Young professional programs are aiming to bring new audiences to opera companies with a variety of incentives.

Across the country, opera companies are aiming to entice younger audience members with membership programs designed especially for them. While the heavy discounts and free events are an added expense, many opera companies are treating these programs as audience cultivation, with the goal of turning young professionals into season ticket holders and eventually donors. “You really have to have a vision about how this might unfold over multiple years to pursue something like this,” says Eric Broker, Minnesota Opera’s former marketing and communications director. “We’re looking at the lifetime value of a patron versus selling 80 tickets for $20.”

As it turns out, many young professionals like to party. Besides heavily discounted tickets and subscriptions, most of the programs — which tend to have chic, upbeat names like Tempo, BRAVO!, or Crescendo — are leaning on hosting special events like happy hours and post-show soirees and back­stage events. These programs have memberships of doz­ens or hundreds at different companies. Some, like Seat­tle Opera’s BRAVO!, have been around for decades and have a proven track record of leading to subscriptions and dona­tions. Others, like The Dallas Opera’s new Crescendo pro­gram for attendees between the ages of 21 and 45, are pri­marily helping draw new attendees. More than half of Crescendo’s 154 mem­bers are brand new to the company, drawn in by the parties and promise of net­working opportunities.

Time will tell whether Cre­scendo provides a short-term social club or a vehicle for driving long-term engage­ment and subscriptions as members age out.

First, though, who exactly are these young profession­als? Chris Cox, marketing and communications director at Pittsburgh Opera, says that its club, the New Guard, is “really an engagement program more so than a revenue genera­tor,” and that there are two different groups in young pro­fessional programs. The first comprises established pro­fessionals who work in fields that offer stable salaries, like law, tech, or finance. They are further along in their careers and have disposable income. For them, opera is an avenue to expand their social net­works. The second cohort of young professionals is made up of die-hard opera fans who just happen to be younger than average. They are recent college grads who are miss­ing the student discounts that were once at their disposal. For them, young professional programs offer a way to keep interacting with a medium that’s currently out of budget.

The New Guard’s two most popular annual events, a summer salon and a Pride night, record more than 100 attendees each year. These events are spearheaded by current Executive Coun­cil President and founding member Michael Komo, who tapped his own personal net­work to kickstart the group’s growth. The New Guard cal­endar also includes around six pre-show happy hours — com­plete with drink discounts — that are another big draw, Cox says. Pittsburgh Opera considers its program a suc­cess, as it brings in a healthy number of new attendees and is revenue-neutral thanks to its membership dues.

That isn’t always the case. These young professional programs can live or die based on the amount of resources a company can invest in the events as well as the net­works that their volunteer leaders can tap into. “If it’s a young company, or if it’s the first time starting a group like this, you really do need a charismatic leader, a mag­net who can connect you with folks,” Opera Orlando’s gen­eral director and CEO, Gabriel Preisser, says. That compa­ny’s young profession club, the Forte Society, didn’t survive the pandemic, as main­taining engagement proved difficult for this event-ori­ented segment. Ultimately, Orlando Opera determined that it wasn’t worth separating attendees out by age and rolled the roughly 20 club members into its Ambassadors pro­gram, which offers some of the same behind-the-scenes sorts of perks and social events for members who want to get more involved and donate. The Ambassadors program is not age-restricted. “We found the Ambassadors like to be around younger folks, and the young professionals liked to feel like they’re part of a larger group,” Preisser says.

Another strategy of these programs is to build more graduated steps between student discounts and full subscribership. Minnesota Opera founded its Tempo club in 2011, and before the pandemic, that club had bal­looned to an impressive 450 members. Tempo is for oper­agoers ages 21–45 and offers step-up price points to mem­bers who age out. The logic is simple: Attendees who suddenly lose access to the Tempo discounts altogether may stop coming, but pro­viding a bridge may ease that transition: “We’re really put­ting our money where our mouth is with this discount and actively undercutting our ticket sales,” Broker says, not­ing the program’s success in keeping patrons coming back.

Seattle Opera’s BRAVO!, founded 1996, provides per­haps the best example of these programs’ ability to forge last­ing relationships. BRAVO! discounts tickets up to 50% for members between the ages of 21 and 39 and offers a vari­ety of happy hours and social events throughout the sea­son. It’s one of the largest operatic young professional clubs in the country, and more than half of its mem­bers continue subscribing to the company after they age out of the program. Cru­cially, thanks to the company’s efforts to consistently engage and interact with the club, members also become donors faster and more consis­tently than other patrons, the company notes. Non-mem­bers tend to take more than three years to make that con­sequential first donation. A BRAVO! member gener­ally makes a first donation after a year of subscribing.