Chatting with the creator of The Dublin Story Slam – a one-of-kind open mic night

Imagine getting up on a stage in front of a room full of strangers and telling a personal tale from your own life. True – this might be the stuff of nightmares for many. But there are also those who actively seek out such opportunities. Who genuinely thrive off the experience of storytelling to an audience in a dimly-lit bar or theatre, all while competing against other like-minded creatives. 

These are the participants of The Dublin Story Slam, an intriguing open mic event that invites anyone who’s willing to tell a story of their choosing on stage. There are no prompts or props allowed. And all stories must be relevant to a predefined theme. Other than that, there aren’t any rules. Just pure, immersive fun for both the storyteller and their listeners in the audience – who, incidentally, also get the chance to submit anonymous stories throughout the event. 

We won’t reveal much more – we’ll leave that up to Julien Clancy, Founder of The Dublin Story Slam, who describes all that this unique open mic event is about far better than we ever could. 

We’ll just say one thing before we get stuck into the interview below. The creators of The Dublin Story Slam believe that great storytelling holds immense power – so much, in fact, that it has the potential to save the world. After reading this interview, we think you might just find yourself agreeing with them. 

✅ Key takeaways 

🎤 When hosting any sort of open mic night, one of the most crucial elements to get right is picking a great host. They’re the glue that will hold the event together – Julien talks about how lucky they are at The Dublin Story Slam to have an incredibly funny host who can handle all the various emotions of the night.

🎟️ Working with a user-friendly, ultra-intuitive ticketing platform can be a godsend. Julien loves how Ticket Tailor simplifies essential ticketing tasks – like exporting door lists – which helps him to save time and handle aspects of event registration on-the-go. 

💪 As an event creator – some of your biggest challenges can turn into your biggest milestones. Julien talks about how Covid actually led them to discover a whole new way to pivot their business.

The Dublin Story Slam is such an awesome concept 🙌 – tell our readers what it’s all about:

We’re an open mic competitive storytelling night based in Dublin. Each night we invite members of the audience to get up and share a true personal story inspired by that night’s theme. At the end of the night, judges in the audience decide who our Story Slam Champion is and that person is then invited to take part in our Grand Slam event which takes place in our National Theatre, The Abbey Theatre. 

How has the Dublin Story Slam evolved over the years – are there any milestones or challenges you can share?

We got a lot of our inspiration from our previous life as The Moth Story Slam. After two years we tweaked a few things to suit our Dublin audience and reinvented ourselves as The Dublin Story Slam. Since then we’ve sold out every show, created a podcast, expanded our shows to include more locations and added another Grand Slam to our annual calendar. 

Our biggest milestone was actually one of our most challenging moments – Covid. When everything went online, we pivoted to working with large organisations to use the power of personal storytelling to bring online work audiences together. This has since expanded into a new mission to convince large organisations to invest in their people by investing in their personal and professional stories.

It sounds like you’ve been busy! What’s a typical Dublin Story Slam event like? 

We are blessed to have two of the funniest people in Dublin who are able to sensitively handle the full range of emotions that each night can contain. We’ll have hilarious, laughter filled moments and then sad, shocking but inspiring moments that stay with you long after the night is over. 

Apart from the hosts and the storytellers onstage, audience members also get to share written anonymous stories that they share in response to a different prompt at each show. This means that the entire night is filled with stories both from onstage but also from the audience, so it’s a very different experience each night. 

It’s also incredibly exciting (if slightly terrifying) that we genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen at each show. In a single night, opening lines can be anything from the time someone found a lost racing pigeon and reunited it with their owner, to the time someone else robbed a bank. 

Regardless of whatever story is being shared, our audiences are always just incredibly warm, loving and supportive. They’re the ones who really empower people to share their stories onstage and we’d be lost without them. 

How do you come up with your themes? Are you ever surprised at how storytellers interpret them?

We choose the themes that are broad enough to appeal to anyone but also have a bit of edge that will trigger a particular memory or experience. For our current theme, Summer in the City, we wanted to give storytellers a chance to capture those hazy summer memories that stay with you – both good and bad. So far we’ve had stories about everything from drunken first dates where you find The One to being in the audience for Live Aid 39 years ago. I’ve been doing this for nearly eight years and I’m still shocked at just how different and varied people’s lives are. Sharing these stories onstage and sharing them on a podcast is a lovely way to preserve these memories, too. 

What kind of venues work best for your events?

We’ve been in the Sugar Club for the last eight years and it’s an incredible space. It’s very intimate and very interactive; audiences are right up against the stage, and the bar’s in the same space as the audience so it’s a whole vibe over the three plus hours. 

Recently, however, we took the plunge and started expanding beyond The Sugar Club to more traditional theatre spaces, where there’s a clear divide between audience and stage. It’s been difficult to hold onto that same intimacy and vibe that we’ve built at the Sugar Club, but I think we’re getting closer to bridging that gap. The audiences are slowly learning that they’re not there really to watch a show and be entertained. They are the show! 

Do you have any advice for anyone looking to set up a similar type of open mic event? 

It’s so important to have a great host! If it’s open mic, you can’t really control exactly how your event is going to pan out – but the thing you can control is to choose an amazing host who can guide things in the right direction. 

They need to be funny, charismatic and entertaining but they also need to be able to handle challenging and incredibly intimate moments too. It’s at these points where the years of experience of dealing with a room of people, knowing how to navigate that space with sensitivity, and the ability to still make people laugh is a real gift. I think you just have to find someone who gets what you’re trying to do, believes in your vision and has the skill to help you bring it to life onstage at every single show. 

That makes a lot of sense! How do you go about marketing The Dublin Story Slam?

We have a mailing list, which is great – although growing it can be a bit of a challenge. We mainly use instagram for promoting our events, as I think it’s the one platform that best suits what we do. 

I’m a bit of a control freak so I find it so hard to just put out any old post or reel – so I’m constantly holding off on posting anything until I think it’s good enough. I’m working on not being so precious about things, but it’s tricky. 

Word of mouth is our biggest marketing tool to date. People come to a show and then come again but they bring their best friend, date, parents or even grandparents to a show – I really love that about our audience. 

Now let’s talk ticketing – why did you choose Ticket Tailor as your ticketing partner? 🙂

I think it was Ticket Tailor’s simple, low-cost pricing structure that drew me in first of all, as I found other platforms way too expensive. I had gone with a smaller platform in the past, which had great people but turned out to be a bit unreliable. It was also tricky to navigate. When I started to use Ticket Tailor, I found it really cost effective especially – because of the bulk-buy approach to buying credits in advance. I haven’t looked back and have recommended it to other friends and colleagues too. 

💡 Tip: With Ticket Tailor, you can buy bulk-buy ticketing credits in advance to save money, which can be handy if you know how many tickets you’re likely to sell 😌.

Have you found any features particularly useful?

Ticket Tailor’s website, as well as its event design and event management pages, are all really intuitional. I remember when I saw those glorious words – Export door list – laid out for me at the top of the page! It’s such a simple feature but so effective when you’re running out the door, on the way to the gig and you just need simplicity done well. 

Can you tell us a bit about your ticketing strategy? 

We just have a standard ticket price – we don’t do early birds or tiered ticketing, choosing to keep things simple instead. We make a point of including all the taxes in our fees, as I absolutely hate when you go to buy a ticket, then discover that the real cost of the ticket has the price of a pint in the difference. 

We might get slightly lower margins but I think it’s worth investing in building that trust with our attendees. We also do refunds right up to the day of the gig because we understand that people’s plans change. I think it’s really important to treat your customers right in any way you can.

Finally, what does the future hold for The Dublin Story Slam? 

We want to do a book of our stories, and to do a TV documentary for our 10 year anniversary. We’d also love to get storytelling on the curriculum in schools. But, most importantly, we want to help people share their stories no matter what they’re about because, in a time of division, social media, and massive societal challenges, we genuinely think that sharing personal stories can save the world!

That’s powerful stuff! Thanks for taking the time to chat with us Julien – best of luck with the future 😀.

📚 Find out more about The Dublin Story Slam >

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