[Images of many past stars of Central City Opera inside a private home near the theater.]

Identifying your market, finding your userbase

A key part of this whole process is not just naming what we think the problem(s) are, but also identifying — defining, really — for whom we’re actually trying to solve said problems. In business, you’d say that you need to find your target market; in tech, you’d need to define your userbase.

For an entirely web-based alumni association, the alumni are the target market, they are the potential userbase.

Who are “alumni?”

Emily and I are both singers; we started the conversation about “alumni” vis-a-vis the Bonfils-Stanton Artist Training Program. Then we were both like, “Well, what about principal artists who didn’t go through the program?” Then of course there are directors and designers and coach accompanists (“Well, we couldn’t possibly exclude them.”) and orchestra instrumentalists and craftspeople who return to the company year after year with their own long, intense histories with the company. Oh and the administrators and interns and volunteers. And what about all the people who have since left “the biz” but doubtless have no small amount of nostalgia for their time here?

Hence the scope of “alumni” for us quickly grew to encompass the rather large pool of very talented humans nationally (and a number internationally) who have passed through the theater’s doors over many decades. It became clear that to limit our scope and our imaginations about who constituted our market, our potential userbase, would be shooting ourselves in the foot.

There’s effectively a global diaspora of us – singers, instrumentalists, pianists, conductors, directors, designers, artisans, craftspeople, costumers, administrators, interns, volunteers – spread out across time and space, or at least nationally and internationally. Including both those who still work in the industry, and those who have since moved on to other things (or a mix of the two, which, like yours truly, likely constitutes the majority of our labor pool nationwide).

And anyone still alive and kicking, post-1932, is welcome to join.

If you are a university, someone who has graduated — many someones, actually — are eventually going to have the wherewithal to give you money in the form of alumni donations. For institutions of higher education, this model justifies both the creation of alumni organizations, as well as annual dues or fees to help fund administrative costs.

What about for other organizations who clearly generate “alumni” of a kind, but whose alumni often can’t afford to give?

The reality for most people working in opera (singers, pianists, costumers, you name it) is that it’s a struggle to even keep a toehold in the middle class. In the United States, if you are, say, an opera singer, you’re a self-employed contractor (with all of the responsibilities and hustle that come with being an entrepreneur) who’s being paid non-profit arts wages. While I don’t have current numbers on hand to readily back this up, most of my singer colleagues would like agree that, if you are an American whose primary source of income is singing opera and you are making over $50,000 a year before taxes and business expenses, you are likely in the top 1% of working singers nationwide.

This holds true for our colleagues working in all the other disciplines it takes to put an opera onstage, as wel — vanishingly few individuals who work in opera in any capacity can claim to make over $100,000 per year.

Most people working in opera simply do not have the resources to practice much regular philanthropy of any kind, let alone paying annual dues to an alumni organization of an arts institution from which they didn’t even receive a degree.

This is reflected in the somewhat nuanced way we are going to be crafting the alumni-network part of this endeavor. This pool of potential users doesn’t represent a readily monetizable opportunity, which is doubtless why no other American opera company has yet attempted something on this scale.

The practical implication is that we need to have almost no barrier to entry: while we DO hope to be able to help Central City Opera eventually raise money either directly (in the form of helping existing campaigns) or indirectly (creating, say, an annual alumni campaign, or even eventually an ancillary alumni foundation), for now, this will be an alumni association that charges no dues for membership.

• The American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) currently has roughly 6,000 active members nationwide, give or take. This includes singers (the majority), stage directors, stage managers, and ballet dancers.

• The Bonfils-Stanton Program page lists approximately 1,300 names of participants since the training program’s founding in 1973. Since this will include some duplicate names of those who participated more than one season, we could conservatively cut it down to about 1,000 names.

• Many of the above have either died or left the business altogether.

• The above list does not include the many Principal Artist singers who did not at some time come through (or pre-date) the training program.

• I have no idea how to account for everyone else for whom we’ve expanded the definition of “Alumni” to include: stage directors, conductors, pianists, orchestra members, costumers, makeup artists, stagehands, administrators, interns, volunteers… the list goes on.

• That said, in any given season, it takes several hundred people to produce what happens onstage at an opera festival — especially at a repertory company, where multiple productions happen simultaneously. Be sure to include people who no longer work in the industry, but of course only those still alive. Multiply that by 87 years…

Well, then, maybe it’s harder to identify our pool of potential respondents — our potential userbase or market — than we first thought. When describing the challenge, I recently rattled off some of the above statistics to a fellow UXer, and he responded, “Well, would you say the pool is in the dozens, the hundreds, or the thousands?”

All those people…? Thousands. My best guess is a potential userbase of several thousand.