E-Mail This Article to a Friend GROWING STAGES Look who’s watching BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

The Theatre Arts Marketing Alliance (TAMA) believes in the power of numbers, which is why it conducted an audience survey last year, from August through December, to determine just who is going to the theater. The loose affiliation of 20 small, midsize, and fringe theater companies in Greater Boston, founded in 2001 by the theater-advocacy and professional-development organization StageSource, presented its findings at the Boston Foundation on Tuesday morning.

The TAMA survey yielded 4500 completed questionnaires that revealed theatergoers’ profiles (age, race, income), satisfaction levels, ticket-buying behavior, process for making arts-and-entertainment-related decisions, and where they get theater information. It’s the first research of its kind to be conducted on this scale in Boston. Funding from the Boston Foundation and Bank of America, as well as from StageSource and ArtsBoston, supported the study.

So what exactly did the survey uncover? Not surprisingly, the largest number of audience members for many companies come from the 45-to-64 age bracket, but the smaller, more fringy the company, the younger the patron demographic. Some particularly interesting informational nuggets fall under the audience-satisfaction category. Seventy percent of respondents testify to being very satisfied with the productions for reasons having to do with their thought-provoking subject matter, the intimacy of the venue, and the quality of work produced with limited resources. Responses substantiate small theaters’ reputation for getting the most bang for the buck. As for ticket prices, 95 percent responded that they were a "good" or "excellent" value.

"If there’s a trend of people wanting their entertainment dumbed down, it doesn’t come out in this crowd," says Janet Bailey, an arts-marketing consultant who was enlisted by TAMA to pilot the research effort. She adds that audiences "get the fact that [a show] can be quality without being particularly splashy or having big-name actors." That’s probably why the survey found minimal crossover between small-theater patrons and Broadway-show ticket buyers, especially among the under-35 set.

So what’s next? TAMA hopes to boost ticket sales through cooperative marketing strategies, and through sharing ideas and resources. This banding together may help smaller fringe companies — many of which operate with little to no marketing budget — to heighten their visibility. Likewise, larger companies could tap into the niche audiences to whom some of the smaller troupes appeal.

"If we learned anything, it’s the power of collaboration," says Jeff Poulos, executive director of StageSource, "and how to move things forward as a group instead of moving myopically as individuals."

For the complete results of the Understanding Audiences survey, visit www.tamaboston.org.