That’s one of the findings in a report released by Americans for the Arts, which examined the national economic impact of nonprofit arts and cultural organizations.  Arts & Economic Prosperity IV looked at data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including research from the Cultural Data Project, and discovered that the industry supports 4.1 million full-time jobs and generates $22.3 billion in revenue to local, state, and federal governments each year.

The report also uncovered the peripheral benefits to the local economy: attendees to arts and cultural events spend money at local businesses surrounding the event (such as restaurants, parking garages, retail stores, hotels, etc.) and spend an average of $26.60 on top of the event’s admission cost.  However, it is interesting to note that “while the ratio of local to nonlocal attendees is different in every community, the national sample revealed that 31.8 percent of attendees traveled from outside of the county in which the event took place (nonlocal) and 68.2 of attendees percent were local (resided inside the county). Local attendees spent an average of $17.42 per person, per event in addition to the cost of admission.  Nonlocal attendees spent twice this amount, or $39.96 per person.”

What do we do with this kind of data?

It is obviously critical for those inside the field to know the impact of our work on the local and national economy.  However, it is equally vital that data be shared strategically with others outside the field to put “to rest a common misconception that communities support arts and culture at the expense of local economic development. In fact, communities are investing in an industry that supports jobs, generates government revenue, and is the cornerstone of tourism.”

Data must be informative AND useful.  To that end, in highlighting this report, we want to know, what are you doing in your respective communities with this type of data?  What are data-insight best practices?

Data geeks want to know….

We had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin Moore, managing director of Theatre Communications Group and asked him one simple question:

How do your clients use data in decision-making?

According to Mr. Moore, “without hard facts as to what’s going on in the world it’s very difficult for an arts organization to know where it’s place is.”  His short, yet informative two-minute interview contains many gems and the context for his answer rests on the belief that by knowing your organization’s place along a national standard of high and/or low performers, you can:

• make solid decisions
• communicate the rationale for decision-making based on facts rather than gut-feelings
• create realistic, attainable goals for your organization.

This notion of “place” is at the cornerstone of NCAR’s work.  Our contribution towards the sustainability of the arts and culture sector will be in the form of an online dashboard where arts organizations can input information and get an “organizational health” score using high-achievers with a similar organizational profile as the standard.  The dashboard will launch in spring of 2014.  However, in the meantime our first annual State of the Arts report will launch this fall and will hopefully provide you and your organization with a sense of “place” within the national arts and culture scheme.

Data is only useful if you act on it.  And according to Mr. Moore, the use of data in his organization “made all of the difference in the world.”

A summary of the data can be found on NFF’s Social Currency Blog, as well as a link to the results in their entirety.

We found many of the findings regarding financial health, funder communications, and actions taken to adapt in the current environment to be especially intriguing and relevant to our stakeholders.  However, as we aggregate our partner data and create indices that are relavant to arts managers in preparation for NCAR’s State of the Arts first annual report that will be released Fall 2013, one question that continues to arise is how do arts organizations measure the health of programmatic activity?

NFF Arts Survey findings reflect the challenges of the field: while funders ask for long-term impact, the arts and culture sector measures such outcomes less regularly than other sectors and has an especially difficult time measuring impact given the challenges of defining artistic and programmatic outcomes.

So the question remains, how would you measure the health of your program activity? How do you define program outcomes and impact?

Data geeks want to know…

We had the pleasure of interviewing Kate Levin, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and posed one question:

How have data-based findings made a difference in your work?

Her answer was incredibly thoughtful, enlightening, and full of surprising data.  For example, did you know that there are three times as many people who work in the nonprofit culture sector than those who work at law firms in NYC?  Or that half of the organizations that apply for funding from the NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs and half of those that receive it have annual operating budgets less than $250,000?  This data flies in the face of the cliche that culture is Big and Rich.  To quote Ms. Levin, “cultural organizations are by and large nimble, they are dynamic, and relatively low budget.”

Ms. Levin also discusses other data points her agency uses to advocate for arts and culture as she recalls how a daily magazine editorialized a spread called cops vs. culture. However, being able to talk about culture as a robust small business sector (with the data to prove it!) can drastically change the course of such conversation.

We don’t want to give away ALL of her nuggets of wisdom in this post as paraphrasing cannot do her response justice.  However, we will leave you with this:

In the words of Ms. Levin, “there are lots of ways in which we can use data to do our job and service our fields and make the larger case for culture.”

What are yours?  How do you use data to make the larger case for culture in your city?

Data. Big data. No data?

Arts organizations fall on a spectrum with regard to their relationship to data.  While some collect and analyze their own data to inform decision-making others misinterpret and may even ignore data altogether.  Sheetal Singh, in her post, Making Data an Afterthought, makes the case that for some organizations, especially small ones that are operating in constant crisis mode, even thinking about data is a luxury.  So it follows, that if we are not thinking about it, data becomes an afterthought.

At NCAR, our vision is to act as a catalyst for the transformation and sustainability of the national arts and cultural community.   In essence, our work is to provide the field with evidence-based knowledge that will move data from being an afterthought to its rightful place as a tool that can be used strategically in making managerial decisions.

We know you are using data and collecting it from various sources, but what exactly is it that you DO?

We have received this question from the field.  So we have decided to take a moment to step back and describe the scope of the center, the services that we will offer, and what we are doing right NOW.

NCAR’s Scope:

As the pyramid image suggests, the Center’s activities focus on analysis, insight, and enablement.

ANALYSIS:  Working with and building on the strengths of our Partners, NCAR will create a comprehensive dataset on the U.S. arts ecology integrating longitudinal organizational, consumer, and market-level data.  These will be first-level findings.

INSIGHTS:  We will generate and disseminate insights through an online annual industry report that provides various levels of detailed findings on the arts sector’s health, impact, assets, needs, operating activity, attendance, and purchasing patterns. We believe that it is essential to arrive at a deeper understanding of the interrelationship between health of organizations in a market and the dynamism of arts participation in that market.  Neither happens in a vacuum.  The first annual report is expected Fall, 2013.

In addition to working with NCAR Fellows and visiting scholars to create practitioner oriented  white papers that focus attention on critical issues in the field, NCAR will create working papers and case studies that address best practices and new thought on problem-solving.

ENABLEMENT: Our engagement activities are designed to provide avenues for arts and cultural leaders to interact with one another and with the data in order to directly benefit from findings.  However, simply reporting results would be good, but not good enough.  Therefore, our goal is to live up to the challenge of being not only informative, but useful.

So how will we do this?

NCAR will provide a FREE resource for arts leaders in nonprofit dance, jazz, presenting, and theatre fields to gain knowledge that will advance capacity-building and stability.

To this end, we will create a smARTindex, which is a family of measures that cover essential dimensions of organizational well-being.  Similar to an annual physical, the smARTindex will identify the areas where an organization’s strengths lie and where pressures are most severe,  forming a global, diagnostic tool.

Arts leaders will be able to access their smARTindex score through our online dashboard that is being co-created with IBM.  The dashboard will allow an organization to compare itself to high performance in the field, based on each measure.  Users will also be able to tap the dashboard to model the impact of alternative decisions.  We expect the dashboard to be live in Spring 2014.

We will also establish an online resource library where an arts leader can focus on gaining insights and professional assistance where desired, contribute knowledge when they have something to share, and join communities around topics of interest.

NCAR will host an online forum for discussion around organizational health, best practices, and research where arts leaders can interact with the findings and dialogue with colleagues in the field.

What we are doing NOW:

1.  Our research team is coding and analyzing data in preparation for our first annual research report which is expected Fall, 2013.

2.  Our staff is in the process of creating an online resource library that will include stories and links to other important research, findings, thought and commentaries, as well as links to videos and specialists who can help address solutions in a variety of areas.  The online resource center is organized to correspond to areas of the dashboard, so that users can focus on gaining insights and professional assistance where desired.

3.  We are also busy building online forums via blogging, twitter, and facebook to engage in discussion and learnings from one another’s experience and successes.  In order for any of this to work, we need YOU!  Your stories, your experiences, your findings…what you’ve tried, what has worked, what you are struggling to overcome.

We hope that you will join us on this data-driven insights ride and offer your knowledge and expertise.  Please feel free to leave comments below and let us know what kind of information is most useful to you and your organization.

On February 12, 2013, National Center for Arts Research hosted a panel discussion in conjunction with our launch event titled, Ending Guesswork: Using Data to Foster Thriving Arts Organizations, at the Nasher Sculpture Museum in Dallas, TX. Over 250 arts and culture leaders filled Nasher Hall for a panel discussion moderated by NCAR Director, Dr. Zannie Voss. Our esteemed panelists, whom we lovingly call the “Rock-Stars of Data” included:

Rick Lester, CEO, TRG Arts; Distinguished Visiting Professor, SMU
Glen Howard, Board Chair, Cultural Data Project
Rebecca Thomas, Vice-President, Nonprofit Finance Fund
Kate Levin, Commissioner, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
Anita Contini, Art and Culture Program Lead, Bloomberg Philanthropies
Kevin Moore, Managing Director, Theatre Communications Group

They each posses a great wealth of experience with data, the knowledge that emerges from it, and know first hand the potential of evidence-based findings to help arts and cultural managers make more informed decisions.

In order to ensure that the issues discussed by our panelists were relevant to the audience, before the event, we asked audience members the following question:

“What questions do you have about your organization’s practices that you think data could help you solve?”

And while we thought we might receive just a few responses, we had over 50 arts and cultural leaders pose questions that were relevant to them and their organizations. These questions became the jumping off point for an incredibly informative and lively conversation:

• We are awash with data. How do we know which data to use?
• How can data help create financial stability for an organization?
• How has data led to new business models?
• How much programming should we have on the market?
• How do we use data to figure out capacity and balance innovative works with sure-fire successes?
• What demographics matter? I know I should be segmenting, but on what?
• Am I tapped out?

We hope you will take the time to view the panel discussion. As the arts and culture field is moving towards an outcome driven approach, it is imperative that every organization have some set of metrics that is its reason for existing. Our esteemed panelists shared some gems of information to help you on the journey.

In addition, one point of note was the need for an expansive data construction model that would more effectively gauge an arts organization’s impact.  This is where our national data partnership with the CDP, the NEA, the National Center for Charitable Statistics, and Theatre Communications Group aims to play a vital role by providing arts leaders with the ability to see how they compare to the highest performance standards in areas shown to be critical for organizational health. This information has the potential to be used in a myriad of ways to inform managerial decisions that ultimately effect an organization’s bottom line.

In order for any of this to work, we must engage in an ongoing conversation with you, our arts and culture colleagues.  With this in mind, we’d love to hear how you have engaged with data (CDP-based or otherwise).  What have you found most useful?  What completely missed the mark?

Inquiring data geeks want to know!

Createquity gave a talk at the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center wherein Ian David Moss, the presenter, outlined the current art research infrastructure, how it is failing us, and what we can do to fix it.  A video of the talk is below.  In a subsequent blog post, Mr. Moss posits that arts research should directly address the question, what do we actually need to know in order to do our jobs better?

We couldn’t agree with him more.  Arts research should directly address pertinent questions necessary to make informed managerial decisions.  Our mission at NCAR is to be the leading provider of evidence-based insights that enable arts and cultural leaders to overcome challenges and increase impact.

Therefore, it is critical that we engage in a two-way dialogue with you, our arts professional colleague.   What are the biggest questions or challenges facing your organizations?  What information would you like to know in order to do your job better?

The San Diego Convention and Vistors Bureau’s ‘Happiness is Calling’ 2012 marketing campaign is a fantastic example of arts data in action. Watch the commercial below to see how the city is using its strong arts scene to attract new and returning visitors to the city.

You can also watch a sizzle reel put together by the SD Commission for Arts and Culture.

The media has also been extensively covering the NCAR launch. In addition to the following articles, other publications have been picking up the story. So the good news is that word continues to spread!

Media Coverage

The New York Times

Art in America

ArtInfo

D Magazine FrontRow

Daily Campus

Dallas Art News

The Dallas Morning News

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

KERA Art & Seek

Real Clear Arts blog