Special Bd. of Aldermen — 5/2/17 Page 2
The first part of our work was to assess this basic idea: what, if anything, should we do? Is there an audience
for new facilities? Are there users? What's wrong or lacking with the facilities you’ve got. And then, most
importantly, from a broader perspective, how do additional cultural facilities help you achieve your goals as a
community around things like economic development, building cultural tourism, helping you recruit companies
to locate here, enhancing the quality of life for your residents. We did that work and reached positive
conclusions. Now we’re looking at essentially putting the flesh on the bones of an idea.
I'll just remind you a few parts of that first round of work. The key issue is what the market area is. We
collected ticketing data from Court Street and a number of other groups in the community to get a sense of
how far people are traveling to Nashua. There’s a high concentration within a 15-mile radius and many more
coming within the 40-mile radius. The market area is quite big despite the fact that there are other
metropolitan areas with larger cultural facilities in the same region. That led us to a number of market
conclusions.
Nashua, with its population near 90,000, is slower grower but still has interesting opportunities for new
programs and opportunities for families and a need for price-sensitive programs, things that can be affordable
and accessible to a broad cross-section of the population. In the 15 and 40-mile radius, we see regions
growing more rapidly, diversity in terms of families and Millennials, and out at the 40-mile radius there’s more
families, higher levels of educational attainment, strong ethnic diversity. What's appropriate locally versus
regionally, it’s a little bit different so we would recommend a general approach of a segmented marketing
strategy, thinking about serving different audiences in different areas. Overall, we conclude that the market
has the size and the characteristics to support more activity.
There is a detailed report that summarizes all of the work we’ve done over the last year and a half that should
be posted on the Economic Development website tonight. I’m just glossing over a few things to give you a
sense of the work that we do. This is how we look at facilities. The horizontal axis looks at the capacity; the
vertical axis are a judgement of quality. What we see in this chart that looks at local and regional facilities is
some significant gaps at the low end, 100-150 seats, locally at the mid-size, 300 seats, and just as importantly
up over 500 seats. There’s some real gaps in that current local and regional inventory.
We also looked at meeting and event facilities because we recognized from conversations within the
community that there’s also an interest and perhaps a demand for better meeting and special event facilities in
downtown Nashua. Most of the hotels that support that now are not in the downtown, more in the northern and
southern areas of the town. We also looked at demand on the part of artists and art organizations in the
community. This chart identified 20 different groups that were looking for spaces of different capacities. We
also did a similar exercise two months ago. We held a scheduling charrette where we had a number of the
arts organizations here. We talked about how they would book facilities, what groups would pay to use the
facilities and encouraged them to help advise us on policy that would make them meaningful to them. That
helped us reaffirm demand at different size levels: 600-seat hall, 300-seat range and a smaller 150-seat
multipurpose room. We saw varying levels of demand for all of those spaces.
We also stressed the importance of partners for the utilization of facilities. The educational sector, given the
educational institutions active in and around Nashua, local developers who are interested in projects that
include and arts and cultural component, and the technology and business community that expressed to us an
interest in higher quality meeting and event facilities.
The fourth issue then was connecting this project to the broader goals that you set for the community. One of
the studies that we looked at was your Arts & Cultural Plan published in 2015, that established a number of
goals for the arts around identity, education and commerce that this project, we feel, fits quite nicely. On the
basis of that analysis, we reached conclusions that the market is diverse, large enough and has the
characteristics to suggest an audience for facilities. Wwe noted the gaps in the existing set of facilities. We saw
that there is significant demand for performance facilities at different capacity ranges, and we came to believe
that new arts facilities align with many of the goals that you have identified for your community moving forward.
