Some reflections on Pay What You Can pricing

The Land’s Heart is Greater Than its Map by Ramzi Maqdisi and Olivia Furber. Photo by Paul Blakemore.

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Mayfest 2022 was the festival’s first edition in four years. Being able to put it on in any format in the context of the pandemic felt like a privilege, and we wanted to re-examine every aspect of it, including pricing.

Inspired by the work of ARC Stockton, Battersea Arts Centre and the many organisations in Bristol who operate on flexible or otherwise non-traditional pricing models, we decided to sell every show in Mayfest on a Pay What You Can basis.  

We hoped that by removing or reducing price as a barrier we would be able to attract a wider audience than ever before, hedge against the rising cost of living, and encourage people to take risks with the shows they choose to see at the festival.

Now that we have had some time to evaluate the festival and crunch the numbers, we wanted to share some results and reflections in the hope that others might find them helpful, or at least interesting.

In the interest of not burying the lede here, we would not have been able to undertake this experiment without the funding we receive from Arts Council England, our MAYK Friends and those who purchased Supporters Passes to the festival. We are hugely grateful for their support.

The Mayfest programme comprised of seventeen different shows, many of which were repeated across multiple time slots across multiple days, resulting in a total of 165 individual presentations.

With the exception of a handful of free events, every ticket to every performance was priced on a Pay What You Can basis, with a minimum spend of £1. We also included a ‘recommended’ price of between £10 – £18 depending on the show, and encouraged attendees to pay the price that felt right for them.

Pay What You Can pricing is not a novel concept, but it's also not so widespread as to negate the need for an explanation. This presented a number of communications challenges.

Some were easily fixable, for example making it expressly clear that the price paid was for a total order (so, for example somebody did not buy six tickets for £1), which was solved by including a short text prompt in the checkout process.

Some were much more difficult - having a 'recommended' price felt necessary to guide people able to afford it and help cover the cost of each show, but setting this price also meant making an implicit judgement on the 'value' of a performance.

Another consideration was booking fees, that any ticketing platform will charge to cover transaction fees and overheads. These are inevitable to a degree, and so we tried to mitigate against this by ticketing through Headfirst Bristol, an independent not-for-profit platform whose fees are substantially lower than those charged by larger platforms.

Similarly, implicit in the notion of a 'recommended' price is the idea that someone should pay that amount, which seems antithetical to the inclusive, non-judgemental ideal of Pay What You Can. Similarly, having a minimum price of any kind is necessarily exclusive - £1 is a lot of money if you are living on low or no income.

Though we did explore the idea of having a zero minimum, there were concerns that using free bookable tickets may see allocations sell out immediately without generating any revenue, and we know from experience that free ticketed events tend to see a greater amount of no-shows. The £1 minimum, we felt, was a compromise – a lower price barrier, but enough to engender a sense of commitment to attending.

Conceiving of success in this experiment is a convoluted process.

In an ‘ideal’ scenario, Pay What You Can works like this: those who are able to pay above the recommended price, offsetting those who pay less. The show breaks even and it’s a more equitable, means-adjusted version of show with a fixed ticket price.

Anyway, neither one of these came to pass: across every show, the average price paid per ticket was £7.61, significantly under the ‘recommended’ price that was between £10 – £18 depending on each show.

There were some more interesting results:

• Mayfest sold around 1500 more tickets than we did in 2018.

• Attendance across the festival was 72%.

• 40% of survey respondents said that this was the first time they had attended a Mayfest event.

• People attended an average of 1.6 shows each – the highest ever.

• 3.5% of tickets to the festival were sold for £1.

• 2.5% of attendees elected to make an additional donation on top of their ticket.

• 65% of survey respondents said that Pay What You Can positively influenced their decision to buy a ticket.

• The performances which drew the youngest and most diverse audiences were the ones where the discrepancy between the recommended ticket price and the average price paid per ticket was highest.

What this points to is the not-at-all surprising conclusion that with price minimised as a barrier, more people who are typically priced out will go and see more theatre.

This is not us being sanctimonious and saying that people need only take the leap of faith into Pay What You Can and everything will balance out  – in this instance, it didn’t. Putting on performance of any kind is financially fraught and we commend anyone brave enough to do it at any scale.

It is, however, something we plan to do again for the next Mayfest and we will seek to price any other shows as fairly and flexibly as we can. We’re also continuing to operate the MAYKING Space on a sliding-scale pricing model.

We also want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who helped make this experiment possible: our MAYK Friends, everyone who purchased a ticket to a show for Mayfest, Harry and the team at Headfirst Bristol and all of our partner venues (in particular the box office team at Bristol Old Vic!)

If you’d like to ask a question about anything mentioned in this blog post or talk in a bit more depth, then please do drop us an email.