BiF-4 Insights – Curt Columbus – Trinity Rep

Curt Columbus heads up Providence’s Trinity Rep theater company and started off his talk speaking about Robert D. Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone“.

Here are some of they key insights from Curt’s storytelling session:

“We lack places for random interaction.”

“We sit on airplanes next to people we never talk to…”

“The end of democracy lies in that isolation from random interaction…”

Trinity Rep has instituted post-show discussions of the performance, theatergoer to theatergoer (no experts), and fully 30% of attendees now stay after to discuss with their fellow audience members what they just saw.

“The death of culture is when it becomes something you purchase…”

Trinity Rep is trying to move from a transaction funding model to an ownership funding model because people naturally show more care for the things they own than the things they rent. They are also trying to move from mass media selling to social selling, which begs the question:

Can selling to your base and explicitly asking them to help you expand it actually work?

For more information on the talk, go here.