Tim Crouch of The Arts Firm has worked with the Toronto Bach Festival for the past four seasons as their fractional Marketing and Communications Strategist. In that time, they have continued to buck trends and see record-breaking audience numbers each season, including the recent 2026 iteration.
We had the privilege of speaking with James Heinrichs, the General Manager of Toronto Bach Festival, to gain insights into their growth, audience experience, and the impact of their collaboration with The Arts Firm.
This year marked the Toronto Bach Festival’s largest audience to date. From an operations and planning perspective, what do you think made the difference this year?
The Toronto Bach Festival has been enjoying consistent growth for a few years now, and we’re happy that our 2026 festival continued this trajectory. We’re very proud of the artistic quality of our concerts, which has certainly helped us grow our audiences year over year, and our Artistic Director, John Abberger, and all our artists work hard to produce exceptional performances.
From an operations and planning perspective, our audience development has been very intentional. In some ways, the size of our audiences in 2026 is a reflection of how well we did producing and presenting the festival the year before. If we’re successful, our attendees will return the following year and help us grow organically by word of mouth.
At the same time, we’re always trying to reach new audiences who aren’t familiar with TBF, and that’s about increasing brand awareness through compelling marketing and communication. We’re fortunate to have worked with Tim Crouch of The Arts Firm as our Marketing & Communications Strategist for several increasingly successful seasons. As a relatively small arts non-profit, our resources are limited – including our budget. Tim’s expertise and wealth of experience in performing arts administration has allowed us to maximize our advertising so that we can effectively promote our festival on a level alongside much larger arts organizations of Toronto. We truly can’t imagine producing the festival without him.
A lot of what brings people back to the Festival – and gets them to bring friends – happens in the details: how welcomed they feel, how easy it is to navigate the weekend. What does your team do intentionally to make that experience work?
TBF is a small team, but I like to think we punch above our weight. There are nearly endless details to planning and executing a festival of 5 live events (some with multiple performances) held over 3 days in 3 venues with more than 30 artists.
Throughout the entire process, we have the patron experience in the forefront of our plans and conversations. We think about their journey from purchasing tickets to attending the festival and try to make all aspects as seamless and easy for the public as possible. This involves regular, detailed communication with our festival attendees via email, on social media, and on our website. Of course this includes the where, when, who, and what of all our events, but also helpful information and reminders about how to get to the venues, parking, when will the venue doors open, public transit service updates, weather forecasts, etc.
If a patron contacts us with a question or concern, we’re happy to provide timely, human assistance over email or on the phone – we don’t use chat bots or pre-written help articles or AI assistants. We also train our event volunteers on the importance of welcoming our audiences with a friendly, helpful, and attentive manner. There wouldn’t be a Toronto Bach Festival without our audiences, so we greatly value their perspective and listen to attendee feedback. It’s important that we remain flexible and innovative to avoid a mindset of “this is the way we’ve always done things.” We’re always looking to make the next festival even better than the one before.
With a record season behind you and the 10th anniversary coming up, what’s on your radar from a planning and growth perspective? What does building on this momentum look like?
As you mentioned, next year’s festival will mark our 10th anniversary – save the dates May 28th – 30th, 2027! From a planning perspective, we started much earlier than usual and began organizing last autumn for the 2027 Festival. While I can’t speak to details at this stage, what I can say is that this will be the most ambitious Toronto Bach Festival yet. Our goal is to continue our momentum to grow our audiences, our fundraising, our reach, and the scale of our productions. Artistically, we’re looking forward to presenting some of Bach’s greatest creations, together with some exciting international soloists and directors to help us celebrate.
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