Culture Counts wrap-up

20 Oct 2015

Georgia Moore, Executive Director of Culture Counts Australia, discusses some of the main findings from the recent Queensland pilot of the Culture Counts audience and peer surveying platform.

The value of intrinsic data

Artists and arts practitioners know that the work they create has an impact on audiences. They get standing ovations, witness people moved to tears, help to spark other artists’ creativity, and read critical reviews in magazines. Most of us have had a cultural experience that made us reflect, feel, connect, learn or be inspired.

While we know this anecdotally and feel it intuitively, it has historically been difficult to measure the impact of the arts for individuals and society.

Attendance numbers and ticket sales capture a fraction of the value of cultural events. To prove that the arts are worthy of ongoing support, intrinsic value needs to be understood, measured and communicated in a way that stacks up alongside dollars and cents.

As economists, our job is to provide evidence to support investment decisions using statistics and rigorous analysis. New technologies mean that we can now apply such rigour to the arts sector – measuring individual emotional and intellectual responses and turning them into meaningful big data insights.

What we learned about intrinsic value in Queensland

Queensland was one of the first states in Australia to pilot the Culture Counts system of intrinsic value capture, using our digital platform and the set of core quality metrics that we developed with the sector. Sixteen events across 12 organisations were evaluated between February and July this year, capturing over 2,000 public and 60 peer survey responses.

The large data set covering a diverse range of artforms, event types and locations means that we could generate interesting sector insights through statistically analysing, grouping, filtering and comparing results. Here is a snapshot of things we found:

Over 1,500 people from the pilot sample had an excellent experience at an arts event, with 96% of respondents agreeing that the event they attended held their interest and attention
On average, audiences had a more impactful intrinsic experience when they were new to the artform, while frequent arts attendees appreciated riskier work
Festivals and events in regional locations were the most successful at helping audiences feel connected to people in the community
Peer assessors (art form experts requested by Culture Counts participants to contribute to event evaluation) were more likely to find events relevant and thought-provoking, while the general public were more captivated and inspired by their experience
Connection and Relevance dimensions, two of five intrinsic value dimensions tested through the pilot, had the largest variation in responses, with more disagreement among audiences on whether events helped them to feel connected to other people or had something to say about today’s world.

Organisations’ experience of Culture Counts

At the end of the pilot period, all organisations were asked to participate in a workshop and complete a feedback survey about their experience, including questions on ease of process, relevance of research, attractiveness of design, usefulness of outputs, and likelihood of future adoption.

While the experience of the 12 organisations varied, the feedback was largely positive and several of the organisations have already used the survey results and reporting to better communicate with staff, boards and funders; modify and improve their events; market their work and pitch for new work.

Since the pilot wrapped up in August, four of the pilot organisations have evaluated one or more additional events using Culture Counts.

Learnings about the Culture Counts system

The results and organisation feedback throughout the pilot have helped us to improve, refine and prioritise features within our technical product. Some examples include fixes to prevent the survey being blocked by office firewalls, and developing offline survey capabilities to enable digital surveying in areas with unreliable internet access.

We found that many organisations have limited staff resources and competing evaluation needs, with requirements to also collect large amounts of economic and tourism impact data for their events. This has led us to broaden our outcome areas to enable organisations to measure the intrinsic impact of arts and culture in the economic, social, civic and cultural domains using the one system.

The bigger context

The reason for using consistent metrics is to enable organisations around the world to compare their results and insights, thereby strengthening the combined voice of the sector. Individual organisations can share their evaluations and results with others through their own Culture Counts dashboards, and gain access to aggregate sector, artform and location benchmarks.

We’re halfway through a Victorian pilot of 22 organisations, in the process of rolling out the system to all Western Australian funded organisations, and starting a trial of 150 Arts Council England National Portfolio organisations. There are almost 25,000 survey responses in the system database and that is expected to increase to at least 50,000 within the year. From this database, many global big data insights will be made available to the sector.

We hope that the evidence generated through use of the tool will help arts organisations to realise greater success and sustainability, and help make a convincing case for the return on arts investment.

You can find out more about the pilot by reading the following series of Culture Counts blog posts:

Georgia-Moore
Georgia is the Executive Director of Culture Counts Australia and a senior consultant at Pracsys Economics. An economist with over ten years consulting experience, Georgia has managed a diverse portfolio of projects for public, private and community sector clients around Australia. She is a founding member of Culture Counts and helped to develop the platform and metrics system in 2011 through a partnership between Pracsys Economics and the Department of Culture and the Arts in WA. She has previously worked in policy development for government. Georgia has a Bachelor of Economics and a Bachelor of Arts, and is based in Melbourne. You can contact Georgia at Georgia.moore@culturecounts.cc

Feature image: From nearpirctures.com. Image has been modified.

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