Backstage - Contributor Guide

Thanks for being a part of the storefront community in Chicago. When collaborating with us, please follow these guidelines.

Email

To avoid inbox clutter, we send only two types of emails to subscribers: "In the Wings," our monthly newsletter detailing upcoming shows, and "Spotlight" micro-reviews as productions open.

Press releases

Please CC us when sending out press releases - we'll make a post sharing the show's information. Please let us know if any changes need to be made to the post regarding performance dates, times, locations, or cast.

Spotlight

We'll do our best to have a team member attend a dress rehearsal to learn about your show and prepare a Spotlight email to go out on opening day. These emails are meant to offer audiences a concise "you'll like this if" overview of the opera. We will only send Spotlight emails for multi-performance operatic productions, not for community events like fundraisers or concerts.

The Calendar

One of our most powerful tools is the community calendar. Each member organization is responsible for creating and curating an event calendar. We'll aggregate those calendars together to share with audiences. Once you have worked with our team to integrate your calendar with ours, you're responsible for adding new events to it going forward - we use these events to populate our In the Wings emails, so if you don't add new events, we won't communicate them to audiences.

When putting together the calendar event, be sure to follow this template:

Event Name - Company Name
Date/time
Location
Description
• Your ticketing link
• A one-paragraph description about the piece

There's no special spot for your ticketing link, so please paste it at the very top of the Description section, followed by your actual description.

Here’s an example of how a correctly-formatted event should look in editing view, and then as a completed event:

Make sure your event is set to Public, or this information will not be visible. Please add a separate entry for each performance, and keep your description content PG.

The Companies Page

We use this page to offer a brief overview of each storefront opera company, including an explanation of what makes them unique. If you want to update your organization's description, logo, website links, or production photo, please reach out.