This is the first in a little series of posts about our potential customer groups for HiH. First up, being the easiest to research, is students. Sheffield has a large student population of approx. 60,000 people, and they are interesting to HiH both as audience members and as potential venue hirers. We’ve been thinking through their needs and how we can give them what they want:
Thinking about students as an audience, we think they want diverse and affordable programming, with a range of new and established plays. They also want to attend in groups, possibly with societies or departments. As potential venue users, we think students want to focus on price and ease of access – they don’t want lengthy forms or admin to complete, and they may need to pay by BACS or invoice.
We’ve tried to approximate our student reach as follows:
Audience
60k students in total
100 student audience members per month
1,200 student audience members per year = 2% of total group
Hirers
50 relevant student societies
10 student groups hiring per year, twice a year
20 total hirings per year
We think we can deliver group booking discounts and interesting programming to bring in student audiences, and flexibility and ease of access for student performers to use the space.