Two Tiny Theatre Groups Score Big Cash

By Julienne Bilker in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 20, 2010 8:20PM

When we checked out the Chase Community Giving 25K winners, we weren't surprised to see some major organizations represented. It was the little ones that were unexpected. Out of the thousands of non-profits in this country, out of the 100+ theatre companies in this city, New Colony and Sideshow Theatre Company, two of the many storefronts-without-a-store in Chicago, had just won what we suspected might be their biggest gifts ever. If we were floored - and we were - we couldn't imagine how their company members felt. So we asked Artistic Directors Andrew Hobgood (New Colony) and Jonathan L. Green (Sideshow) to fill us in.

To say that New Colony's ensemble was excited would be an understatement. Said Hobgood, "Receiving a phone call from a woman at Chase telling me that she has to explain the rules for Round 2 to me was something that I just hadn't even imagined in my head. The amount of yelling (and broken glass - yep, Evan Linder, our Associate Artistic Director responded to the call by throwing a glass) startled the woman calling from Chase. She asked me if she was calling at a bad time. So I actually had to lock myself in the bathroom and stand in the shower to talk to her because the rest of the company was screaming and throwing things too loudly." For a group accustomed to investing all of their money in each show without the capital to plan for the next one, throwing things almost seems like a tame reaction.

"The first benefit of the money was that it gave [New Colony] the money to have the design budget for [our next show], 11:11, that we wanted. Ever since opening, we have had to focus all of our budgets on rental costs and paying our people, and then design elements get the scraps. But we have very talented designers in our company, and we've always wished we could give them the budget to do what they can do. And having our next show in the Biograph Studio, we knew that design was our next big step. So Chasegiving gave us that budget. Also, it created a fund-pool for our next show, Sordid Little Story, which we've never had before."

"For Sideshow," Green said, "this funding means that we can continue planning for our future rather than scrambling to cover our two-weeks-ago. It makes up over half of our 2009-2010 budget and allows us to keep taking risks - like producing two world premieres and one Chicago premiere (Janet Burroway's Medea With Child) in the next 14 months. It gives us a little room to breathe and allows us to seriously plan for the company more than five or six months out, but we're not going on a spending spree, and we're not doing a pyrotechnic and laser show for our spring production," although he added that if the company wins the grand million-dollar prize, we can "expect lasers and pyrotechnics year round."

While both companies are using the prize to help fund their immediate futures, they're also investing in their foundations. Sideshow plans to use some of the money to expand their donor base and garner more foundation support, in addition to developing new community outreach programs such as subsidized performance classes for "starving artists," starting this spring. "Chase's purpose in starting this grant is to allow everyone an equal say in what work is important to them in their communities," Green said. "It's important to us that we remain faithful to that purpose." New Colony is taking the opportunity to rebrand themselves and build a new website, which until recently was a "much-discussed embarrassment for the company," according to Hobgood, especially considering the importance they place on Social Media.

In fact, New Colony's social media savvy is the reason the group was able to rally support fairly quickly. Unsure of the scale of Chase's initiative, the company hung back until there were just ten days of voting left. "We agreed that we didn't want to rally our social media network around a campaign we knew we couldn't win. If we watched for two weeks, and it seemed like it would take more than 2,000 votes to win, we were going to take a pass on it. Your social media network is a trust-based asset - and the members of that network belong to it because they believe they will be called upon effectively." With big-name charities carrying 1000-1500 votes, winning didn't seem to be out of the question. "We ran our campaign over the course of one week. One thing we've found is that social media relies on urgency. Social media campaigns seem to lose momentum if they last more than seven days. At least, that's been our experience. Our campaign involved communicating with our Facebook Fan Page fans, calling supporters with large networks and asking them to leverage their networks for a good cause, and reaching back into the networks from our pasts."

Green felt that the groups' sizes were assets in terms of building support. "The smallness of our company...allows us to be very personalized in our communications with our supporters - I think that both Sideshow and New Colony found that our ability to provide specialized attention and care to all of our supporters made it a lot easier to drum up the votes when we needed them."

Speaking of drumming up votes, both New Colony and Sideshow are now in the running for even more money. You have two days left to vote for five of the non-profits in Chase's top 100 - the winner will take home $1MM, and the five runners-up will each snag $100K.