Dear Majestic Patrons and Volunteers,
Last summer at about this time, we had some unhappy facts in front of us; the Majestic Theatre had just ended its first full year of operation under the management of the Corvallis Parks and Recreation department and the numbers weren’t good. For the 2015-2016 fiscal year, our expenses had exceeded our revenue by approximately $175,000.
Today, a month after our 2016-2017 fiscal year ended, I’m happy to report some very happy facts. The Majestic Theatre ended the 2016-2017 fiscal year within the $10,000 subsidy our City Council provided for us during our three year experimental period. In fact, our expenses only exceeded our revenue by about $4,000 in a budget of over $526,000. Expressed as a percentage, our expenses exceed our revenue by less than 1%.
How did we do it? As I explained in my message to you last October, our plan to balance our budget was to simultaneously reduce our service level and ask for help from our amazing volunteers to fill that gap. We reduced our staffing, reprioritized our staff time, and asked volunteers to step up into many roles that had been filled by staff during our first full year.
Between November 2016 and February 2017, that’s exactly what we did. Our volunteers responded to our challenge and became the house managers, cashiers, technicians, street team members, and other workers that are needed to make the Majestic work. We launched our new volunteer management system Volgistics, and within eight months we had over 500 volunteers responding to our weekly calls for help, getting trained on our systems, and stepping into whatever roles we needed them to fill. In FY 16-17, our volunteers contributed over 85,000 hours of service in support of our programming.
But our volunteers weren’t the only ones who responded to our call for support.
Our donors responded to our challenge of raising $75,000 to support our operations…no… responded is not the right word. Our donors BLEW AWAY our goal by donating over $114,000 during the 16-17 fiscal year!
Lastly, our shows during the 16-17 season were sooo amazing, that we increased our ticket sales for the year by 20% with a total of $334,559 in tickets sold to over 20,000 patrons!
Look what you did! Yes, YOU!
You’re one of (or more likely several of) those sorts of Majestic folk; a patron, a donor, or a volunteer and YOU did this for the Majestic during this past year. YOU bought all of those tickets. YOU stepped up and filled roles when we asked. YOU put in over 85,000 hours of volunteer service to make over 150 performances. And YOU donated generously over and over and over until we exceeded our annual donation goal by over 50%.
You did it, folks. You made it work. I can’t tell you enough how proud I am to have helped y’all make this happen. How proud I am of each and every one of you. As I like to say….you are Majestic. And together, you can do anything.
Jimbo Ivy Theatre Supervisor Corvallis Parks and Recreation