arts organization needs to launch campaigns throughout the year and promote the membership system using a variety of channels, thus providing information to people and inducing them to become a member. It is necessary to limit the term of membership, and provide information and maintain audience's interest continuously, in order to increase the rate of membership renewal. It is also necessary to check members whose membership expires soon and then carry out renewal promotion for them, thus preventing their withdrawals and attracting new members through oral transmission effects. In order to prevent charged member's withdrawals and increase their loyalty, it is necessary to expand/reshuffle the benefits of charged members, and provide a variety of events and experiences which are discriminated from those for free members.
Third, performing arts organization needs to understand audience's needs and provide conveniences and benefits to them. In order to satisfy the audience's need, every small benefit should count to be special. Members would prefer such benefits as the provision of MD, fee exemption for reservation, discount for reservation and reservation first system.
Lastly, it is also necessary to carry out diverse activities to create earnings through members. Earnings from annual fee and facility use are not small, but it has no great effect on fiscal self-reliance, because the management of membership and provision of benefit need manpower and expenses. Therefore, it is important to hold charged events for charged members and sell MD and so on, thus creating earnings through a variety of means.
This research has some limitations because cases were not enough to generalize study findings and collected data were also insufficient. However, this study is academically meaningful because preceding studies on membership system have not been conducted a lot, and study results can be used as detailed marketing data on the practical operation of membership system and provide strategies to increase performing arts organizations' fiscal self-reliance.