Empty stage in expectation of performance, by Flickr user renewleeds

If all the world’s a stage, who can compete with Broadway? While gathering research as a doctoral student at Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, Mirae Kim interviewed numerous arts organizations about funding issues. She spotted a pattern among local nonprofit venues: “Many theaters in New Jersey mentioned their need to compete against Broadway theaters in New York City – which perfectly made sense since they are only about ten to 20 miles away from Broadway,” Kim recalls. “They mentioned they cannot compete against Broadway theaters in the traditional way because of the different financial sizes, so several of them highlighted their community basis as a way of differentiating themselves from ‘commercial’ theaters.”

Kim’s curiosity about this distinction led to an intensive research study – Characteristics of Civically Engaged Nonprofit Arts Organizations: The Results of a National Survey – which she completed over a three-year period while working as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs. She broadened her inquiry to survey myriad nonprofit arts organizations throughout the United States, focusing on what differentiates the groups with a 501(c)(3) status from commercially driven ventures.

“It intrigued me whether the need for survival prompted nonprofits to highlight their civic engagement role – or if there were other reasons,” Kim explains. “One of the findings I didn’t expect was the role of associations and collaboratives in encouraging nonprofit arts organizations to recognize ‘civic and community engagement’ as one of the critical factors they should embody.”

A Winning Formula

Another unexpected outcome for Kim: her study won the inaugural Createquity Arts Research Prize, entitling her to a $500 cash award and a platform for sharing her work with a wider audience. In our review of more than 500 arts research studies for the Research Prize, Kim’s publication rose to the top for several reasons: a high-level methodological design, the use of previously validated survey instruments, a widely representative sample, and a topic with resonance in the arts community. This work exemplifies Createquity’s interest in encouraging arts institutions to prioritize community needs ahead of their own prosperity.

First published in 2016 in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Kim’s article includes and draws on a wide-ranging literature review. The study relies on a varied and robust combination of instruments and data sources including:

• structured interviews with 21 nonprofit arts organization directors
• a survey of 900+ arts organizations, with questions based on the qualitative interview results
• financial data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics to uncover income-source patterns

The survey was used to place arts organizations on a matrix measuring “civic roles” and “market roles,” based on a validated index of organizational behaviors developed by other researchers. Kim used the above methods to test hypotheses about the relationships nonprofit arts organizations have with other types of community organizations, their peer organizations’ emphasis on civic duties, the level of bureaucracy in their governance, and their reliance on program fees for revenue.

Key Findings

Kim uncovers several notable ways in which civically engaged arts organizations differ from more market-driven arts organizations, including:

• they maintain stronger networks with other community organizations such as schools, senior centers, etc.
• they consider civic engagement a key force driving the mission
• they’re consciously aware of their nonprofit status

The study finds that charging and receiving a higher share of program revenue negatively correlates with civic engagement. Indeed, revenue sourcing is one of the inquiry’s driving concerns. Noting that arts nonprofits often rely on a mix of contributions and selling tickets, Kim poses a central question that arts nonprofits confront: “How can they maintain marketable programs and share responsibility for the wellbeing of their community without compromising either?”

Many nonprofits surveyed reported high levels of involvement in both market roles and civic roles, so Kim conducted additional analysis taking market roles into account. She finds a greater correlation between network diversity (the number and variety of other organizations worked with in the past year) and civic engagement, when an organization performs both roles. Interviews with directors reveal that work with outside community groups and organizations helps arts nonprofits implement civically relevant programming and reach new audiences within their markets.

Perhaps surprisingly, “Characteristics” does not find a significant correlation between an arts organization’s reliance on government funding and its level of civic engagement. Kim points out in her literature review that several studies hypothesize a negative relationship between the two, while others argue for a positive correlation – and that empirical results are mixed. (At any rate, as Createquity has noted, the vast majority of arts organizations’ budgets comes from the private sector rather than government funding.)

Kim also hypothesized that a rigid and bureaucratic governance structure would be negatively associated with civic engagement. In fact, however, the survey responses indicate the opposite relationship. Because this finding conflicts with some of her interview data, Kim recommends more research in this area before a conclusion is reached, noting that this study does not establish a causal relationship between these factors.

Room for Growth

Kim notes that these findings cannot tell us definitively whether collaborating with other organizations causes nonprofits to be more civically engaged, or if civically engaged organizations are more likely to seek out collaboration. It also does not shed light on how effective the efforts of civically minded nonprofits are in achieving outcomes. However, the article does make a strong argument that partnering with other types of organizations will strengthen ties with communities and potential audiences.

The study’s survey instruments themselves contain a bit of wiggle room in terms of reliability. For example, respondents were asked to rate their involvement in various activities on a scale of 0 to 100, a huge range with no clear benchmarks that may have been vulnerable to bias in unpredictable ways. Future research on this topic would benefit from a lower reliance on self-reported, subjective measures like these.

Nevertheless, we find much to praise about the innovative approach that “Characteristics of Civically Engaged Nonprofit Organizations” uses to uncover and elucidate some of the key questions and priorities that nonprofit arts organizations face in the real world.

“I hope this encourages researchers to study the role of arts nonprofits, as they are critical elements to improve our civic life,” says Kim, now an assistant professor at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School of Policy Studies. “And I hope it helps arts nonprofit managers recognize the role of associations and informal networks in influencing program decisions at individual organizations.”

As a think tank and online publication investigating the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them, Createquity continually gathers and reviews research in the arts sector. With the Createquity Arts Research Prize, we set out to highlight and celebrate the groundbreaking research that we see as essential in maximizing the good that the arts can do.

Arts research occupies no single, well-defined space in either higher education or the wider world; it has roots in many different academic disciplines and intellectual traditions, and it stems from a variety of sources. Candidates for the Createquity Arts Research Prize were drawn from Createquity’s ongoing internal review of hundreds of publications as well as from external nominations, and the winner was selected via two rounds of evaluation. The first was conducted internally by Createquity’s research team using the three criteria of relevance, rigor, and the extent to which the research adds to existing knowledge. The top scoring studies from this round were then evaluated by an external panel comprised of some of the foremost research minds in the country, basing their choices on the criteria above as well as inventiveness, transparency, courage displayed in the choice of topic or approach, and the extent to which the prize would represent a significant opportunity for the author. (See more information on the selection process here.)

Winner of the 2017 Createquity Arts Research Prize, Mirae Kim

Mirae Kim’s prize-winning publication explores one aspect of the important and under-studied question of what sets civically engaged nonprofit arts organizations apart from those whose behaviors are more responsive to market forces. The topic is increasingly resonant within the arts sector, and directly addresses Createquity’s interest in the willingness of arts institutions to prioritize community needs ahead of their own growth and prestige. To investigate this topic, Kim applies a mixed methods approach, robust in its combination of interviews with 21 arts nonprofit directors to inform a survey of approximately 900+ arts organizations, and the integration of key financial data reported on 990 forms to try to uncover patterns related to income sources. The findings of the study suggest that arts organizations that are more civically engaged (as opposed to market-driven):

• Have stronger networks (i.e., work with a greater range of other organizations like schools, senior center);
• Consider civic engagement as an industry norm (i.e., nonprofits are inherently civic-minded institutions); and
• Are consciously aware of their nonprofit status.

Kim also found that earned income negatively correlates with civic engagement behaviors, whereas no correlation between government funding and civic engagement was observed.

Originally, Kim was drawn to this research topic by looking at commercial versus nonprofit theaters in New Jersey, investigating what makes the nonprofits inherently different from commercial theatres. She questioned what is it about the 501(c)(3) identity that is different from commercial ventures.

At the time of her selection, Kim was aware of Createquity but not aware of this inaugural prize. Receiving the congratulatory email in a car driving to Georgia for her new assistant professor position, she was thrilled. She had worked for three years on her research, in some isolation in Missouri. Now, she’s excited by the opportunity to discuss her work and what it means, especially with practitioners. “I love the idea of condensing research into concise briefs and sharing research,” Kim explains. “I am excited about this and looking to connect with people who might want to have a more in-depth discussion about the research and what they see in the real world. This is a great opportunity for researchers who are studying in their offices trying to work on datasets and understand the world better to convey what they find to the people who are out there making real changes.”

This is the first time Createquity (or anyone else, to our knowledge) has attempted to review a year’s worth of arts research with anything approaching this level of comprehensiveness. Congratulations go out to Mirae Kim!

* * *

Additional finalists for the 2016 Createquity Arts Research Prize included:

Runner-Up

“Artistic education matters: survival in the arts occupations”
Trine Bille and Søren Jensen
Does a formal arts education matter in one’s potential for success as an artist? We have published several articles on the role of socioeconomic status in access to arts careers, so this title immediately stuck out as relevant. The research focuses on a group of artists in Denmark, and looks at the influence of their artistic education on survival in the labor market, comparing across different artistic disciplines using detailed statistical procedures. Createquity has published a Research Spotlight of this work.

Honorable Mention

”Does “Strong and Effective” Look Different for Culturally Specific Arts Organizations?”
Zannie Giraud Voss, Glenn Voss, Andrea Louie, Zenetta Drew, and Marla Rubio Teyolia
This working paper, from SMU’s National Center for Arts Research, was a timely response to the controversial 2015 DeVos Institute of Arts Management study that recommended funders consider consolidating grantmaking to organizations of color among a smaller number of institutions. This study was a key source for Createquity’s 2016 article “Making Sense of Cultural Equity.” Its approach of looking at quantitative data to track performance on key indicators, including access to funding, is a fresh lens through which to understand the effectiveness of culturally-specific organizations.

”Do Donors Care About Results? An Analysis of Nonprofit Arts and Cultural Organizations”
Cleopatra Charles and Mirae Kim
This study addresses Createquity’s interest in understanding what motivates decision-making by arts organizations. One of our hypotheses is that donors often dictate what arts institutions do, which may or may not be in alignment with a goal of improving the overall health of the arts ecosystem or maximizing wellbeing benefits from the arts. “Do Donors Care” looks at the important question of whether or not donors change the way they give (e.g., size of donation) based on how an organization performs on outcomes such as attendance via a regression analysis that controls for things like size of organization, age, and fundraising efficiency.

”Showcasing Creativity: Programming and Presenting First Nations Performing Arts”
Jackie Bailey and Hung-Yen Yang, BYP Group; Mandy Whitford and Marija Vodjanoska from the Australia Council for the Arts
One of the few studies on this list that focuses on populations outside of the United States, “Showcasing Creativity” focuses on the the barriers Aboriginal artists face in being able to reach broader audiences in Australia. The methodology combines data visualization techniques to describe frequency of presentations of Aboriginal artists, interviews with presenters, and survey data. Createquity has published a Research Spotlight of this work.

Music, Singing, and Wellbeing – What Works?
Norma Daykin, Guy Julier, Alan Tomlinson, Catherine Meads, Louise Mansfield, Annette Payne, Lily Grigsby Duffy, Jack Lane, Giorgia D’Innocenzo, Adele Burnett, Tess Kay, Paul Dolan, Stefano Testoni, Christina Victor Dolan
We came across this systematic evidence review project from the UK think tank What Works Wellbeing just as Createquity was getting ready to publish “Everything We Know About Whether and How the Arts Improve Lives.” It immediately impressed us as a major resource about the evidence of the effect of music on the wellbeing of adults, both healthy and with dementia (the main focus of the literature under review). Although it is not the first research synthesis covering the topics in question, its comprehensiveness and elegance of design struck us as a model of the genre.

”Well, if They Like it… Effects of Social Groups’ Ratings and Price Information on the Appreciation of Art”
Jon O. Lauring, Matthew Pelowski, Michael Forster, Matthias Gondan, Maurice Ptito, and Ron Kupers
This study looks at the impact of social and monetary contextual information on how people respond to art, potentially adding to our understanding of both the development and cultivation of artistic taste and social constructions of artistic excellence. For Createquity, these ideas are relevant to the question of how a healthy arts ecosystem matches arts participants with experiences that they are likely to find meaningful.

Featured image: South Dunedin community art project. Photo: Flickr user Paul S Allen.

Each year, our field generates tons of research about critical issues in the arts, on topics ranging from the impacts of arts participation to issues of access and equity to what drives organizational performance. Arts research is an expansive domain, and we wanted the scope of eligibility to reflect that. However, to be considered for the Createquity Arts Research Prize, publications had to meet a few criteria. On a logistical level, they needed to have been first released in 2016, written in English, and available to the public (journal articles counted as long as they were accessible through standard library subscriptions). And in terms of content, they needed to be either focused primarily on the arts or have been written with an arts audience in mind. Historical, biographical, or aesthetic analyses of single or small groups of artists’ work were not eligible; nor were cultural criticisms focusing on specific artworks.

We found candidates for the prize from a number of sources. We started with our own Newsroom columns, which contain a section each month featuring “New Research of Note” taken from the 200+ blogs, newsletters, and social media feeds that we collectively follow. We combed a handful of research “aggregators” including the UK’s CultureCase and Canada’s Arts Research Monitor. We issued an open call for nominations, which yielded 18 eligible submissions from readers like you (thank you!). The majority of the content, however, came from academic journals. We dug through the following, reviewing articles published in 2016 for each:

• Artivate
• Arts Education Policy Review
• Creativity Research Journal
• Cultural Trends
• International Journal of Art and Design Education
• International Journal of Arts Education
• International Journal of Arts and Technology
• International Journal of Arts Management
• International Journal of Cultural Policy
• International Journal of Design Education
• International Journal of Education and the Arts
• International Journal of Education through Art
• International Journal of Music Education
• Journal of Cultural Economics
• Journal of Learning Through the Arts
• Medical Problems of Performing Artists
• Research in Dance Education
• Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance
• The Arts in Psychotherapy
• The European Journal of Philosophy in Arts Education
• The International Journal of the Arts in Society
• The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society
• Youth Theater Journal

Once we had collected all of this material in one place, we embarked upon three rounds of review. First, screeners extracted crucial information about each study, including a summary of the research questions or hypotheses being explored and the methods employed to pursue that exploration. Screeners were also free to offer a recommendation about whether the piece should or should not be set aside for deeper review. Second, Createquity’s founder Ian David Moss and Research Team Leader Rebecca Ratzkin scored each study on the basis of its relevance to Createquity’s interest in “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them,” the rigor of the methodological approach, and the added value it offers above and beyond existing literature. (You can read a more detailed description of these criteria here.)

This rating process yielded a total of eight finalists for the prize, which we’ve now put in front of an external panel of research experts to rank. In addition to the criteria above, the expert panel will consider as “tie-breaker” factors the inventiveness and transparency of the research, as well as the boldness of the topic or approach and the extent to which the Prize would represent a significant opportunity for the author(s) or publisher. This year’s panel includes Norman Bradburn, an esteemed scholar who is a former professor and provost at the University of Chicago and currently senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago; Carlos Manjarrez, director of the Office of Data Governance and Analysis at Legal Services Corporation and formerly founding research director for the Institute of Museum and Library Services; and Michael Rushton, director of strategic planning for Indiana University and formerly director of the arts administration program within the university’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs. These distinguished individuals join Createquity’s Moss and Ratzkin on the expert panel.

This process has pushed us to standardize our approach for processing and synthesizing research. As a result, we’ve built a comprehensive database of arts research published in 2016 – a pretty amazing thing. Our hope is to build upon this database each year as new research is released.

This is the first time Createquity (or anyone else, to our knowledge) has attempted to review arts research at anything approaching this level of comprehensiveness, and there were some limitations to our process that we’ll look to improve on in any future efforts. For instance, because of differing levels of access to academic databases among our team members, in some cases we relied solely on abstracts for initial screening. This would have biased us towards studies that included methodological descriptions in their abstracts, and may have led us to disregard some valuable studies this time around. We also didn’t use keyword searches to find relevant articles in journals that we don’t follow regularly, which means we probably missed a lot of medical literature, as well as other publications featuring arts-inclusive research from a non-arts disciplinary perspective. And of course, there’s the language limitation – we restricted ourselves to English-language sources for feasibility reasons, which is likely more of an issue for gray literature than academic literature. Even so, we likely missed a fair amount of English-language gray literature from outside the U.S.

Still, despite the imperfections, this was quite a feat for us here at Createquity, and we’re confident the selection process has been much more robust than those that, for example, rely solely on nominations. And we think we’re off to a great start filtering through the untapped potential in arts research. We hope this brings the field a step closer to more fully engaging with arts research, including understanding how to make sense of all the research that’s out there, and how best to use findings in decision-making. We plan to make the big announcement in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

We have long maintained that research – however rigorous or innovative – has little value if it exists in a vacuum: the sharing of discoveries between researchers is essential to a collective understanding of arts issues and, ultimately, a healthy arts ecosystem. We also support the idea of critical evaluations – and ongoing discussions – between peers about the work that is being generated in the research community. This new prize advances these goals: we encourage our readers to nominate work that they greatly admire and believe truly moves our field forward.

What We’re Looking For

Createquity is seeking research that advances the current scholarly conversation, applies new methods to old inquiries to uncover fresh and important insights, and/or explores new avenues of investigation.

Our definition of arts research is broad, and may include studies published in peer-reviewed journals, reports commissioned by foundations or government agencies, dissertations, self-published work, even in-depth blog posts. We are open to quantitative work, qualitative work, empirical work, and theoretical work. It can be from any country in the world. The only requirement is that the research must be about the arts or be written with an arts audience in mind. Generally speaking, we are interested in research on the arts that employs methods from the social sciences, broadly conceived—economics, psychology, sociology, etc.—as well as neuroscience and medical research; please note are NOT looking for historical, biographical, or aesthetic analysis of a single artist’s or small group of artists’ work, or cultural criticism focusing on specific works of art.

Our evaluation criteria will include:

• Relevance: the work has research goals that either 1) connect directly to Createquity’s interest in “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them,” or 2) facilitate essential knowledge infrastructure that helps make a broad range of research investigations possible.
• Rigor: the work uses methods that match up well with its research goals, and executes them without obvious flaws.
• Added Value: the work either 1) makes a unique contribution to the literature or 2) is designed explicitly to replicate previous work on an important and under-studied topic.

After getting through an initial screening round, candidates for the Arts Research Prize will ultimately be judged and selected by an external panel of distinguished experts. Additional information is available on our Frequently Asked Questions page for the prize.

We Need Your Help!

Createquity systematically gathers and reviews research in the arts and culture sector on an ongoing basis, and we continue to mine the depths of academic journals and our personal networks for studies published in 2016 that we should be looking at. But we need your help to make sure we haven’t missed anything important! Accordingly, we’ve announced an open call for nominations.

The deadline for nominations is April 10, 2017. You can submit up to three nominations total. If you have more than three you’d like to recommend to us, or have any other questions, please email Rebecca Ratzkin at rebecca@createquity.com.

Thank you for participating in this exciting initiative!