The Choir Friendly Venue Research Project is a collaborative R&D initiative, part funded by Innovate UK through it's Design Foundations funding, and bringing together Choirfarm, Conveenie and LIVE to explore how digital tools and AI can help choirs and venues find each other, plan better and perform more. At its heart is a simple but persistent problem: choirs struggle to find the right venues, and venues struggle to reach choirs.
To understand what's really going on, we spent the latter half of 2025 speaking with choir leaders, venue managers, singers and industry professionals*.
One of the most valuable things to emerge from the research so far is a clearer picture of how choir events actually unfold — not just on concert day, but across the full arc of planning, promotion, delivery and follow-up. We're calling this the choir event lifecycle, and this mini blog series maps it out.
Drawing on insights from over 50 interviews with choir leaders, venue managers and industry professionals, the series examines the operational lifecycle of a choir event — from gauging viability through to long-term growth. Each blog looks at a key stage in the process, and using quotes gathered through the research, highlights both the strategic considerations and the lived experiences behind successful performances.
Stage 1 — Programming and Viability
This stage tackles what needs to happen before the event date is set: when leaders are assessing availability, deciding on repertoire and essentially weighing the risk of putting on an event.
Stage 2 — Planning and Logistics
Not all venues are choir-ready. This stage examines, amongst other things, staging, acoustics and accessibility. It focuses on how mismatches at this stage can create stress later on in the process, and explores what makes relationships with venues sustainable and symbiotic over time.
Stage 3 — Promotion and Ticketing
Marketing a choir concert relies on both community and strategy. This stage looks at how choirs promote events and who fills the seats — exploring how choirs engage friends and family, and the challenge of 'audience fatigue'.
Stage 4 — Delivery and Performance
Concert day reveals the complexity behind the event. Everything from transport, technical setup, people management, safeguarding, staging transitions and audience experience needs to come together as smoothly as possible. This stage highlights the often invisible labour of performance day and the systems that can reduce stress while maintaining event quality.
Stage 5 — Follow-Up and Growth
This final stage explores what happens after performance day — post-event administration, media capture, member recruitment conversion and long-term partnership development, to name a few. It discusses the possibility of growth as a result of structured follow-up and strategic leverage.
Together, these five stages offer a practical framework for understanding choir events not as isolated performances, but as repeatable cycles — with processes and strategies that can be refined, strengthened and scaled. Whether you're a choir leader planning your next concert or a venue looking to better support the groups you host, we hope this series gives you something useful to take away.
And if it prompts any thoughts about your own experience, we'd love to hear them as we're still listening, and new research can result.
If you haven't yet shared your experience, you can take one of our quick surveys at ChoirFriendlyVenues.org. Each one takes less than five minutes, and your input is directly shaping the tools and resources we're building to help choirs and venues alike.
