Intermission and lobby logistics

A concert lobby is a crowded room for three short windows and empty the rest of the evening, and it belongs to the venue rather than to you. Both facts shape the plan.

The contract, first

• May we place a table, and where — some venues restrict it to a named area
• Does the venue take a percentage of anything sold on the premises?
• Is there an exclusive catering or merchandise supplier our items would cut across?
• May we display signage, and does it need approval and by when?
• May we make an announcement from the platform, and who does it?

Get the answers in writing from the venue's events contact, not from the front-of-house staff on the night. The percentage question in particular has a habit of arriving as an invoice afterwards.

The three windows

• Before the doors — the longest and quietest, and the one most organizations waste. Open early and staff it
• Intermission — crowded, short, and where most in-person bidding happens. More volunteers than you think
• After the final piece — brief. If you are closing here, announce it before the last work, not after

Setting up in a shared room

• One table, out of the bar queue's path and away from the house doors
• Display sheets with a large, high-contrast QR code — a concert audience reads
• One volunteer whose only job is helping people bid on a phone
• Nothing that creates a queue during a twenty-minute interval
• Check the lobby's mobile signal at the hour of the concert — older halls and basement lobbies are where this fails

Printable material comes from the items already entered: display sheets and catalogs. On signal, see mobile bidding.

Announcements, sparingly

One from the platform at most, short, made by whoever normally speaks — the conductor's introduction or the executive director's welcome. Not between movements, not during a piece, and not after the final applause.

A concert audience will tolerate one fundraising sentence and will resent three. If your organization already has a pre-concert welcome, add a line to it rather than creating a second moment.

Open online a week before

This matters more for an ensemble than for a theater company. A concert audience includes subscribers who are not at this particular performance, and an online window reaches them — plus items arrive in the lobby with bids already on them, which gives a browsing patron something to react to.

See hybrid auctions and silent auction checkout.