How New 42 navigated renovations with mobile engagement tech

Renovation created challenges to standard operating procedures

After inspection, New Victory Theater discovered that the auditorium's historic plaster was not as secure as necessary, the New 42 team had to move out of its space to do emergency repairs. Their summer program was moved to a black box space two doors down, and they were forced to find an alternate venue for their main programming for the following three-month period. That temporary location, while still on 42nd street, was a 7-10 minute walk, three blocks further west. In New York that can feel like going 3 miles, like you’re almost leaving Midtown.

“I just had all of these visions of patrons, along with their children, bustling to get to the theater… Then showing up at the doors to find out that they had another 15 minutes to go, which negatively impacts the mindset to have a nice theater experience, it’s not good for the patron overall. There’s technology out there that can help us with awareness, and help make things better for our staff and patrons.” Jamie O’Brien, Associate Director of Digital Services, New 42

To add to the additional steps required to attend the show, the New 42 team faced another challenge. With youth-oriented content, many pre-show activities come with the New Victory Theater experience. Jamie described, “You buy the ticket for the show, but if you come early, you could spend 15-30 minutes doing activities with your kids in our lobby spaces. From our post show survey mechanism, we know that everyone’s like, ‘these activities were amazing. I just wish you told us about them.’ So we knew we had the capacity to address the information problem that the pre-show emails themselves weren’t solving it. I really wanted to place an interrupter in front of people.”

Patron advocates opt for mobile patron engagement technology to lift visitor experience

At the Tessitura Learning and Community Conference (TLCC), Jamie was looking for integrated mobile texting visitor experience solutions and discovered Encore Pro Experience. It was very important to the New 42 team that the solution fully integrated with Tessitura. It was going to be key to use automations, especially when performances are primarily on the weekend. And the admin staff are usually