“Museum” by flickr user World’s Direction

Title: “Taking Charge – Evaluating the Evidence: The Impact of Charging or Not for Admissions on Museums”

Author(s): DC Research Ltd.

Publisher: DC Research / Association of Independent Museums

Year: 2017

URL: https://www.aim-museums.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Final-Report-Taking-Charge-%E2%80%93-Evaluating-the-Evidence-The-Impact-of-Charging-or-Not-for-Admissions-on-Museums.pdf

Topics: museum admission, admission price, museum attendance, museum finances, UK, Wales

Methods: literature review, survey, case studies, interviews

What it says: Purpose and product: DC Research Ltd undertook this study in the first half of 2016 to understand the effects of charging or not charging for admission at UK museums – and of changing a museum’s policy toward charging – on attendance, visitor diversity, funding, visitor experience, and institutional relationships. (The research was commissioned by the Association of Independent Museums (AIM), in partnership with Arts Council England (ACE) and the Museums Archives and Libraries Division (MALD) of the Welsh Government.) The researchers produced four documents: the full report discussed here, a separate executive summary, a summary of the results from Wales, and a “Success Guide” capturing lessons learned for use by museums.

Methodology: The authors reviewed the existing literature on the consequences of charging for museum admission; conducted a survey generating usable responses from 311 museums across the UK; produced 20 case studies, primarily of museums that had changed their charging position, involving site visits and interviews with a variety of stakeholders; and consulted 18 museum experts through one-on-one conversations. Notably, all of the study components excluded National Museums and Galleries, which have tended to be the emphasis of much previous research into this issue in the UK. The authors also had access to AIM’s proprietary Visitor Verdict database.

Findings: Few clear patterns emerged with respect to what kinds of museums charge for admission or the effects of charging. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that other factors, including how a change in charging policy is communicated and managed, seem to matter more for nearly all of the metrics considered. The main exception is that charging seems to be associated with more time spent in the museum (longer “dwell times”) and possibly with greater likelihood of using the museum shop and café. Unsurprisingly, charging was found to provide a useful focal point to welcome visitors and collect data.

Of the 311 respondents, 57 percent charge for general admission and/or specific exhibitions, with a mean general admission price of about £6 for adults; this was higher for museums with more visitors and those that reported being a key attraction in their area. There was a stark difference in perceptions between institutions that are free and those that charge: the former mostly believed that being free had a positive effect on the number and diversity of visitors and on spontaneous donation and secondary spend; the latter mostly believed that charging did not have much effect on any of these. (Interestingly, separate data suggests that the average visitor experience rating was similar across the two kinds of institutions.)

Only 26 percent of the 311 respondents changed their charging policy in the last three years, with 70 percent of those who did being museums that already charged and merely increased price or scope. The institutions that increased charges mostly believed that these increases had no significant effect on number or diversity of visitors or spontaneous donations. The nine institutions that went from free to charging reported that adding a fee did reduce attendance overall (by some 35-40 percent, anecdotally) and disproportionately for locals and repeat visits, but did not seem to affect the social diversity of attendees. Data from AIM’s Visitor Verdict offers some support for this last point: the 2016 breakdown of attendees by social class was nearly identical for charging and free museums. The museums reported, however, that special outreach and discount programs are necessary to achieve this. (Some of the institutions that switched from charging to free reported an increase in diversity, although data was often thin.) The institutions that added a new fee also reported that spontaneous donations decreased, but that this was more than offset by the admissions income.

In terms of best practices for changing charging position, the authors conclude from their case studies that communication is the most important factor for success, emphasizing that staff should be trained to be confident and positive, stakeholders (especially the local community) should understand why the change is happening, any increase should ideally be tied to an improvement in the visitor experience, and thoughtful pricing tiers and discounts are key to maintaining the diversity of attendees.

What I think about it: The design of the study means the authors rely mostly on what museums perceive to be true, and so it doesn’t allow analysis of causality – especially since so few of the institutions involved changed their admissions policy. The authors wisely adduce external data (especially from Visitor Verdict) to triangulate those perceptions and adjudicate among them, but because the dataset is proprietary, it is hard to know how much confidence to place in it, and the authors do not address that question. As a result, the findings on the effects of charging must be taken with a grain of salt. More interpretation, perhaps from the case studies, might have increased the usefulness of this study.

The real value of the work may therefore be in the success guide, which provides practical advice to museums considering changing their policy. Here the anecdotal approach yields valuable insight, and the narrative style allows the authors to put their suggestions in the context of specific institutions they have learned from so their applicability to other institutions can be weighed by the latter’s staff.

The report would be strengthened if the authors made available the list of relevant institutions in the UK and/or of those that received the survey (to clarify how representative the response base is) and the survey instrument itself, without which it is sometimes hard to interpret the summarized responses. For example, only 3 percent of respondents charge for specific exhibitions only; one-third of free institutions believe being free has no impact on “admissions income”; and respondents are more likely to charge admission if they report that competition for visitors is more intense in their area.  These findings strike me as quite counter-intuitive, and I’m not sure how to evaluate them: access to the survey would help me understand whether I am interpreting the terms differently from the respondents. These are also examples of when more interpretation from the authors would be useful: if these things are true, what do they mean? If not, why do the museums perceive them to be?

What it all means: This is a topic on the minds of many museums: about half of the institutions surveyed have considered changing their admissions policy, though the vast majority think it is “not very likely” or “not at all likely” that they will change in the next three years. That last point, and the fact that such a small number of institutions actually did switch from free to charging or vice versa, suggests that this debate might be a proxy for more fundamental issues – and potentially a distraction from real engagement with them.

For example, the debate about charging in the US is often considered in terms of equity and access. This report (and especially the Visitor Verdict data it cites) suggest that charging or not charging is not the main factor in achieving diverse attendance, though the grain of salt mentioned above must be added. If that’s right, this report is a salutary reminder to focus on what matters to achieving our desired ends, which may be more about communication and implementation than admissions charge. But one additional caveat applies here: like many studies touching on diversity in the UK, this one focuses on social class based on occupation; race is not considered.

Author(s): Bruce A. Seaman

Publisher: Georgia State University

Year: 2005

URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=895099

Topics: economics, econometrics, arts participation, lit review

Methods: literature review

What it says: This is a critical review of cultural economics research literature, starting with Baumol and Bowen’s work in the 1960s up through research published in the early 2000s. Broadly, Seaman examines the conventional wisdom that studies finding that the arts are a luxury good are “carefully designed confirmations of the obvious.” According to Seaman, while this perspective might make sense from a layman’s perspective, findings that confirm arts as a luxury good are hard to replicate because of challenges facing performing arts data and conceptual  confusion. The lit review is structured into four chapters:

1. Introduction

Introduces the idea that cultural economics studies tend to rely more on survey data or data derived from other studies on arts participation that have used survey data. The studies are thus more about parsing out the different predictors of arts attendance than about calculating precise price elasticities of demand.

Two major economists in the field, Louis Lévy-Garboua and Claude Montmarquette, claim that there needs to be more progress in the use of econometrics and large data sets in the field of cultural economics, and in particular, that there needs to be a rigorous consideration of how to model “cultivation of taste” before questions about price elasticity of demand can be answered definitively. Seaman’s lit review attempts to evaluate these claims based on past research and results.

      2.  Observations about arts audiences from survey data

This chapter discusses observations about arts audiences based on survey data and econometric analysis. Early reports and papers on the socioeconomic makeup of arts audiences, including Baumol and Bowen (1966) and a study from the Ford Foundation (1974) showed that higher education level is more associated with arts attendance than higher income, and this finding is not restricted to the United States or to a single arts type. While the Ford Foundation study highlighted a causal effect of education level on art participation, the effects of income and education are generally difficult to separate in econometric analysis. In summary, there are differences in the degree to which education level plays a role in arts participation, and a more recent study (DiMaggio & Useem, 2004), was reluctant to conclude that education was the dominant driver of arts participation.

This chapter also looks at audience overlap between audiences of different types of arts events. In general, there is some conflicting evidence of audience overlap, or people attending more than one type of arts event. Some studies show limited overlap, suggesting that  while audiences of different types of arts events (like theater and ballet, for example) are similar in socioeconomic factors, they are not the same audiences. In comparing rates of participation between attendees for different arts events, it is important to consider the “base rate” of participation for each group before considering crossover to different categories, and this may be a reason for conflicting findings. Further, there is some literature that looks at “snobs,” who consume just one type of arts event vs. “omnivores,” who consume a variety of arts. Behavioral changes that have made people tend to eclecticism instead of snobbery should be somewhat encouraging to arts providers.

Finally, this chapter considers how audiences have changed over time. First, the evidence suggests that arts audiences are getting older as the percentage of audiences 18-29 has fallen while audiences over the age of 50 has risen. There is conflicting evidence on the changing “elitism” of arts audiences and the role of education over time. In the 2002, there was a stronger boost in arts attendance from having attended some college instead of having a college degree, and there have been other indicators that education level has “smoothed’ in attendees. DiMaggio and Mukhtar (2004) calculated the “odds” of arts attendance for a particular group, and found that arts attendance declined for both high school and college graduates, but declined further for high school graduates.

    3. Arts demand studies: price and income elasticities

Of the 44 econometric studies that have been published since 1966, 29 have attempted to either derive or impute own price or income elasticities of demand for the performing arts. Despite the conventional wisdom that frames the arts as a luxury good, this view has not been confirmed by the data, with 12 of the 29 studies finding arts prices to be relatively inelastic and 4 finding strong evidence of high price elasticities. On the whole, studies that use more aggregated arts price data, or examine the data from many organizations, tend to find more price inelasticity.

Seaman suggests that studies with less aggregated data are analytically superior to studies that use more aggregated data because they are able to look at a particular organizational type, size, and mission. One of the problems with aggregating price data to derive price elasticity of demand is that the “average” ticket price, calculated as the total number of tickets over the total revenue, is a price that no consumer actually faces. Since arts organizations are able to price discriminate, looking at a more disaggregated measure of price data allows for more refined analysis through a consideration of seating type (main floor vs. box seats, for example) and scale of ticket prices. The most disaggregated studies show fairly high price elasticities of demand, though there are no unambiguous findings of price elasticity greater than one at the most disaggregated level.

The low price elasticities may be related to the fact that arts organizations, like sports events, systematically under charge for tickets. Another explanation is that the price of a ticket to an arts event is not the “full price” of attendance, meaning that it does not include the cost of transportation, dining, and other costs associated with attending an arts event. Additionally, Seaman notes that arts organizations may be under-charging for tickets may be because organizations are attempting to incentivize donations from some individuals while allowing for a broad range of people to attend arts events.

In terms of unique challenges that might face cultural economists when calculating the demand for arts events, there may be some particular considerations for thinking about product homogeneity, established consumer taste, and assessing quality variation in arts products. In terms of problems with measurement for determining price elasticity, the biggest problem is that available data sources do not incorporate a demand-determining variable.  For example, a researcher might have data about ticket sales for a particular organization, but may not have data on consumers’ incomes. Some studies have successfully decomposed the effect of rising income and used Gary Becker’s idea of “full income” and found low elasticity results. Additionally, some have suggested that econometric research needs to include a variable that accounts for consumers’ ability to learn by doing, or to acquire and refine their taste in the arts as their consumption increases, though Seaman does not think that prior attempts have been successful to account for this in formal modeling. In summary, the evidence suggests a low elasticity of demand for arts organizations, which means that ticket prices at arts organizations may be kept intentionally low, perhaps to encourage donations from consumers or allow consumers from a broad range of income levels to participate in events.

Efforts to examine cross-price elasticities and complements for arts events have drawn some interesting conclusions. The historical approach has been to examine the “recreation and reading component” of the Consumer Price Index, thus comparing the price and demand for other recreational activities to arts performances. Gapinski (1986) finds evidence of cross price elasticities in smaller geographic markets, which suggests that considering location and transportation to events might be an important consideration for researchers. Looking at television subscribers in particular has shown a strong negative effect on ticket sales in some geographic markets, though there is some conflicting evidence on the effect of television.

   4. Evaluation and conclusion

Seaman highlights major findings from the arts demand literature that may have some bearing on how we understand demand for the arts:

1. Substitution evidence shows that there substitution across performing arts may be significant, though there is less evidence of substitution within an art form.

2. Aggregate price elasticities are lower than single firm price elasticities.

3. In future studies, income elasticity needs to account for full income and opportunity cost of leisure time.

4. Quality matters in arts demand, but it’s hard to measure and model.

5. Considering how people’s attitudes and tastes evolve in the arts will be important to consider as researchers estimate demand.

6. Education level is a strong determinant of arts participation in survey data, but regression analysis suggests that formal training in the arts, family socialization, and arts training are stronger determinants of arts participation.

In summary, Seaman finds that there are surprisingly few “arts axioms” in arts demand, and that while there are certainly trends in the literature, there is also contradictory evidence highlighting the need to think critically about analytical methods and units of analysis.

What I think about it: This is a very thorough examination of the major econometric studies that have been published over the 40-year period from 1966-2005. Seaman finds many examples of inconsistencies in arts data and arts analysis and has sound reasoning for why those inconsistencies might exist, both in the econometric methods used to derive the results and from intuition about how arts organizations and arts consumers behave.

Seaman examines the idea of economic disadvantage through a largely theoretical lens, and I think two of the major topics in the article might have some bearing on arts and economic disadvantage hypothesis #1:

1. Looking at summary statistics of survey data suggests that education level is a strong driver of arts participation and attendance, even more so than income. However, regression analysis suggests that some type of formal arts training and other social lifestyle factors may be a more important driver of arts participation than education. This may be due to the fact that education level has a multicollinearity problem with other socioeconomic factors, but some evidence shows that, after considering lifestyle and attitude toward the arts, socioeconomic status is no longer a significant predictor of arts participation.

2. While a low price elasticity of demand at the aggregated level suggests that arts organizations could theoretically raise their prices to increase their revenue, Seaman points out that arts organizations may be intentionally under charging to both encourage people at a number of income levels to attend their events and to encourage some consumers to make donations to organizations.

What it all means: There are few “axioms” with regard to understanding arts demand, but there are some trends pertaining to economic disadvantage that may be important for our understanding of access and opportunity in the healthy arts ecosystem. First, the low price elasticity of demand for arts organizations suggest that cultural institutions could be charging more for arts tickets to increase their revenue, but choose not to because they are both trying to incentivize donations and make it possible for lower income people to attend arts events. However, the idea that current price elasticity estimations are omitting “full income” and opportunity cost estimates mean that arts institutions may have more work to do to ensure that a broad range of people are able to attend arts events. Second, evidence of substitution, particularly the study that found that increased television subscription decreased arts participation, suggests that there might be some evidence to our previous hypothesis that consumers may be substituting arts attendance with television. Finally, considering attitudes and formal training in the arts may be an even more important driver of arts participation than income level, which furthers the idea that choice and lifestyle may play a greater role in predicting arts participation than any measure of socioeconomic status.

]]> https://createquity.com/2015/06/capsule-review-attendance-and-participation-in-the-performing-arts/feed/ 0 https://createquity.com/2015/02/one-size-fits-all-does-not-fit-the-arts/ https://createquity.com/2015/02/one-size-fits-all-does-not-fit-the-arts/#respond Wed, 04 Feb 2015 14:55:07 +0000 https://createquity.com/?p=7494

NEA Infographic: Why Do People Attend the Arts?

If your events and exhibitions have seemed just a bit…emptier lately, you’re not alone. The National Endowment for the Arts’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) reveals that only 33.4% of U.S. adults attended one of seven “benchmark” arts activities—ballet, opera, musical plays, nonmusical plays, classical music, jazz, and visiting museums or galleries—in 2012, down from 41% in 1992. Though many a tooth has been gnashed over these statistics since they were released a year and a half ago, on their own they don’t provide much guidance for arts managers desperately trying to stem the tide. In an effort to better understand the reasons for the decline, the NEA decided to sponsor a set of questions on the arts as part of the 2012 General Social Survey (GSS). Administered by the National Opinion Research Center based at the University of Chicago, the highly-regarded GSS has been collecting data on a random sample of nearly 3,000 adults biennially since 1972.

The resulting report, titled “When Going Gets Tough: Barriers and Motivations Affecting Arts Attendance” and released last month, provides an unprecedented level of insight into the motivations of “interested non-attendees,” that is, individuals who indicated interest in attending a specific performance or exhibition in the given twelve-month period, but ultimately did not follow through. (It’s important to note that the definition of arts participation used in the study excludes film and literary arts, as well as remote and home-based participation modes. A survey with these disciplines and contexts included might tell a different story.)

Just over half of survey respondents had attended either a performance or an exhibition within the past year, and an additional 13.3% fell into the category of “interested non-attendees.” Among attendees, performance patrons were most likely to credit socializing with others as the reason for attending an event, while nearly nine in ten exhibit-goers indicated that “learning something new” was a motivator for their attendance.

Among people who didn’t attend an event or exhibit but would have liked to, nearly half blamed a lack of time as a reason for their lack of engagement (particularly an issue for parents with children under six), 37% indicated that the venue was too difficult to get to, and 22% just didn’t have anyone to go with. Almost 40% of these interested non-attendees cited cost as an issue, and although it was not mentioned as often as time, the people who were concerned about affordability were much more likely to see it as a major obstacle than other barriers. Importantly, this figure enables us to arrive at a reasonable estimate for the number of people in the United States who are impaired from accessing one form of common arts experience due to economic disadvantage: just over 5% of the adult population, or 12.4 million people.

That fun and intrigue motivate participation in anything an arts event seems pretty obvious, and that cost, convenience and time are barriers to attendance will not be news to administrators who for years have struggled to address these very obstacles. Where the report really gets interesting – and concretely useful to the field – is in the somewhat unexpected variations between disciplines and among categories of attendees that it surfaces. This research supports the notion that individuals have different relationships to different disciplines, and get different things out of them. For example, 65% of performance attendees, and an even higher proportion of those attending music events, were motivated by the opportunity to see a specific performer, whereas just 6% of those attending art exhibits went to see artworks by a specific artist. Instead, as noted above, the vast majority of exhibit goers were motivated by the desire to learn something new – almost twice the rate of performance attendees. There were some interesting variations in motivation for audience members within the performing arts themselves, as well: 64% of theater-goers cared about experiencing high-quality art, compared with 52% of both dance patrons and music fans. Performance attendees were also more likely to bring somebody along. Interestingly, the number of respondents citing socializing as a motivating factor was much higher than the number attending with a friend of family member, implying that many patrons went to these events with the intention of seeing or meeting other people without necessarily bringing anyone with them.

Finally, the report shows that attendance patterns can be shaped not only by perennial cost and time issues, but also by cultural context. For example, African Americans and Asians are more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to attend performances supporting community events, and 79% of first-generation Hispanic immigrants saw performances and exhibitions as an opportunity to celebrate their cultural heritage. (By contrast, only 4.4% of US-born non-Hispanic whites mentioned cultural heritage as a motivating factor.) Several intriguing education-related findings included the fact that more than three-quarters of individuals with less than a high school diploma or GED indicated “learning something new” as a motivation for attendance, compared to 63% of those who had finished high school.

“When Going Gets Tough” confirms that reasons for non-attendance are complex and personal, and even (or especially) when armed with lots of data, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to improving participation across all disciplines and individuals. The “arts” are not “The Arts,” a homogenous monolith with homogenous strategies. Rather, “the arts” are a mosaic of disciplines and sub-disciplines, of artists and thinkers, of administrators and producers and curators, of venue owners and critics, and of audience members – each with their own unique relationship to the field. Still, there is much practitioners can learn from the statistics unearthed here by the NEA. The Venn diagram of sorts that emerges from the data put forth can be extremely specific, if we want or need it to be, and we now have an actual idea as to why, for example, a first-generation, retired, working-class Hispanic individual might attend a community concert, or what spurred the mid-thirties, middle-class mother of two to bring her kids to the MOMA. The first step, of course, is figuring out where in that Venn diagram our audience for a particular event sits (or where we want them to sit.) And the second, that of addressing the needs and expectations of interested non-attendees – and actually getting them in the door – might turn out a bit more successfully when armed with reports such as these.

Cover image of a gallery show by flickr user Brainfloat, via flickr Creative Commons license.