How can the Arts & Cultural Community Partner with METRO?
ByLast May, the US Airways Center and METRO light rail entered into a creative partnership which allows consumers who possess a ticket to any event at US Airways Center to ride METRO light rail at no additional cost, on the day of the event. CLICK HERE TO SEE METRO’S PRESS RELEASE.
Recently, I met with METRO executives to ask if such a partnership might be created with the arts & cultural community. They are open to the concept, but there are some concrete limitations:
- METRO has absolutely ZERO ability to enter in to such arrangements for ”goodwill” or even ”philanthropic” purposes. Their rate system is strickly regulated and such a relationship must be “revenue neutral” – meaning that they can’t sacrifice revenue.
- METRO’s agreement with US Airways Center is a PAID relationship – that is, METRO calculated the value of the number of riders who routinely use the system to attend events at the Center; and US Airways Center agreed to pay a certain % of EVERY admission to the Center to METRO to directly cover that expense.
- Even if we can figure out the monetary aspects of such a relationship, we would also need to figure out how to make such a process operational. Consider the fact that METRO needs to be able to easily enforce this policy – which means that its staff needs to be able to quickly determine if a rider has an authorized ticket. I imagine that US Airways Center tickets exist in 3-5 different formats (i.e. hard tickets, print @ home) – but imagine asking METRO to recognize all the different kinds of admission tickets that come from 10 (or 100+) different arts and cultural organizations all over the Valley. It seems obvious that a larger coalition of organizations would need to find a way to “standardize” this process as well.
What do you think? Is this a desirable objective? If so, how could we fund it and make it work? Please “Leave a Reply” with your comments/suggestions here: http://notes.allianceforaudience.org/2010/08/22/metro/
And if you’d like to be part of a task force to explore/advance this opportunity further, please write to me directly at MLehrman@allianceforaudience.org.
I’ve been tossing this one around in my head for a while. I wanted to do a family event day where if folks purchased two family programs on one day…Childsplay and the zoo for instance…we would send them day passes purchased in bulk from Metro. And they could travel from one venue to the other on Metro. This just needs to be done far enough in advance to receive the passes in the mail…and it was a bit labor intensive.
Is there a way to do some community branding? I remember a campaign in Atlanta that was something like…
ZOOOOM TO THE ZOOOO
WOOOOSH TO THE WOODRUFF ARTS CENTER
And these appeared en mass throughout the city on busses and billboards and i believe they didn’t cost the cultural orgs a dime
In theory it’s a great idea – but probably not for the Garden. We are two miles from the closest light rail stop with no bus connection at this time. We are set up for a bus connection but until the economy recovers and Valley Metro expands bus service, we are out of the loop. Also, we don’t have admission tickets – they pay when they get here. If they do buy an admission online, they will only have an email receipt.
I imagine the only way to fund it is to have an excellent solution and ask one of the major foundations to support it.