SLOC Audience Statistics

Introduction:  When patrons order tickets their name, address, and phone number are recorded.  After each show, this information is given to the person maintaining the SLOC mailing list.  New patrons are added to the list with their show attendance noted for this season.  Existing patrons have their show history modified to include show attendance for this season.  Show attendance data consists of single show or season ticket purchases for 7 years.  Note that the years do not have to be consecutive.  It should also be noted that individuals moving out of the area are deleted from the data base.  This can have the effect of skewing the data slightly to the most recent seasons.

Patrons Attending Multiple Shows:  This statistic is compiled by adding up all the shows attended by our patrons over the 7 years.  If the record indicates the patron purchased a Season Ticket, the patron is credited for 4 shows.  Therefore, perfect attendance for 7 typical seasons (4 shows/season) would be 28 shows.   A purchased ticket is credited for only 1 show.  The current system has no way to record multiple single tickets purchased within a season.  The data for the 2005-2006 season is shown in the figure below:

Consider, first the good news:  About 50 patrons held season tickets for 7 years.  
Now for the not so good news:  70.6% of our patrons saw only one show and only 11% saw two.  From there the numbers decrease significantly out to about 6 years then the number is fairly constant till the long term season ticket holders above 23 shows.  It should be noted that this situation isn't untypical of this statistical analysis.  For example, a similar analysis in 1991 yielded a one-time patron percentage of 69.9%.

Patron Year by Year Attendance:  Having a record of which season each patron attended a show, it may be instructive to analyze how many patrons attended shows in two particular seasons.  For this analysis, the number of seasons is limited to 7 years.  The data for seasons 1999-2000 through 2005-2006 are presented below:

The layout of this chart may be somewhat intimidating.   Let's start at the right of the chart, the x-axis shows "2000" implying the 1999-2000 theater season.  Note that the legend shows the dark blue line corresponds to the number of patrons the the same season.  The same goes for all the seasons, the line on the right of the group represents the number of people still in the data base that came to SLOC during that season.  The number of attendees has been decreasing over these 7 years.
Consider the 2003-2001 years.  While the number attending is dropping, the number seeing shows more than one season is staying about constant just over 200 patrons.  Moving to the most recent seasons, 2006-2004, the number seeing shows more than one season decreases to about 150.   Further, the correlation with older seasons decreases to about 125.  We are loosing some of our long-term patrons.

Where do Our Patrons Live:  An analysis of the data base zip codes shows where our patrons live.  If all the codes are included with only those over 2% of the total listed the the pie chart shown below is obtained.

Considering only the major communities, the chart shown below is obtained.