Our Funds

We don’t receive any external funding (yet). This means that all of our expenses are covered by ticket sales, purchases of our services, and personal contributions from members of the Stoke Team.

Our Expenses

Fixed expenses (things that we pay for monthly):

• Website

• Eventbrite

Ongoing Expenses (things that we pay for as they come up):

• Venue hire

• Marketing

• Photographer fees

• Technician fees

• Facilitator fees

How We Charge For Events and Services

We strive to keep event and service prices as low as possible, while ensuring that we can pay our photographer, sound engineer, and facilitators a fair fee for their services. Some people assume that low prices are indicative of low quality services, but this isn’t the case with us. We want to keep our prices low so that creatives have greater access to the services they need to develop their practice.

Our financial model breaks down each event according to ticket price so that we know how much we have to charge in order to meet the costs for that respective activity.

Let’s say for example that we’re hosting a two hour directing workshop. The facilitator has a fee of £150 for the event. The venue hire fee is £35 per hour, and our photographer has given us a discount for their services at £50 for the event. Total costs come up to £235. This means that at £20 per ticket we need to sell 8 tickets in order to cover the facilitator’s fees; and 12 tickets to cover venue and photographer fees. If we brought the price down to £15 per ticket we’d have to sell 10 tickets to cover the facilitator fee, and 16 tickets to cover venue and photographer fees. This would be doable, but as a new theatre company (we’re not even a year old yet!), we can’t guarantee that we’ll sell 16 tickets. So, £20 is a safe spot. With £20 per ticket in mind, every ticket after the 12th purchase gives us a small profit that we’re able to put toward our fixed expenses, which we pay for on a monthly basis.

We’d be happy to break even, delighted to sell a few more tickets, and thrilled to make a profit after paying for that month’s fixed expenses. However, our priority is delivering high quality services at low prices.

How We Plan To Scale Up

Using our existing financial model, we plan to slowly adjust our prices so that we can continue to cover venue costs, facilitator fees, event-related expenses (which are always calculated per activity), and our fixed expenses. If you see fluctuations in our prices it’s because we want to ensure that our service providers (i.e. facilitator, photographer, technician) are paid a fair wage for their work, and so that we can continue to operate without going into a deficit.

At the moment the Stoke Team is made up of volunteers. One day we’d like to pay our team for their services, and hopefully we’ll be able to do this through successful funding applications and possible profits from our events and services.