Perhaps no arts-related research study is cited as frequently in the mainstream media these days as Americans for the Arts’s gargantuan economic impact survey, Arts & Economic Prosperity III. Its key message, that the nonprofit arts sector is responsible for $166.2 billion in economic activity nationwide, has been hammered home relentlessly to policymakers, politicians, grantmakers, and arts managers around the country since the report’s initial publication in 2007. Americans for the Arts clearly sees the report itself, along with the general theme of economic relevance, as central to its overall advocacy strategy: as AFTA’s Director of State and Local Government Affairs, Jay Dick, put it while speaking at the 2007 Wyoming Arts Summit,

In the past, when we went to do funding for the arts, we said, “fund the arts, it’s good for the soul.” […] That’s true, [but] it doesn’t work anymore. You know, we have to have a business argument for it. So, “fund the arts because it’s good for the soul—and they bring to the jobs to the economy and they bring taxes back into the [government].” That’s what we have to do.

Not everybody, however, is convinced. For one thing, the dual role that AFTA assumes as impartial researcher and impassioned advocate renders the report vulnerable to criticism on the grounds of bias, criticism that the report itself goes to great lengths to counter. Moreover, even assuming the numbers are accurate, thinkers from Tyler Cowen to Greg Sandow have assailed the very concept of economic impact studies and their utility in advocacy discussions. Indeed, when last we paid a visit to the Arts Policy Library, the authors of Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts argued that relying too heavily on economic and other “instrumental” arguments for the arts is a trap, pointing out that that economic impact studies

…receive criticism because most of them do not consider the relative effects of spending on the arts versus other forms of consumption—that is, they fail to consider the opportunity costs of arts spending. Some economists dispute the validity of the multipliers used in economic studies because they assume that spending on the arts represents a net addition to a local economy rather than simply a substitute for other types of spending.

The tension between the two approaches led journalist John Stoehr to set up a kind of debate between the AFTA and RAND texts in a 2007 article for the Savannah Morning News, a debate that in Stoehr’s mind Gifts of the Muse ultimately won.

As always, though, much is lost in a public debate about a study when most of the participants have only read the press release. The full Arts & Economic Prosperity III report contains some 314 pages of findings, facts, and figures, including 27 multipage data tables and one of the most thorough explanations of methodology I’ve ever encountered in a research report. So let’s dive in and find out what Arts & Economic Prosperity III actually has to say about the economic impact of nonprofit arts organizations in the United States.

Summary

The first thing to understand about Arts & Economic Prosperity III is that it is comprised of many studies in one. It makes use of an innovative distributed data-gathering strategy that involved partnerships with organizations and agencies in some 156 study areas across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The study areas included 116 cities and counties, 35 multi-county regions, and five entire states. These 156 partners were tasked with identifying and coding the universe of nonprofit arts organizations in their area, using the Urban Institute’s NTEE codes as a guide; disseminating, collecting, and reviewing organizational expenditure surveys; conducting audience-intercept surveys at a minimum of 18 representative events in the area; and paying a modest cost-sharing fee (though the study authors take care to note that no community was turned away out of inability to pay this fee). The partners collectively produced 6,080 completed organizational surveys¹ and interviewed some 94,478 audience members about their spending over the course of 2004 and 2005.

Americans for the Arts then collected this data and created four sets of numbers with it. First, it tabulated the total organizational expenditures in each community, noting the breakdown of artistic versus administrative versus capital expenses, and calculated the averages for each of six community cohorts based on population size, labeled A-F (0-49,999, 50,000-99,999, 100,000-249,999, 250,000-499,999, 500,000-999,999, and 1 million and up). Second, AFTA tabulated the audience expenditures related to arts events in each community (excluding the cost of admission), and calculated the averages in the same way. Third, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology ran both the organizational and audience expenditure numbers through a sophisticated econometric tool called an input/output model to estimate the cumulative local transactions that those expenditures might cause in each community. Though those results aren’t reported in the study directly, the researchers ran them through another set of models to come up with estimated resident household income, employment figures, and state and local government revenue that could be attributed to the organizational and audience expenditures. Finally, taking the averages for each of the six population groups, AFTA calculated national estimates for all six of the metrics listed above by mapping the averages on to the populations of the 12,662 largest cities in the United States. (Note: only the 116 cities and counties, the smallest unit studied, were used in the calculation of the national estimates.)

The resulting figures will look familiar to anyone who’s read a news story about arts funding lately. Nonprofit arts organizations account for $63.1 billion in organizational spending and $103.1 billion in audience spending nationally, for a total annual industry footprint of $166.2 billion. Collectively, these expenditures support an estimated 5.7 million full-time equivalent jobs, $104.2 billion in annual household income, $7.9 billion in local government revenue, $9.1 billion in state government revenue, and $12.6 billion in federal income tax revenue.

The study reports that the typical attendee forked out $27.79 per event on top of any cost of admission—what the study calls induced spending—on things like meals, refreshments, clothing, lodging, souvenirs, child care, and transportation. As one might expect, the numbers vary dramatically between local and nonlocal attendees (nonlocal defined as traveling from outside the county). Tourists spent more than twice as much on average as residents on event-related items ($40.19 vs. $19.53), the biggest increases coming from single-night lodging (more than tenfold) and transportation (nearly threefold). Tourists also spent 40-50% more on average than residents on meals/refreshments, gifts/souvenirs, and “other.”

Arts & Economic Prosperity III is, as the title implies, the third study in a series. (A fourth is planned for launch next year.) Comparisons to the previous edition, using data collected in 2000, show a growth of 24% in the five years between studies—a rate that sounds impressive at first, but was actually outpaced slightly by growth in overall US GDP during the same period. Twenty-five communities were represented in both the second and third editions of the study; this group grew more than twice as fast as the national estimates.

Some of the most interesting statistics from the study aren’t the ones that usually make it into the press release or the media alerts. For example, the 6,080 participating organizations reported an average of 125 volunteers who donated a mean of 45.3 hours each in a year. That’s a simply astounding level of volunteerism. The total of 191,499 hours is valued at $3.4 million using Independent Sector’s 2007 valuation of volunteer time. Those hours have no economic impact as defined by the study (and are not included in the national estimates of economic activity), but the study authors take care to note that they add much value to artistic communities anyway. In addition, 71% of responding organizations received in-kind support of one kind or another, valued at an average of $47,906 per organization. The largest source of such support was corporations at 61%, with the balance from individuals, local and state government, local arts organizations, and other.

Though not reported in the study text, the audience demographics (Tables 25-27) are worth a look. Women consistently outnumbered men by nearly a 2:1 margin in almost every community. Assuming the survey samples were representative, we can conclude that arts audiences are VERY well-educated (more than 83% reported having a college degree, and fully a third had one or more graduate degrees) as well as quite affluent (30% reported a household income of more than $100,000). More than 80% of audience members are 35 or older. These results tracked quite consistently between urban and rural areas and between residents and tourists, with the exception that audiences tended to be a bit richer and better-educated in big cities.

I also found Table 9 notable for its breakdown of organizational expenditures on artists. In almost all communities, artists themselves get a truly tiny slice of the money that goes to support the nonprofit arts. Their share was only 11% overall, and ranged as low as 7% in the group of the smallest cities and counties. In a few areas, like Lauderdale County, MS and the entirety of Northwest Minnesota, the total amount spent on artists in a year was not even enough to pay one person’s salary.

Analysis

Since there seem to be a number of misperceptions about Arts & Economic Prosperity III in the media and elsewhere, perhaps the most helpful step I can take at the beginning is simply to delineate what the study is and what it is not. I can tell you that Arts & Economic Prosperity III is:

• A serious study. One thing that becomes clear from reading the entire report is that the people behind Arts & Economic Prosperity III invested significant time and care into getting the numbers right. As I mentioned earlier, A&EP III has one of the most comprehensive explanations of methodology I’ve seen in a research study – a full ten pages of information representing one-third of the non-appendix portion of the report. The authors even make a valiant effort to explain the mechanics of input/output analysis, an advanced econometric technique involving matrix algebra and other graduate-level technical sophistications. Time and again, as questions popped into my mind while I was reading along, I would find them answered in the next section or by the end of the report. Wary of any perception of bias on the part of an advocacy organization tasked with making the case for government funding of the arts, researchers took numerous steps to ensure that the final estimates would not be skewed too far in favor of that conclusion. These steps included large decisions with major implications—the country’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, were excluded from individual study in part because of their outlier status among American arts scenes; areas with unusually high economic activity for their population group, like Teton County, WY and Laguna Beach, CA, were excluded from other national estimates—and small details—like the fact that the audience expenditure survey checked to make sure respondents were over 18, or that organizations collected data throughout the year in order to guard against effects of seasonality.
• A legitimate estimate of total annual nonprofit arts organization and event-related audience expenditures in the United States. Even if you find yourself confused or unconvinced by the input/output model, that $166.2 billion number has nothing to do with it. The organization expenditure estimate is a direct extrapolation from the responses of 6,080 survey participants (which is quite a robust sample) based on the populations of the communities in which they operate. There’s nothing mysterious about this part of the study.Likewise, the audience expenditures—which don’t include tickets or admission prices—are extrapolations of the information from 94,478 survey respondents and everyone in their party (so, in actuality, a sample of nearly 300,000). By excluding airfare and more than one night’s worth or lodging, researchers did their best to limit their inquiry to expenditures directly linked to arts events that would mostly be staying in the local area.
• Clear evidence that the arts are a big deal in this country. The core takeaway of Arts & Economic Prosperity III – that “the arts mean business” – is amply demonstrated by the data. $166.2 billion is a lot of money, well more than one-thousand times the direct support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005. The $63.1 billion represented by the organizational expenditures alone is more than the revenue figures for spectator sports, furniture stores, coal mining, or the hunting, fishing, and logging industries combined. And as the authors point out, most industries can’t claim the same kind of “induced” spending—related payments made by consumers to third parties in connection with a core purchase—that the arts can. Even if the numbers aren’t dead on—a possibility I’ll explore in a bit—the point is clear: nonprofit arts organizations play a far more central role in the nation’s economy than commonly believed.

On the other hand, Arts & Economic Prosperity III is not:

• A perfect study. Despite the authors’ seriousness of intent, the study does contain a few errors, idiosyncrasies, and other less than ideal aspects of its construction. These range from embarrassing but ultimately unimportant mistakes like the mislabeling of the audience income demographics in Tables 25-27 (the last column in each table should read “$100,000 or More” instead of “$120,000 or More”) to potentially more significant issues like the inclusion of both Miami and Miami-Dade County among the 116 cities and counties used for the national estimates, which would lead to an over-representation of Miami’s organizations and audiences in the sample. Other issues will be examined when we take a look at the actual numbers.
• A demonstration that the arts cause economic growth. This is perhaps the single most prevalent myth about Arts & Economic Prosperity III and economic impact studies in general, a myth that is in no way dispelled by language like “the nonprofit arts industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year,” that often accompanies the report. Merely counting up the activity associated with the arts in that community doesn’t show that the arts created that activity. Indeed, they easily could have just pointed it in a different direction. If there were no arts, would the audiences who spent $40 to buy dinner across the street have gone hungry instead? Would the office bookkeeper for the local museum not have found another job elsewhere? As I understand it, the arts (or anything else) can cause a net local increase ineconomic activity under traditional definitions essentially in two ways: 1) if they satisfy an unmet need such that people are motivated to spend more money on the arts than they would have spent on other things, thus inducing demand and ultimately driving a higher standard of living; and 2) if they draw money into a community from outside of it. The arts can actually make a pretty decent case for the latter on a local level, thanks to cultural tourism. But once you combine all of those local communities together to make a national estimate, all of those “nonresidents” of your county—with the exception of international travelers—suddenly become residents of the good ol’ USA, and the economic activity associated with the arts is no longer being drawn in from outside the community but merely shifted around within it. As for the first way of creating value, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether and how much that really happens. Essentially, we would need evidence that the same people, on average, are willing to spend more money over the course of a year to attend arts events than they would if there were no arts events to attend. So willing, in fact, that they would take steps in their lives to ensure that they have more money to spend on such things, which (by economic logic) would mean that they would increase their own productivity and value to society, thus making us all better off. No one, to my knowledge, has conducted a study like that, though some researchers have made strides in showing a causal relationship between arts activity and other indicators like housing prices.
• Particularly useful for policy decisions on its own. Let’s say I have some money to give out to improve the city, and I have to decide how to spend it. You come to me and you say, “you should spend that money on nonprofit arts organizations. Nonprofit arts organizations spend a lot of money.” I reply, “umm…okay, that’s interesting.” You go on: “nonprofit arts organizations employ a lot of people.” “So do our pharmaceutical and insurance industries,” I answer. “Should we subsidize them as well?” Finally, you bring out the big guns. “Nonprofit arts organizations produce revenue for your tax base.” “Well, clearly you are already doing a great job of that without my support,” I conclude. “I don’t see a reason why I should give you any.” Do you see how most of these arguments, in a vacuum, are kind of non sequiturs? If one is making an economic argument, policymakers need to know not just what the arts do now but what they can do in the future with an additional investment—their investment. And they need to know how that compares with other potential recipients for that investment. I believe that there are ways to do this, but unfortunately, this particular study is hardly…
• A study of the arts’ “return on investment.” Out of all the report’s assertions, the only one I’d describe as downright false appears right there in the introductory letter on page one—and never again in the report:
  

  Our industry also generates nearly $30 billion in revenue to local, state and federal governments each year. By comparison, the three levels of government collectively spend less than $4 billion annually to support arts and culture—a spectacular 7:1 return on investment that would even thrill Wall Street veterans.

  It’s only a seed, but it’s been enough to sprout numerous other attempts to use this logic (like in this piece from earlier in the month in Miami-Dade County). This much is true—a 7:1 return on investment would indeed thrill Wall Street veterans. It’s too bad the examples aren’t remotely comparable. The $4 billion in government investment and $30 billion in government revenue are two different beasts, apples and oranges. As the report itself tells us, nonprofit arts organizational expenditures total $63.1 billion—which means that the $4 billion coming from the government only accounts for about 6% of this total. Take away that 6%, and you’d still have 94% of those expenditures left—and, presumably, something like 94% of the tax revenues. So, that $4 billion in government investment is really only “responsible” for that last 6%—which turns out to be about $1.9 billion, or considerably less than a 7:1 return (more like 0.5:1, for those keeping count). Now, in fairness, the real story is probably more complex than this—surely the government’s impact is not strictly linear, but makes certain projects possible where none had been before, and communities may be able to leverage that support in other ways. But to realize what a junk statistic this is, think about it this way: if a state, oh, let’s say Pennsylvania, were to get rid of its arts funding entirely, all of the sudden it would be able to claim an infinite return on investment from any arts-related tax or other revenues that come in after that! I’m not sure this is really the line we want to be pushing in these battles.

Now that we understand what A&EP III is trying to do, let’s take a close look at the numbers the researchers actually came up with. I’ll divide these into five categories: the organizational expenditures, the audience expenditures, the volunteer contributions, the input-output model, and the national estimates.

Organizational expenditures

The collection of the organizational expenditure data for each community was probably the simplest aspect of the study, so I think it’s reasonable to assume that, in most areas, the numbers represent decent estimates. A few caveats do apply, however, which I’ve listed with the direction in which they are likely to have skewed the totals (if any):

• First, it worries me a little that the partner organization in each community was given the autonomy to implement the study themselves. While it was probably the key factor in making the scale of the study possible, this distributed approach opens up a number of quality control and consistency issues. For example, who from the organizations was conducting the surveys? Was it senior management? Program staff? Interns? LIKELY IMPACT: UNKNOWN
• The report mentions that the Urban Institute’s NTEE designations were used as a starting point for identifying relevant arts nonprofits in their area. Hopefully, partners would have gone the extra mile to edit those lists, but I can tell you from experience that going by the NTEE codes will tend to result in missed organizations, sometimes important ones, that are coded incorrectly or not at all. LIKELY IMPACT: SKEW LOW
• The study only counted the numbers for organizations that responded to the survey, which means that for communities that saw less than 100% response (which was most of them), there’s almost certainly an undercount. (It also means that communities that had higher response rates were over-represented in the national estimates.) Response rates ranged from 10.4% to 100%, with an average of 41.3%. LIKELY IMPACT: SKEW LOW
• Though responding organizations were asked not to include grants to other arts organizations, any payments to other arts organizations (for example, a presenter paying a nonprofit chamber ensemble, or renting performance space from another nonprofit) could result in double-counting. LIKELY IMPACT: SKEW HIGH
• When you get down to the itemized level, there are some bizarre oddities in the data that, taken together, throw a bit of a shadow on the rest of the numbers. For example, in Table 9, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) arts organizations are shown as spending nearly eight times as much on artists as Philadelphia, despite having only a third of the total expenditures. Similarly, Jefferson County, AL (Birmingham) is shown as spending more than three times as much on artists as Baltimore, despite budgets only 40% the size. LIKELY IMPACT: UNKNOWN

Audience expenditures

A&EP III employed the audience-intercept method for collecting information about audience expenditures, which from what I can gather is similar to the method used for exit polling in national elections. The caution I mentioned above about the autonomy of the partner organizations applies even more strongly to this portion of the study, as administering survey instruments in person is something usually done by professionals. The survey asked audience members not to report expenditures on airfare, presumably because most of that spending would not impact the local community (also because it’s unlikely that most tourists had flown to the area specifically to see that one event, which is the rationale behind counting only one night of lodging). Other notes and caveats include:

• Audience members provided information about their entire party, which might have decreased the reliability of the data since the practice assumes that respondents knew what other people in their party spent. I’d think this would be more likely to result in undercounting (missed purchases) than overcounting. LIKELY IMPACT: SKEW LOW
• Any spending on concessions at the event (e.g., buying a glass of wine in the lobby at intermission) would be double-counted, since that money would become revenue for the organization and eventually show up in its expenditures. I believe the same is true for items bought at museum gift shops. LIKELY IMPACT: SKEW HIGH
• Though audience members were instructed to report lodging expenses for the night of the event only, it’s a bit questionable how attributable some of these expenditures really were to the arts event. For example, if someone bought an outfit to wear that night, does that mean they wouldn’t have bought the same outfit on some other occasion? If someone was in town overnight, does it mean that they were there specifically for that event? LIKELY IMPACT: SKEW HIGH

Volunteer contributions

As mentioned in the previous section, the volunteer hours reported by nonprofit arts organizations are extraordinarily high. According to the study, volunteers supply the labor equivalent of two full-time staff positions to the average arts organization each year. Upon closer examination of the numbers, I couldn’t find any obvious red flags—while there’s some variation, nearly all communities reported a higher level of volunteerism than I would have expected, even when considering the contributions of board members, etc. I can think of only two plausible explanations. One is that organizations must be counting unpaid internships. The other is that some, especially smaller, organizations may be counting uncompensated time put in by founders or artistic/executive directors, which is likely to be substantial in many cases. These are not the kinds of things that normally come to mind when I think of “volunteer work,” but of course that is what they are, so I guess I’m inclined to take the results at face value. The valuation of volunteer time at $3.4 million comes from Independent Sector’s Giving and Volunteering in the United States 2006, which pegs the value of an average volunteer hour at $18.04 in FY05.

Input/output model

As explained by the report, an input/output model consists of “systems of mathematical equations that combine statistical methods and economic theory” that trace “how many times a dollar is respent within the local economy before it leaks out” and quantify “the economic impact of each round of spending.” The ”economic impact” in question is no more and no less than transactions: if I pay you $20 to serve me food, I have increased economic impact by $20 according to this definition. I won’t attempt to recreate the report’s detailed and extremely technical explanation of how the input/output model works; you can read it for yourself if you like. The basic idea is that for each community, a team led by the former chair of the school of economics at Georgia Tech, Bill Schaffer, constructed a matrix of the dollar flow between 533 industries based on data from the Department of Commerce and local tax records. After adjusting to include only local transactions, this table was then simplified to a matrix of purchase patterns of 32 industries plus households. The table was then run through an iterative model that, at each stage, sought to calculate the local requirements in terms of output to make possible the numbers seen in the previous iteration of the table. After a certain number of rounds (I think 12, but it’s a little hard to tell from the description), the numbers are all added up to get the total cumulative transactions made possible by an infusion of the amount of money represented in the organization and audience expenditures.

I don’t really have any complaint with the input/output model itself—it was constructed by a trained professional, and without having access to the actual spreadsheets and models used, there’s no way for me to verify its conclusions independently. The main issue is more conceptual: namely, that the model takes for granted that all of the money coming in as a result of organizational and audience expenditures is new money, money that would not have been available to the community otherwise. But of course this isn’t true: if people weren’t working as or for artists, and going out to see arts events, they’d probably be doing something else that would involve money—quite possibly more money than there is in the arts, given the high education levels of many in the field. One way to deal with this, at least on a local level, would be to simply exclude the spending of residents, figuring that what we care about is new money brought into the community by those outside of it. This methodology would break down significantly at the level of a national estimate, however. Perhaps this is why the study authors admit,

…as in any professional field, there is disagreement about procedures, jargon, and the best way to determine results. Ask 12 artists to define art and you will get 24 answers; expect the same of economists. You may meet an economist who believes that these studies should be done differently (for example, a cost-benefit analysis of the arts).

Indeed, I would have been very interested to see the results of a cost-benefit analysis, as it would seem to me to be a more relevant measure of the value of public investment in the arts. However, the input/output model is what we have, and so it is up to us to understand properly what it means. As with the expenditure totals, the impacts on things like employment, household income, and tax revenue are associations rather than causal links. The arts may account for 5.7 million jobs nationally, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve added 5.7 million jobs to the economy that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

National estimates

At first glance, one would assume that the national estimates of organizational and audience expenditures are almost certainly skewed low. As mentioned earlier, the study leaves out specific estimates for our nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, instead assigning them the averages for the 1-million-and-up population group. This decision was made, according to AFTA’s Senior Director of Research Services, Ben Davidson, thanks in part to cost considerations as well as a desire to avoid overinflating the national totals. By how much does this downplay the overall national estimates of economic activity? Well, the average for the Group F (population 1,000,000+) bucket of cities and counties is $408 million in total expenditures by organizations and audiences. Two estimates for organizational expenditures alone are $5.8 billion for NYC and $1.5 billion for LA; assuming a similar spread on the audience side, we’re probably looking at a gap in the ballpark of $13 billion caused by not measuring those two cities directly. Furthermore, an untold amount of activity is left out because the study tabulated spending figures and estimated audience totals only from organizations that responded to the survey. One would hope that the most significant organizations in each community were more often than not in the responding column, but even so it’s likely that a fair amount of economic activity in the 156 study regions simply was not counted.

Despite the factors mentioned above, I think that there remains a pretty compelling reason to think that the national estimates are actually overinflated after all. The reason is simple, but easily missed. It is selection bias among the 156 study regions—and specifically, among the 15 communities in the smallest population category, that of cities and counties containing fewer than 50,000 people.

Think about it this way: in order to participate in the study, a community needed to have a nonprofit organization or government agency with the following attributes: a) a programmatic focus on the arts (preferably exclusively on the arts); b) the staff capacity, expertise, and interest to manage a research project that involved identifying and surveying all of the nonprofit arts organizations in their area and conducting in-person audience surveys at a minimum of 18 events throughout the year; and c) the financial capacity to participate in AFTA’s cost-sharing fee (note: though this fee was supposedly waived for any partners that couldn’t afford to pay it, it’s unclear to what extent partners who didn’t take the time to ask were aware that this was an option—the call for participants for Arts & Economic Prosperity IV, for example, does not mention the fee waiver.)

Out of the thousands of cities and counties in the United States with populations of less than 50,000, how many of them do you think meet these criteria? Do you think that there might be some important differences between the ones that did and chose to participate in the study versus the ones that didn’t? Like, for example, a LOT more arts organizations and arts spending?

Luckily, Arts & Economic Prosperity III studied a few different kinds of regions, including entire states, making some interesting comparative analysis possible. I put together a table below with the average economic activity per capita for each of the six population subgroups for the cities and counties, as well as the average for the 35 multi-county regions and the estimates for each of the five states studied. First, looking at the different population subgroups, rather than per-capita spending going down as populations get smaller and more spread-out as one might expect, there’s a big jump in both organization and audience expenditures from group B (50,000-99,999) to group A (under 50,000). More interesting, however, is the comparison between the cities and counties and the multi-county regions, and especially the entire states. A statewide count would not suffer from the selection bias discussed here: instead, it would incorporate urban and rural areas in proportions not all that dissimilar from the rest of the country. Similarly, some of the multi-county regions studied occupy large swaths of land, and their arts organizations could pool their resources to meet the requirements for participation in the study.

The average expenditures in the smallest city and county population group are absolutely off the charts. Group A cities’ and counties’ arts organizations spent nearly two and a half times as much per capita as the regional average and more than three times as much as the statewide average. Their audiences spent more than five times as much as the statewide average.² It’s not just group A, though—all of the city and county subgroups have per capita expenditures higher than those for the regions and states. In fact, the highest average for a state in the study was lower than the lowest average for a city/county subgroup. That’s not random. That’s selection bias.

So what happens when your national estimate is based on the city and county averages in Groups A-F (and especially sky-high group A) rather than the lower regional and statewide averages? Remember, the estimate is based on the populations of the 12,662 largest cities in the US—all the ones with populations of at least 500, according to Davidson—and more than 90% of those cities would have been in Group A.

Well, we can do a little exercise to sense-check the numbers. The total nonprofit arts organization expenditures nationally should be roughly equal to total arts organization revenues. I checked the Giving USA statistics for arts and culture, which include contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations but not government support or earned income, and got an estimate of about $12 billion for 2006. Then I checked data from the National and Local Profiles of Cultural Support study that looked at the typical breakdown of income sources for nonprofit arts organizations and pegged the contribution of private donations from individuals, foundations, and corporations at 25% as of 1998. So if $12 billion accounts for 25% of arts organizations’ budgets, their total budgets should be around $48 billion—not outrageously off, but nevertheless only about three-quarters of AFTA’s $63.1 billion estimate. And 25% was the lowest estimate I found on the web of private contributions to nonprofit arts budgets. Now, this is not conclusive–it’s certainly possible that Giving USA itself undercounts the revenues of nonprofit arts organizations and foundation contributions. And maybe the breakdown of income sources was dramatically different in 2005 for whatever reason. But given the information we have, I think it’s fair to assume that AFTA’s expenditure numbers are probably not that conservative after all.³

Implications

So is Jay Dick right that we need “a business argument” for the arts? I think he is, and I think Arts & Economic Prosperity III is helpful in that regard—to an extent.

As I read Arts & Economic Prosperity III, I found myself coming back again and again to the theme of language. A&EP III is a serious study, one worthy of our attention and use for advocacy and research purposes. However, some of its potential impact is undermined by the hyperbolic language with which it is often presented to the press and politicians. The first several pages of the report are cluttered with spurious or misleading statistics and graphs that distract from the more strongly supported of the study’s findings. For example, on page seven there’s a graph that shows “jobs supported by nonprofit arts” apparently outnumbering several categories of specific professions, including lawyers, farmers, and computer programmers. Of course, there’s a crucial difference: the arts number includes all jobs supported by the industry (according to the study’s calculations–so, not just artists and arts organization employees but people at Staples, Guitar Center, etc.), rather than jobs in specific professions. Any of those industries—software, legal, agriculture—could likely draw up a similar graph to make itself look good. Or take the consistent use of the word “generates” when talking about the economic transactions associated with arts organizations and audiences, which clearly implies a causal connection that has not been shown to exist. There is a whole section entitled “Nonprofit Arts & Culture: A Growth Industry” that conveniently downplays the fact that the arts grew at rate slower than overall GDP between this study and the last one. And then there’s that bogus 7:1 “return on investment” figure that we dissected earlier. These overreaches ultimately provide fuel to the economic impact naysayers such as Cowen and Sandow, and may only encourage those with an axe to grind against the arts to sharpen their instruments.

That’s a shame, because I think there is a real case to be made for the economic impact of the arts. As we’ve seen in several smaller studies that focused on particular geographic areas, there seems to be strong evidence for a causal relationship between the density and proximity of arts providers today and growth in local real estate prices tomorrow. That, pure and simple, is economic impact right there. Furthermore, though I’ve spent much of this article talking about substitution effects and pooh-poohing the notion that all of the spending associated with the arts represents spending that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, it would be equally foolish to assert that none of that spending represents new value being created, either through bringing money into the area via cultural tourism or improving quality of life such that people are willing to spend more than they would have otherwise.⁴ Even if the arts turn out not to be the absolute most surefire way to spur economic development in local communities in all cases, I think we can assume that they often represent one component of a successful growth strategy. And certainly we can argue with a clear conscience that the arts support real jobs, that they play a much bigger role in the economy than commonly assumed, and that public subsidization for the arts is not the same thing as a giveaway.

For the fourth edition of Arts & Economic Prosperity, which is in its planning stages right now, I hope Americans for the Arts will take advantage of its strong local partnerships and infrastructure to help fill in some of the gaps in what we know. The building blocks for causal analysis are already there. In fact, the audience questionnaire for A&EP III did ask audience members the reason why they were in town that evening, and one of the options was “I am here specifically to attend this arts event.” Alas, this information never found it into the data tables or the report itself. Another question on the survey could ask audience members what they would have done with their time and money instead that afternoon or evening if they had not attended the event. Even though this wouldn’t be the most reliable data in the world due to its reliance on self-reports of hypothetical situations, it would nevertheless get us a step closer to an understanding of the true economic impact of arts events. Finally, at the organization level, it seems obvious that government investment in the arts must have some return, we just have to be careful about attributing outcomes to it that would have happened anyway. So why not ask organizations where they would make cuts if deprived of government funds as part of the expenditure survey? If you really wanted to go nuts with it, you could literally ask them to submit a revised budget that doesn’t include government support and see what they end up cutting. This last approach, needless to say, would be difficult to pull off, but one wouldn’t need to do it everywhere to get some idea of what the overall picture would tell you. A few sample communities might be sufficient as a pilot.

We should be grateful to Americans for the Arts for investing as much time, capital, and seriousness of purpose into this research as it has. While there are a number of paths open for improvement of this work, the foundation upon which those improvements would be laid is solid. I look forward to finding out what Arts & Economic Prosperity IV will have in store for us.

¹Since the study focused on nonprofit arts organizations, spending by for-profit creative firms and industries was excluded, as was any spending by individual artists. However, government-sponsored arts councils and presenting facilities were part of the study, and so were select programs embedded within non-arts organizations, such as university presenters.

²In fairness, the authors did exclude Laguna Beach, CA from the organizational expenditures and Teton County, WY from the audience expenditures when calculating the national estimates. However, even with this precaution in place, the averages still compute to $210.76 and $251.93 respectively–far above the next-highest number in each category.

³Part of the problem, really, is that organizational and especially audience expenditures just aren’t that strongly correlated with population. Looking at the data tables, one sees huge variances in nonresident spending totals between cities in the same category, like Miami Beach ($72.2 million) vs. Lauderdale County, MS ($502k), or Philadelphia County ($565 million) vs. Suffolk County, NY ($5.7 million). I’m guessing there are a lot more Lauderdale Counties in this country than Miami Beaches. (Indeed, according to Davidson, this is the reason why the cities with a population of less than 500 were not included in the estimates.) If it were possible to extrapolate the national estimates using local estimates of economic activity rather than population size, this approach might yield a more reliable result.

⁴While this study documents attendance at arts events by nonresidents, it does not do much to show that their travel plans were dictated by those events. However, it does point us to resources that go farther: a 2001 study by Travel Industry Association of America and Partners in Tourism found that 65% of adult travelers attended an arts and culture event while on trip 50+ miles away from home, and that 32% of these (i.e., about 20% total) stayed longer because of event. And of those that stayed longer, 57% (or about 11% of all travelers) extended their trips by one of more nights. So we can infer from this that arts and culture events were directly responsible for one or more nights of lodging expenses for approximately 11% of adult long-range travelers in 2001.

• The IRS has proposed a new Form 1023-EZ, which would allow some smaller organizations to apply for tax-exempt status with much less hassle. The National Association of State Charity Officials has objected out of a belief that completing the longer form is an important educational experience and a fear that applications could skyrocket.
• A report from the R Street Institute argues that copyright terms, which have ballooned while patent terms have barely inflated, are so long that they are not only stifling to creativity but actually unconstitutional.
• With the recent passing of Cornelius Gurlitt, hoarder of over 1,000 works of art suspected to be looted from Nazis, the official investigation into the provenance of the artworks in his collection ended. Unexpectedly, Gurlitt bequeathed his trove to the Kunstmuseum Bern, reopening legal and ethical questions surrounding the new acquisitions.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• MacArthur President Robert L. Gallucci will step down when his term expires on July 1. Julia Stasch, VP for US programs, will act as interim president while the board searches for a replacement.
• Jarl Mohn, chairman of Southern California Public Media and former MTV executive, is the new head of National Public Radio. Mr. Mohn has the enviable charge of pulling NPR out of its deficit, sowing harmony among member stations, and figuring out how to fundraise in the post-pledge drive era.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Knight Foundation has awarded Theaster Gates $3.5 million to transform an office space on the south side of Chicago into an incubator “where neighborhood residents will come together with artists, designers and urban planners to work on revitalization projects through art.”
• Reflecting on the Hewlett Foundation’s recent announcement of the end of its Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative, Tony Proscio wonders whether the funder pulled the plug too soon. Meanwhile, in another frank self-assessment, Hewlett undertook a field scan of evaluation spending and found room for improvement in its own practice, particularly regarding embedding evaluation strategies in the early life of programs. As a result, the foundation plans to up its evaluation spending from roughly 1.2 percent to 2.3 of its overall grant budget.
• Bad news for “cultured professionals” looking to buy art at auctions: the average price for fine art has doubled over just four years, leaving many to settle on prints. And in other art market news, between 2012 and 2013 online art purchases increased 83 percent. Total sales have finally exceeded $1 billion.
• Angie Kim summarizes the origins and history of the 5 percent payout rule for foundations and argues a variable payout rate, based on a foundation’s performance over 25 years, would better ensure that foundations’ wealth does not grow disproportionately to their support of the greater good.

IN THE FIELD

• The San Diego Opera’s financial situation is looking up: in the last two weeks, the organization has raised more than $1 million through a crowdfunding campaign and received a $500,000 matching gift challenge – although, in the other column, the city is expected to cut its funding for the opera by $223,000. The Opera’s new board leadership’s desire to save the company now has the vocal support of the members of the San Diego Opera Association and the solo singers’ union. They aren’t out of the woods yet, though, since a 2015 season will still require about $2.7 million in additional funds.
• After seven years, the Seattle Dance Project is shutting down as artistic director Timothy Lynch moves to Ohio’s BalletMet. And the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra‘s next season will be its last after over 100 years of performances in Wisconsin.
• Say what? The Colorado Symphony Orchestra will host a series of bring-your-own marijuana events in collaboration with Edible Events, a pro-pot company, as a way to be more inclusive and raise money for the orchestra.
• We have no idea how much Comcast and Verizon are charging Netflix for more direct access to users’ homes – and that’s not a good thing.
• Some remarkable numbers from the academic field about the extent to which hiring for administrators has outpaced the hiring of professors. A similar dynamic to arts organizations, perhaps?

BIG IDEAS

• As Piketty-mania continues to drive interest in income inequality, a comparison of the prices of various goods in the United States over the last ten years yields grim insights about its effects. While the cost of education and health care — i.e. services that can’t be outsourced — has risen dramatically, the cost of electronics, clothing, and other personal goods has fallen. One commentator sums things up nicely: “Prices are rising on the very things that are essential to climb out of poverty.”
• Mania being what it is, it’s not surprising that some conversations about income inequality have taken an interesting turn, suggesting that the widening gap between rich and poor may be good for artists. As at least one author has pointed out, that argument fails to demonstrate that the arts are “more dynamic under high inequality than… under conditions of low inequality,” and even if great art has been produced in awful social conditions, that by no means justifies those conditions. Add to that mix confusion about the difference between rising wealth creation and wealth inequality, and you’ve got a growing debate on your hands.
• Design methodology is increasingly used to solve unwieldy social problems at a policy level in the European Union, but the US has been slow to catch on. The National Endowment for the Arts contracted the Design Council to organize a webinar addressing how to use design “to create public services around the people who use them, to introduce new methods into the civil service skill set, and as a tool to aid the process of public policy development” as part of the Learning from Abroad series.
• The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has launched Philamplify, a collection of in-depth assessments of the top foundations in the country. Assessments of the Lumina Foundation for Education, William Penn Foundation, and Robert W. Woodruff Foundation are included at the moment, though the site plans to add about one hundred more within the next few months. Website visitors can indicate whether they agree with Philamplify’s recommendations for the foundations and add comments.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Arts marketing specialists LaPlaca Cohen released the sixth edition of their CultureTrack report on participation in cultural events and held a panel discussion about it. The report characterizes American audiences as promiscuous (we range across media) and social (we hate to go alone, and personal recommendations and invitations are among the main drivers of participation). The verdict on attendance is mixed: more people are attending museums, musical theater, and classical music each year (though not straight plays, theater, or opera), but overall they are going less often.
• A new study by researchers at the London School of Economics concludes that engaging in the arts makes people happy – as happy as if you paid them $100-150 per month. Michael Rushton, as is his wont, argues caution.
• The NEA has an update on three current projects that aim to support continuous learning in the field: 1) an assessment of the artistic excellence of grantees’ work products, 2) a pilot survey of grantee organizations’ audiences, meant to measure the extent to which they were engaged and moved by arts experiences, 3) a new evaluation by the Urban Institute of the the NEA’s Arts & Livability Indicators.
• inBloom, a massive educational data collection effort supported by the Gates Foundation, is shutting down following mounting concerns voiced by parents regarding their children’s privacy. Besides serving as a cautionary tale of how philanthropic efforts can stumble when they lack appropriate buy-in, the example may portend a backlash against collecting data on children — and arts audiences of all types.
• Of 7,000 Victorian novels, only a few dozen are read today. How does an author pass the test of time? Salon interviews cultural historian Franco Moretti, who uses big data to analyze bad books.
• Speaking of not getting read today, do you ever feel like posting reports online is adding to a virtual wasteland of PDFs that will never be opened? You’re probably right. The World Bank decided to test that feeling by running analytics on its website and discovered that a whopping one-third of its research reports have never, ever been downloaded. Only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times.

ETC.

• Positive reviews on sites like Yelp and Amazon translate into real money for businesses – even though as many as a third of reviewers may be fake and the real ones may not be representative of customers.
• The Gray Lady suddenly appears to find itself in the business of hiring actors, thanks to a new “Verbatim” series that features “recreations of actual events from the halls of law and government” by “transform[ing]… legal transcripts into dramatic, and often comedic performances.” The first one comes courtesy of a 2010 lawsuit involving photocopying public records. It has to be seen to be believed.

• And, we try again: as expected, the FCC is proposing new net neutrality rules. They are similar to the previous rules, which were recently invalidated by a federal court, but depend on a different legal rationale. Those who are concerned the rules (old and new) do not go far enough to protect content creators they have their chance to persuade the Commission – the public comment period has just opened.
• Even as the Detroit Institute of Arts contemplates privatization, the private Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC is planning to cede most of its collection of 17,000 artworks to the National Gallery of Art and other museums across the country. The move, following years of financial crisis, would also see the Corcoran’s building and College of Art and Design taken over by George Washington University.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• The Marin Community Foundation has named Larry Best to the business-card-bending position of Program Director for Arts & Culture, and Social Justice & Interfaith Understanding. His predecessor, Shirin Vakharia, has become Program Director for Community Health and Aging.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Boston-based Barr Foundation has joined the ArtPlace America coalition, bringing 2014 commitments to $28 million – just in time for Artplace’s announcement of this round’s finalists.
• Continuing the trend toward transparency in artist earnings, cellist Zoë Keating has shared a breakdown of all her income from music sales and streams in 2013. Of the $75,341 she made, 92% was from sales; a single track bought on iTunes was worth 160 Spotify streams, which was in turn worth seven YouTube streams.

IN THE FIELD

• Heads up to the country folk: a new rural arts blog salon and webinar series put on by Americans for the Arts shines light on how rural communities can and have used the arts for economic growth.
• The art world was abuzz recently with the news of an artist/vandal who destroyed a work by Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei in the middle of a museum – mimicking Ai’s own actions in photographs posted in the gallery. Are Maximo Carminero’s actions a harbinger of participatory disaster? Nina Simon weighs in on how to bring clarity to the messy transition towards museums as “living” institutions.
• For those prone to screw up targeted marketing, NewMusicBox breaks down how not to become the Abercrombie and Fitch of music.

BIG IDEAS

• The Dallas Museum of Art’s unusual membership program, instituted in January 2013, provides free membership to individuals willing to let the museum track their activities as they enter and explore the galleries, offering points and rewards along the way. In addition to reducing barriers to joining, it has given museum leadership valuable insight into visitor behavior. The information is then used to attract new donors. So far, it seems to have worked out well for everyone involved; is this the future of memberships?
• In an interview, Deeksha Gaur, Director of PR and Marketing at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in DC, talks about the digital audience engagement innovations that have been called “a glimpse at the theater of the future.”
• Grant panels meet American Idol? Back in 2013, the Arizona Commission on the Arts shook up its grantmaking by identifying and supporting arts-based entrepreneurial ventures via an “Art Tank” competition in which applicants had six-minutes to “pitch” their proposals to experts and a live audience. Executive Director Bob Booker offers interesting reflections on the process. Meanwhile, Barry Hessenius considers what might happen if arts funders acted more like venture capitalists: more active involvement with grantees beyond funding, and greater weight on leadership in evaluating proposals.
• Writing the next great American novel? Consider finishing it on a train. Amtrak, in a move that’s left authors everywhere drooling, quietly launched a residency program that allows writers to travel its long-distance rail routes for free while working. While undoubtedly cool, the initiative has caused some to wonder whether the resident writers have an obligation, explicit or implied, to make sure Amtrak benefits from the arrangement.

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

• Registration for “Creativity and Innovation in Public Education,” this year’s Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF) Cultural Symposium, is full – but the event will be livestreamed on March 4. E-participation is free.
• Anupama Sekhar offers a personal account of her experience at January’s 6th World Summit on Arts & Culture in Santiago, Chile.

RESEARCH CORNER

• In the latest study about the streaming music service Spotify, Music Machine looks at musical preferences by state.

ETC.

• Seeking an opportunity to relax, kick back, “hear and think about what is heard”? Join the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (yes, it exists) at a three-day symposium in Portugal. If you’re already of the acoustically ecological persuasion, consider submitting a presentation or artwork on anything from noise control policies to “the study of soundscapes as social and political intervention.” Proposals are due March 15.

Vault photo by Ostrograd

(Please enjoy this guest post from Yvonne Lee, a recent UCLA MLIS graduate and information professional specializing in cultural data research. -IDM)

In late July, the National Endowment for the Arts quietly issued a request for proposals for a national arts data repository to serve as a clearing house for “high-quality datasets with arts variables.” Given my experience as a data geek, this news seemed like Christmas in July. I started daydreaming about accessing flawlessly documented datasets (perfect codebooks! detailed workflows and logbooks!) and having a dedicated repository where I could store and share all of the data from my own projects. Most of all, I thought about how this archive might transform our sector.

Many hopes sprang to mind. A one-stop shop for longitudinal and reliable datasets could change how arts researchers document, publish, share, verify, and re-use data, and have implications for policymakers, practitioners, and administrators. For one, we could deepen the current dialogue(s) on arts research and cultural vibrancy indicators to examine their utility and comprehensiveness. This in turn could help the sector develop better frameworks to define arts and culture and more transparent benchmarks for measuring the health and vitality of the arts sector. While several arts and cultural indicator projects like the Urban Institute’s Arts and Culture Indicators Project or ArtPlace’s Vibrancy Indicators utilize widely available datasets, crucial segments of the data and documentation—like the actual methodology used to derive cell phone activity for ArtPlace’s Vibrancy Indicators—are not available for wide consumption. A popular adage in the sciences is to “trust, but verify” research results. Should the arts be any different? If a critical mass of datasets and supporting documentation is included in the NEA’s repository and accessed for re-use, researchers might communicate more openly and make strides toward building a shared framework for how we understand the arts.

Still, as excited as I was, my experience with arts-related datasets has taught me that working with data archives is never rarely as simple as we’d like it to be. In my past role as a data curation consultant, I researched and advised how best to document, select, publish, and deposit research data for potential re-use on behalf of various stakeholders in the arts and humanities. As part of a digital humanities project called Visualizing Statues, I investigated research methods to develop a digital management plan (DMP), a process that is now required for all NEA and NEH research grants. The questions that came up were manifold and pretty universal to the arts and humanities sector—how to properly cite datasets, for example, or how to migrate proprietary file formats so that others could access datasets without using soon-obsolete software. One of the biggest of these questions was what constituted arts research data. The Visualizing Statues project used the National Science Board (NSB)’s Long-Lived Digital Data Collections definition of data as “any information…including text, numbers, images, video or movies.” This definition is a standard among data curators. Its chief advantage is that it provides a springboard for researchers to consider data as something with a wide and changing scope rather than something static. On the other hand, the definition is so broad that it makes articulating the exact provenance of datasets difficult as they change hands from “raw” to normalized and cleaned. In Visualizing Statues, “the data” included everything from photographs to geocoordinates to ArcGIS code to epigraphic documents in TEI XML. Citing the different types and versions of data became a major issue when it came time to select a data archive, as some have policies that are unfriendly to such a heterogeneous mix of formats.

Despite concerns over version control and the wide scope of data in Visualizing Statues, the good news was that the project reflected a trend toward data sharing and access in the arts and humanities. Our researchers uniformly expressed willingness to share and deposit their data in an archive. We were also able to access others’ research data in conjunction with this project, though all of it came directly from the principal investigators’ colleagues. This is pretty typical; in general, access to arts-related datasets varies greatly. Anyone can search for and download files from wide-access or public datasets like the NEA’s Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics, but to access datasets from smaller projects, which typically are not publicly funded and rely on third-party consultants, interpersonal connections are often required. Even having friends in high places won’t work for everyone, as some datasets are kept for internal or highly restricted use. Given these roadblocks, arts researchers are often forced to or unknowingly duplicate efforts using precious project resources. The ability to inventory and access current and past datasets will let us better understand the scope of research in the sector while encouraging collaboration between researchers, and keeping past research data relevant.

Certain data archives and collection initiatives in the sector are already trying to address issues of access. Princeton’s Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive (CPANDA), which has been around since 2001, seems an obvious choice for depositing and retrieving arts-related datasets. CPANDA describes itself as the “world’s first interactive digital archive of policy-relevant data on the arts and cultural policy in the United States.” However, its site is like a digital ghost town, with its most recent dataset dated 2011. One reason for CPANDA’s disuse may be the rigidly hierarchical format of its finding aids and directories. Researchers can conduct a simple search of terms used in survey questions or browse by the title or subject of a study, making searches difficult unless the researcher knows exactly what he or she is looking for. Say, for example, that you are a researcher looking for past surveys on how Americans have spent their leisure time since 2008. You could type “American Time Use” in the search bar and retrieve a list of survey questions with the terms American, time, and use in them. Or, you could browse by title, assuming you have a specific study in mind. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.

The Cultural Data Project (CDP), another seemingly obvious choice, is not an archive per se as much as a longitudinal collection of participating members’ financial data. The CDP was first launched in 2004 and states that it is “the emerging national standard for data collection in the arts and cultural sector.” However, the CDP requires data deposits use the CDP’s data collection instrument (the Data Profile) which collects narrowly but deeply on financial and programming data. Unfortunately, access to CDP’s rich datasets is neither public nor wide, and researchers not otherwise affiliated with CDP or its participating members may find their request for CDP data denied.

More recently, Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts and Cox School of Business announced a collaboration with CDP and others on a National Center for Arts Research (NCAR) that “will analyze the largest database of arts research ever assembled.” This “hub for critical [arts research] data” may be more in line with the NEA’s RFP than CPANDA or CDP’s efforts, though whether it will provide wide or public access to its data is unclear. The Center’s focus will be “analysis, insights, and enablement” while data gathering will be on an ad-hoc basis. While NCAR released an introduction to its inaugural report in early December, it’s too soon to tell whether it will yield viable datasets for arts researchers. In the meantime, we have a clear and timely need for an arts data archive that utilizes relevant analysis tools, regularly maintains its datasets, is simple to navigate, and allows users to easily deposit and download data.

Fortunately, the NEA solicitation addresses some of these needs. It specifies that the NEA is seeking “a contractor who has an established data archiving infrastructure and the capacity to create, maintain, update, and expand an archive of datasets, metadata, and links to related literature.” This means that not only the reports, tables, figures, codebooks, and appendices affiliated with the data will be available to the public, but (huzzah!) the actual data as well. Very importantly, the NEA’s proposal states that researchers using the repository should have access to enough resources within it to be able to verify or replicate the data. The standard of replicability is virtually unheard of in arts research, in large part because of our reliance on qualitative research methods. Requiring it for datasets deposited in this archive would go far toward ameliorating some of the trust issues with arts research that then NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett referred to in an interview with Barry Hessenius earlier this year:

I think we generally have a research and data problem in the arts. Our data sets are often not as robust, and our research is not always seen as being as rigorous as other sectors.

In addition, the NEA proposal asks the consultant do the following to ensure a successful deployment and implementation of the data archive:

• Design and develop a website to serve as a discipline-specific archive that stores arts-related datasets, metadata, and references to literature (or citations) that use the datasets
• Acquire and process art-related datasets, metadata, and links to literature currently housed at CPANDA
• Update, maintain, and add to this new archive of arts-related data for a base period of one year
• Communicate the mission of the archive to the public

It seems straightforward enough: if you create a data archive with accurate research documentation, citation tracking, and simple methods for inputting and retrieving data, provide technical assistance on how to use the repository, and alert stakeholders, it should be in high demand. However, the repository will still have challenges ahead, in no small part because of the sector it intends to serve. While I don’t believe that the arts sector is inherently antagonistic to data, I do think there will be some steep learning curves for the community at large (exemplified by the Archive and Data Management Training Center’s hilarious “The five stages to data sharing” based on the Kübler-Ross model of grieving). Despite early calls for an arts database by Alvin Toffler and others, the level of data literacy in the arts sector is low. Even if researchers share their datasets more consistently, there’s still the issue of whether others will feel compelled to (re)use them. While Createquity along with WESTAF’s Barry’s Blog, LinkedIn’s Digital Curation Group, and various ArtsJournal blogs address issues of research and data literacy, the discussion still needs to reach a wider audience in the arts.

As of publication, the NEA has not yet announced the awardee of the data archiving contract, though a source there indicated the agency would “have something to say soon.” Although I am more skeptical now than I was in late July, I am cautiously optimistic that the creation of the arts data archive along with the NEA and NEH’s Digital Management Plan requirements will further data sharing and access in the sector. Although the growing pains are still evident, these measures should stimulate the arts community’s interest in data and collaborative research, and will hopefully thereby cultivate a better understanding of the nature of human creative endeavor. As stated by the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences:

We have remarkable opportunities to bring new analytic and interpretive power to bear on the materials and the methods of the humanities and the social sciences; by so doing, we can advance our understanding of human cultures past, present, and future. In the process, however, [stakeholders] will also have to re-examine their own . . . culture, rethinking its outward forms, its established practices, and its apparent assumptions.

For the arts, this emerging path may be tumultuous, but indicates great promise.

(Acknowledgments to Christine L. Borgman and Laura A. Wynholds’ s bibliography on “Data, Data Practices, and Data Curation.”)

“I want change” by m.a.r.c.

Toward the end of the summer, bioethicist Peter Singer raised the hackles of art lovers everywhere with a New York Times op-ed that considered a hypothetical dilemma: should you donate to a charity that combats blindness in the developing world or should you spend that money instead on an art museum? After running through a cost-benefit analysis of each option, he determined that the charity addressing blindness “offers [donors] at least 10 times the value” of the museum.

Ouch.

To no one’s surprise, the arts community didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat for the piece, calling Singer’s argument “a shocker,” “absurd,” and “tyrannical.” Another round of alarm ensued recently when none other than megaphilanthropist Bill Gates threw his support behind Singer’s thesis. The responses from our field to date have generally coalesced around two broad counter-arguments:

•  Why does it have to be “either/or”? Why can’t we support both? Singer forces a false choice in “assuming charitable giving is a zero sum game.” Weighing the value of saving a life against the value of donating to an art museum is comparing apples to oranges when “both are essential, and if either disappeared you’d be in bad shape.” We need a holistic approach to ensure we don’t “solv[e] Third World crises at the expense of fostering crises right here at home.” Just as we have “multiple passions in [our] lives,” donors can and should target multiple causes and direct their charitable dollars in a “proportionally prioritized” manner. Anyway, we can’t really be sure than curing blindness is more important than inspiring the next Jackson Pollock, and even if we were, concentrating all our resources with one or two tried and true nonprofits runs counter to the “messiness and power of America’s [decentralized] approach to charity.”

• Saving lives is all fine and good – but only if those lives have meaning. If we’re so concerned with making sure that people can see, shouldn’t we also try to make sure they have beautiful things to look at? Singer’s logic is dangerous because he fails to acknowledge the “creative outlet[s] and emotional oas[e]s that only art museum[s] can provide.” If all philanthropic dollars were channeled toward alleviating disease and poverty, arts and culture would languish, society would become monochromatic and dull, and life would cease to be worth living.

As satisfying as these rebuttals may feel to arts advocates, they unfortunately miss the point. The crucial assumptions behind Singer’s argument are that

1. “there are objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more good in one [sector] than in another,” and
2. we have a moral obligation to make choices that do as much good as possible.

It’s important to understand this perspective in the context of “effective altruism,” a relatively nascent but growing area of applied ethics that has been featured more than once on this blog, not to mention a recent edition of This American Life. Besides Gates, fellow philanthropic heavyweight and past Hewlett Foundation President Paul Brest has declared himself a fan. “Effective altruists,” or EAs, are on a quest to “do good” by way of hard-nosed rationality. “Doing good” doesn’t mean recycling a little more, or occasionally doling out spare change to a beggar on the street. It doesn’t mean foregoing a high-powered corporate career to work for a nonprofit. It means taking the time to analyze how to do the most amount of good possible with the resources available – or, to use a more nerdy turn of phrase, to “[use] science and rational decision-making to help as many sentient beings” as they can.

Most funders are already in search of a big “bang for your buck,” but in trying to identify the objectively best causes to support, effective altruists stray from the conventional wisdom of mainstream philanthropy. EAs cast a global net when determining where to focus, and often settle on supporting causes in faraway parts of the world, the results of which they may never see in person. They also believe that while human lives are created equal, philanthropic causes are not. Those causes that can save or improve the most lives must take first priority.

How does this play out in practice? Let’s say you donate to the free medical clinic in your area. You do this for good reasons: you care about inequities in the American healthcare system, and want to give back to your community. You like the feeling you get when you walk by that clinic every day. Maybe you even know people who benefit from the services the clinic provides. The clinic gets its donation, and you get warm fuzzies. Everybody wins. Right?

Not so, an EA would counter. Despite your good intentions, your donation amounts to a near-waste of resources:

We understand the sentiment that ‘charity starts at home,’ and we used to agree with it, until we learned just how different U.S. charity is from charity aimed at the poorest people in the world. Helping people in the U.S. usually involves tackling extremely complex, poorly understood problems… In the poorest parts of the world, people suffer from very different problems…

We estimate that it costs [Givewell’s] top-rated international charity less than $2,500 to save a human life… Compare that with even the best U.S. programs… over $10,000 per child served, and their impact is encouraging but not overwhelming.

EAs advocate making evidence-based decisions even if they don’t resonate on an emotional or intuitive level:

Effective altruism is consistent with believing that giving benefits the giver, but it’s not consistent with making this the driving goal of giving. Effective altruists often take pride in their willingness to give (either time or money) based on arguments that others might find too intellectual or abstract, and their refusal to give suboptimally even when a pitch is emotionally compelling. The primary/driving goal is to help others, not to feel good about oneself.

If this approach leaves you with an empty feeling in the back of your throat, it is by design. “Opportunity costs” – the costs of choosing not to behave in a certain way – weigh heavily on EAs. Every time you make a donation, considering where your money could have gone is as important as considering where it will ultimately go (emphasis mine):

In the “Buy A Brushstroke” campaign, eleven thousand British donors gave a total of £550,000 to keep the famous painting “Blue Rigi” in a UK museum. If they had given that £550,000 to buy better sanitation systems in African villages instead, the latest statistics suggest it would have saved the lives of about one thousand two hundred people from disease…  Most of those 11,000 donors genuinely wanted to help people … But these people didn’t have the proper mental habits to realize that was the choice before them, and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

Weighing choices isn’t limited to how we spend our money – it also applies to how we spend our time. Just as EAs dispute the notion that people should support whichever charities they feel “passionate” about, they question whether channeling those passions into a nonprofit or medical career is the best way to make a difference. Many suggest instead that people “earn to give,” saying they “might be better off…in a high-earning job and making a deliberate commitment to give a large portion of what [they] earn away.“ The organization 80,000 Hours, founded to “become the world’s number one source for advice on pursuing a career that truly makes a difference in an effective way,” elaborates,

Working at a non-profit can be a great way to make a difference. But it’s no guarantee. Amazingly, lots of non-profits probably have no impact. And do workers at [a] non-profit have more impact than the people who fund them? The researchers who push forward progress? The entrepreneurs who transform the economy? Policy makers? Maybe. No one stops to ask.

Putting ideas like these on the table is a great way to make those of us in the arts squirm. While there are echoes of the effective altruism movement in some recent trends within our field, like the “universal call” for better data on the impact of the arts and the pointed questions about who ultimately benefits from arts funding, the arts are chock-full of people – artists and arts administrators alike – who were drawn to their work by that same passion that EAs claim clouds our judgment. The idea of allowing cold rationality to dictate and limit our quest to “do good” flies in the face of our artistic sensibilities, and challenges the assumptions many of us made when we entered the nonprofit sector in the first place – even those of us who have a sincere desire to address social inequities.

Tempting as it may be, it would be short-sighted to dismiss the EA movement as the pet project of a bunch of aesthetically stunted curmudgeons. It’s hard to dispute the notion that we could improve the human condition if only we could get our act together and commit our resources to a data-driven approach. After all, the nonprofit darling of the moment, collective impact, is based on the same premise. What effective altruism does is counter our cause-specific argument for the arts with a dizzying moral appeal for cause agnosticism. And to be honest, it’s hard to see how the arts win if they play the game by the EAs’ rules. The “both/and” argument mentioned previously is unlikely to sway an effective altruist who weighs each decision as a choice between two different futures, one in which a museum gets funded and some lives get saved and one in which the museum struggles and more lives get saved. Even if the museum shut down completely, its patrons could probably find or create an alternative “creative outlet and emotional oasis,” while the people dying of malaria can’t very well make the mosquito nets themselves. The “we give lives meaning” argument likewise rings hollow when we’re talking about lending privileged lives (anyone living on more than $2 a day is privileged in a global context) a dose of incremental “meaning” at the expense of giving others a shot at basic survival. It also comes across as incredibly condescending to those others considering that they would likely never get the opportunity to visit or benefit from Singer’s hypothetical museum. In any case, art is hardly the only possible delivery mechanism for meaning. In the words of one effective altruist,

Trying to maximize the good I accomplish with both my hours and my dollars is an intellectually engaging challenge. It makes my life feel more meaningful and more important. It’s a way of trying to have an impact and significance beyond my daily experience. In other words, it meets the sort of non-material needs that many people have.

Whether the EA movement sputters or gathers steam, taking the time to engage with its principles, even critically, is a healthy exercise. The bottom line is that EAs may actually be onto something when they argue it’s possible to make a bigger dent in one sector than another. Rather than insisting otherwise or dodging the argument altogether, we could heed the call to examine how altruism really manifests in our work, particularly when examined through the lens of what benefits the people we engage, rather than what benefits our organizations or our donors. Might we, too, have objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more “good” in one program, or with one population, than in another? Do we, too, have a moral obligation to maximize that good? How would that change how we operate and who we serve? Do we want to change how we operate?

If the effective altruism debate makes anything clear, it’s that to be able to make art, not to mention argue about it, is to be fortunate. Taking a hard look at our assumptions about what draws and keeps us to this work may not be easy, but if we squirm a little, so be it. In the grand scheme of things, a little squirming is a luxury too.

• A consortium of City of Detroit creditors have made the first legal move towards pressuring the Detroit Institute of Arts to sell city-owned artworks to help pay for debts owed. Executive Vice President Annemarie Erickson defends the museum against Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr’s demand that the museum find one way or another to contribute $500 million in assistance to the bankrupt city.
• The California Arts Council will apply a $2-million funding windfall it received from Assembly member John Perez to several new initiatives in arts education and community improvement, including Creative California Communities, The Arts in Turnaround Schools, and Jump stARTS. In the face of a 7.6% budget cut handed down last year, the state arts council is taking a gamble on the success of these programs winning fresh credibility with policymakers and an increase in annual funding.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Jamie Bennett, chief of staff and director of public affairs at the NEA, will take over as executive director of the creative placemaking funder collaboration ArtPlace America starting in January. He succeeds ArtPlace’s founding director Carol Coletta, who joined the Knight Foundation back in March, and interim head Jeremy Nowak.
• After a decade serving Californians as president of the James Irvine Foundation, James E. Canales will step down in the spring to become the first president of another arts funder, Boston’s Barr Foundation.

• There has been some shuffling in the world of state and local arts councils. Ohio Arts Council ED Julie Henahan has retired after thirty years; Milton Rhodes, President of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County in North Carolina, has retired and been succeeded by Jim Sparrow; and Glenda Toups was dismissed from her position as ED of the Houma Regional Arts Council in Louisiana in the wake of the discovery by the board that the Council was not in compliance with state reporting law.

• We’ve known for a while that Michael Kaiser is leaving his post as President of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; now it turns out he’s taking the DeVos Institute of Arts Management with him. Both are moving to the University of Maryland, where Kaiser will be a professor of practice beginning in the fall, and hopes to expand the Institute to include a master’s program.
• Financial news giant Bloomberg has decided to discontinue its cultural journalism brand, Muse, in favor of focusing more on leisure and luxury. Along with the reassignment of Muse editor Manuela Hoelterhoff and a cadre of employees and contracted writers, the news outlet laid off theater critic Jeremy Gerard.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Hewlett Foundation has announced a rigorous new “Openness and Transparency” policy, which assumes from the outset that information the foundation creates should be made public to improve outcomes, spark debate, and foster collaboration. Hewlett’s President Larry Kramer offers context in a post on the foundation’s new blog; transparency watchdogs celebrate the policy.
• The D5 Coalition has released a scan of best practices and a guide to online resources for foundations wishing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion at every stage of their work.

IN THE FIELD

• Eric Booth and Tricia Tunstall share profiles of El Sistema “encounters” in five of approximately 55 countries – Sweden, Austria, Korea, Japan, and Canada – that have borrowed from Venezuela’s seminal movement to realize youth development goals through “intensive investment in ensemble music.” The global umbrella for El Sistema has also released the first literature review of “research, evaluation, and critical debates” related to Sistema-inspired programs around the world.
• The Arts Council of Lawrence, New Jersey has shut down after 42 years, having, in the words of one member, “outlived [its] usefulness.” Originally formed by a group of female volunteers, the Council struggled to recruit younger members throughout the recession.
• The August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh is struggling mightily. After a struggle to find an audience and keep backers the organization has been forced to move further and further from its original intention to create a cultural home for the people portrayed in Wilson’s plays, working class African Americans. A conservator has been appointed to try to avoid liquidation.
• The Warehouse, an all-ages music venue in La Crosse, Wisconsin, has filed to become a nonprofit after 22 years as a for-profit, prompting some musicians to wax lyrical about their time there. Financial pressures were the primary impetus, but owner Steve Harm has indicated he will open the space to the local community in new ways to provide a public good.
• Fractured Atlas has added another tool to their encouraging-and-rewarding-arts-entrepreneurship tool belt. The Arts Entrepreneurs Awards will recognize artists and arts organizations who have “innovated new business practices or paradigms” or  “developed novel solutions to old problems.” Nominations will be accepted until December 22nd at 5:59pm.

BIG IDEAS

• A report from the Next Generation Evaluation Conference forecasts “game-changing” trends in impact evaluation, including shorter evaluation cycles and simpler measurement systems.
• “Is social practice gentrifying community arts out?” Arlene Goldbard parses the difference between the art world’s latest obsession and community cultural engagement.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research is about to release its inaugural report, drawing on what it calls the “most comprehensive set of data ever compiled” on arts organizations.  In addition to a statistical overview of the field – did you know that performance of an arts organization is lower in communities with a higher concentration of graduate degrees? – the report attempts to answer the question, “What makes one arts organization more successful than another?” The key turns out to be leadership.
• Speaking of data aggregation, Markets for Good has a progress report on the BRIDGE (Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities) project, an ambitious collaborative effort to identify and map philanthropic entities across the world.
• A new report by the Consumer Federation of America bashes “abuse of market power by a highly concentrated music sector,” argues against the need “to expand copyright holders’ rights,” and suggests that digital file-sharing (aka “piracy”) may, in some cases, actually be good for both artists and consumers. One well-circulated chart suggests that it is the proceeds of live performance, not recordings, that drives artists’ income.
• Gold standard at Crystal Bridges? In a rare, randomized, controlled (albeit “natural”) experiment on the effects of art on students, a single school-group visit to the major new museum appears to have raised students’ scores on vague but desirable traits such as critical thinking, social tolerance, historical empathy, and likelihood of future museum visits. It’s too soon to parse out the effect of contemporary art in particular.
• A study of STEM graduates from the Michigan State University’s Honors College found that graduates who went on to earn patents or start companies had more arts and crafts experiences than the average Americans – and believed their ability to innovate was influenced by that experience. (The paper itself is behind a paywall.)
• How “rampant” is gentrification? New research suggests that most urban areas experienced only “moderate” gentrification in the past decade, with significant variations across cities. Unsurprisingly, gentrification was most prevalent in large and dense metro regions with solid public transit infrastructure.

• The even playing field that is the Internet might be about to tilt in the favor of the powerful, in this case AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and the like. Net neutrality is in the hands of the DC Circuit Court.
• The National Initiative on Arts & the Military has released a new advocacy white paper on arts and health in the military context, just as the NEA has announced that it will expand its Creative Arts Therapy Program through a new three-month pilot at the Department of Defense’s Fort Belvoir Community Hospital.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Ralph Remington is stepping down as the NEA’s Theater/Musical Theater Director to become the western regional director and assistant executive director at Actors Equity Association. He had been at the NEA since 2010.
• Los Angeles has a new mayor, and will soon have a new head of cultural affairs. Olga Garay-English, who served as Executive Director of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs since 2007, announced she is stepping down January 4.
• Kenneth Foster, former Executive Director of the Yerba Buena Center for Arts, has kicked off his tenure leading the new Arts Leadership Program at the University of Southern California and offers some words of wisdom on how funders can best serve the performing community, and why  “best practices” aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.
• Continuing a string of recent layoffs of classical-music radio staff, Houston’s KUHA has cleaned house. The station claims that the move will actually lead to more coverage of local arts groups.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Consider arts crowdfunding thoroughly kickstarted. Crowdfunding raised more than half a billion dollars for the performing and recording arts last year, almost 20% of the total money raised for all purposes through crowdfunding platforms, according to industry research. Lucy Bernholz is interested in investigating the small but increasing role U.S. foundations seem to be playing in driving this trend.
• Risë Wilson, the new Director of Philanthropy at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, makes the case – and offers a model – for arts grants as risk capital in an interview about the Foundation’s SEED grant program.
• Like many other downtowns, Philly’s is booming these days. But residential developer Carl Dranoff attributes the revitalization of the South Broad Street area to the Avenue of the Arts project, and insists that “anyone who says it would have happened anyway has a very short memory.”

IN THE FIELD

• In his coverage of last month’s 2013 Future of Music Summit for the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot describes a frustrated yet resolved music industry, “Music is generating a ridiculous amount of money, none of it flowing to the people who create it.” Check out the write-ups from day one and day two.
• Nina Simon responds to the backlash that her novel programming at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has generated in recent months locally and, to a lesser extent, nationally. The contention is that encouraging active participation so strongly erodes the traditional museum environment of quiet contemplation, distracting the MAH from its historical charge. Simon argues that the new approach allows for both kinds of experiences, while “balancing priorities, embracing creative tension, including diverse voices, and staying true to our mission.”

BIG IDEAS

• The ambitious Sustain Arts project aims to bring the wonders of Big Data to the cultural sector over the next three years, ultimately strengthening the nation’s cultural infrastructure. The first wave of work is happening now in the San Francisco and Detroit regions; Marc Vogl, Bay Area Field Director of the initiative, explains what he’s up to and how Bay Area folks can get involved.
• New Bonfils Stanton Foundation president Gary Steuer weighs in on the “is ‘innovation’ a nefarious buzz-word” debate (which is really the ongoing argument over how funders find the sweet spot of nurturing, not hindering, their grantees) and provides other thoughtful comments on the recent National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture. (All 27 talks from the Summit, by the way, are now available online.)
• Google has launched Helpouts, a service that provides live on-demand chatting with experts in fields ranging from the arts to cooking and electronics. Udi Manber, VP of engineering, believes Helpouts will offer users a more “precise” mode of online learning.

RESEARCH CORNER

• WolfBrown is out with a multi-pronged report on how to engage college students in the performing arts. It includes case studies of best practices and a survey of student attitudes toward the performing arts across seven different schools.
• The Wallace Foundation has released new research on the challenges of after-school arts programs in low-income urban neighborhoods. The study draws on hundreds of interviews with young people, their families, program leaders and others to provide some answers, including ten principles for developing effective programming.
• More evidence that art therapy helps patients with Alzheimer’s.
• Elizabeth Merritt reviews a new report from European consultancy Arup on Museums in a Digital Age.
• The U.S. may be out of UNESCO, but the work continues: the international cultural agency and the United Nations Development Program have just released a Special Edition of the United Nations Creative Economy Report concluding that world trade of creative goods and services more than doubled from 2002 to 2011, to $624 billion. Unlike the 2008 and 2010 editions, many of the case studies and recommendations this time around focus on the role of culture in sustainable development at the local level, especially in poorer countries.
• So many charts, so little time! The Foundation Center has launched the eminently clickable Foundation Stats, where you can find “the answer to almost every basic statistical question about the collective work of U.S. Foundations.” Emphasis on the “basic” here, but as an added bonus the data is open and free. Meanwhile, A new report from the Foundation Center, Media Impact Funders, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation shows that foundations are stepping up in a big way to support traditional media organizations struggling to adjust to the digital age.
• As cultural asset mapping projects continue to gain popularity, this quick overview of where to get spatial data, and what you can do with it, is particularly timely. And speaking of cultural asset mapping, Philadelphia’s massive CultureBlocks initiative is barely six months out of the gate and there is already an academic paper on it.

• Glenn Beck is at it again: the right-wing broadcaster recently attacked the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture along with the Imagining America initiative on his Internet show, The Blaze. Far from a government agency, the USDAC is a “citizen-powered” art project that hasn’t received any public funding to date. Not one to be deterred by facts, Beck claims the two groups are “America’s newest propaganda machine” attempting to “rewrite our history.”
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art has signed a new lease with the city of New York that clarifies the museum is allowed to charge a suggested admissions fee, and added fees for special exhibitions. A lawsuit filed earlier this year alleged that the Met’s previous lease with the city required the museum to be free to the public five days a week.
• Cultural policy researchers in England are crying foul over Arts Council England’s “long-standing bias” toward organizations based in London, which receive a whopping 82% of funding, and asking it be redistributed proportionally to the population across the country.
• A number of theaters in upstate New York are concerned about the possible opening of several casinos in the area and the potential impact on booking major performers and retaining audiences. The advocacy group Upstate Theaters for a Fair Game is seeking protections from the state to “‘establish a fair and reasonable partnership” between the casinos and the local market.

IN THE FIELD

• The Museum of Modern Art sure is committed to staying on top of digital trends in education: it jumped on the MOOC train early, and now has a new partnership with Khan Academy.
• Two Latino theater companies in New York, Pregones Theater and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, are getting set to merge with the help of Time Warner and the Ford Foundation. The two performing ensembles will retain their original names under the new organization, but will share resources.
• The Theater for a New Audience has moved into its first permanent home after spending the last 34 years producing shows in a variety of rented spaces around Manhattan. City planners view the completion of the newly constructed theater as “the capstone” to a downtown Brooklyn cultural district long in the making.
• What’s going on with the Brooklyn Philharmonic? The NYC-area orchestra made a splash back in 2011 with a daring programming strategy focused on marrying classical music with other more widely popular genres as well as local composers and artists. But all the positive press and attention the new direction received apparently wasn’t enough to stanch the organization’s financial bleeding.
• While the debate rages on over whether Spotify is good or bad for musicians, YouTube muscles in on its territory by planning a subscription service that would give users on-demand, ad-free access to music videos on their mobile phones.
• Musicians of the Charleston Symphony Orchestra recently voted to break from their local union chapter of the American Federation of Musicians in an unprecedented industry move. The decision was reportedly motivated in part by the “understanding that to be successful as an orchestra in the future, [they] need more flexibility, they need to be nimble, and…unions sometimes get in the way of that.”

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• With 71 percent of projects getting funded (compared to the 43 percent average), the dance community boasts the highest proportion of successful Kickstarter campaigns. Theater clocks in at second place with a 64 percent success rate.  Is this evidence that arts orgs are reaching new supporters – or just swapping money back and forth between their friends?
• Pop quiz: which nonprofit group has successfully  “reduc[ed] its reliance on foundation funding, buil[t] new revenue sources” and is “constantly experimenting and challenging assumptions around who their audience is and what they care about”? Nope, not the arts — nonprofit news outlets.

BIG IDEAS

• Barry Hessenius’s Arts Dinner-vention has wrapped, and the edited video has been posted in seven installments; GIA collects them all on one convenient page. The conversation among some of the leading lights of arts administration explores ideas for the future across three areas: the role of the community, new format and delivery mechanisms, and the artist’s role and artist ecosystems.
• Say you didn’t require a project budget as part of that RFP. What’s the worst that could happen? Michelle Williams calls for grantmakers to trust the artists we work with, and she catalogues some innovative ideas from the GIA 2013 conference.
• Scott Walters has a new blog series examining the history of the regional theater movement by riffing on Todd London’s An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions of a New American Art. London, incidentally, delivered what reads like a doozy of a talk on innovation at the recent National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture.
• Michael Kaiser’s latest book, The Cycle: A Practical Approach to Managing Arts Organizations takes an optimistic look at the difficult and delicate task of building an arts organization that is effective and strong enough to last.

RESEARCH CORNER

• The National Endowment for the Arts is offering a $30,000 prize for an interactive application that will “make the rich content of the 2012 [Survey of Public Participation in the Arts] more accessible to the public through a series of interactive, visually appealing, and easy-to-use data visualization tools.” Submissions are due February 3.
• A new study by On the Move examines how European cities support “cultural mobility” – the ease with which artists and cultural professionals engage outside their home region.
• In an effort to increase both convenience and access to data on the nonprofit sector, major players Guidestar and the Foundation Center have entered into a strategic partnership meant to “support the field in new and innovative ways.”
• The Whole Schools Initiative in Mississippi reports that 5,000+ students participating in an arts integration program performed significantly better on fourth and fifth grade state assessments than their peers.
• For its Arts, Culture and Audiences week, the American Evaluation Association highlighted assessment practices in arts education with a series of blog posts stressing that assessments can be “hands-on, active learning experiences for students.”
• York University and the National Ballet School in Toronto are partnering to conduct a pilot study with the hopes of providing scientific evidence of the positive mental and physical effects of dance on people with Parkinson’s disease.
• Grantmakers in the Arts’s ongoing research into support for individual artists has generated a crop of admirably detailed case studies of how a nonprofit grantmaker, state agency, private foundation, and family foundation select recipients for their awards to individuals.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to technology trends the past few years, you know that we live in the era of Big Data. All of those videos we upload to YouTube, hard drives we fill with government secrets (or cat photos, take your pick), and tweets we awkwardly punch out on touchscreen keyboards add up to a whole lot of gigabytes, the bulk of which are stored by someone, somewhere, indefinitely. By some estimates, human beings generate more data every two days than we did in the entire history of civilization prior to 2003 – and that was as of three years ago!

Indeed, these are exciting times for data nerds, and data nerds in the arts are no exception. Initiatives such as the Cultural Data Project, Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research, and the Americans for the Arts National Arts Index seek to collect or organize relevant indicators pertaining to everything from arts organizations’ financial health to audience reach and characteristics to long-term trends for musical instrument purchases.

Fractured Atlas is no stranger to data initiatives in the arts. Our Archipelago data visualization software is one of the largest such efforts, bringing together information on arts nonprofits, for-profits, fiscally sponsored projects, funding, audience distributions, and community context all in one place in the service of better understanding the arts ecosystem in a region. Facilitating data-driven decisions is a major long-term objective of Artful.ly, our just-launched cloud-based arts management tool, and a present-day reality for Spaces, our venue listing and booking service that can promote spaces with last-minute availability to users. Through our research advisory services work, we’ve helped funders such as ArtsWave organize their entire grantmaking process around principles of data-driven decision-making in order to further their philanthropic objectives. Everyone benefits when funders, organizations and individuals in the arts ecosystem make thoughtful decisions about resource allocation, setting up and responding to incentives, and more. At Fractured Atlas, we believe that data can and should be a crucial input into that thoughtful decision-making process, and we’ve been increasingly vocal in evangelizing for data-driven decision making throughout the arts and cultural sector.

There’s just one problem. Up until now, Fractured Atlas has not had any formal guidelines in place to ensure that we use data in our own decision making, with the result that our internal decisions – relating to management, marketing, strategy, and the like – have been guided primarily by managerial intuition. In a “doctor, heal thyself!” moment, we’ve agreed that is time for our practices to reflect our preaching, at both the program and institutional levels. In 2013, the scope of our operations, the size of the community we serve, and the financial stakes in our work demand informed analysis at a level of rigor that we have not historically practiced. (This directive was immortalized by our fearless leader Adam Huttler in the organization’s annual Strategic Priorities Memo with the colorful title, “Eating Our Data-Driven Dog Food.”)

So between now and next summer, Fractured Atlas is embarking on a pilot initiative to explore how we can use data and evidence to improve our decision-making process at all levels. We’re calling it Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization, and through this and future blog posts, we’re giving you the opportunity to be a fly on the wall as use this process as a way of grappling with issues of organization identity, strategy, culture, and impact.

What Is a Learning Organization?

As I define it*, a learning organization is one for which information and strategy are joined at the hip. It is, quite literally, an organization that has successfully forged a culture of learning and integrated that culture into its decision-making process at all levels.

Why is this integration between information and strategy important? Because every organization operates in an environment of uncertainty about what is going to result from its decisions, and every decision we make on behalf of an organization is based on a prediction, whether explicitly articulated or not, about the results of that decision.

If you can reduce the uncertainty associated with your decisions, the chances that you will make the right decision will increase. Of particular interest here  are what I call decisions of consequence: dilemmas for which the consequences of making the wrong decision and uncertainty about the nature of the right decision are both high. So, how do you reduce that uncertainty? Why, through research, of course! Studying what has happened in the past can inform what is likely to happen in the future. Studying what has happened in other contexts can inform what is likely to happen in your context. And studying what is happening now can tell you whether your assumptions seem spot on or off by a mile.

In fact, I subscribe to the notion that research is only valuable insofar as it helps to answer a question that matters. I’m not the only one who thinks so, either: Jake Porway, the founder of a nonprofit that connects data scientists with social enterprises in need, wrote this past spring that “any data scientist worth their salary will tell you that you should start [a data project] with a question, NOT the data.” In fact, all of the excitement around Big Data notwithstanding, data divorced from strategy is not likely to be very useful.

A learning organization solves this problem by forging a powerful feedback loop between information and strategy, with each feeding the other and adapting in relation to the other. The more obvious implication of this symbiosis is that organizational decisions must adapt in response to new information, as discussed above. But the less obvious implication is no less important: information-gathering must be directed by the organization’s decision-making needs. Without that intimate connection, there are no real safeguards to prevent organizations from thinking they are making data-driven decisions without really putting much thought into either the data or the decisions.

More broadly, a learning organization develops a culture of seeking out and using information thoughtfully from the highest levels to the organization’s grassroots. The most effective organizations are conscious about the impact they are trying to achieve, and willing to be open-minded regarding the paths they take to maximizing that impact.

*Some readers may be familiar with the term “learning organization” as defined by MIT management scientist Peter Senge in his well-known 1990 book The Fifth Discipline. My use of the phrase is broadly in the same spirit as Senge’s, but he sets out a very specific formula for what constitutes a learning organization that I don’t make use of here.

Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization

This fiscal year, which started in September and goes through next summer, we are undertaking a pilot project to put some of these principles into practice. The primary goal of the pilot is to develop a conceptual framework and a toolkit of situation-adaptable methods for reducing uncertainty about decisions of consequence. If we can reduce the uncertainty we have about those decisions through strategic measurement and information-gathering efforts, over time we’re likely to make better decisions that will in turn lead to better outcomes for Fractured Atlas and the people who benefit from our work.

As powerful as this idea is, it only works if we have a very concrete sense of what we’re trying to accomplish as an organization. While we’ve had a mission statement for some time now, the huge variety of programs and services Fractured Atlas offers is virtually impossible to fully capture in a single sentence. Accordingly, the first step in this process is to create a theory of change for every program at the organization, from which we’ll roll up an overall theory of change and logic model for the organization as a whole. This will allow us to define our overall goals as well as some key success metrics at various levels of operation, taking into account both Fractured Atlas’s mission objectives and its focus on developing programs that are sustainable with earned income.

Meanwhile, we’ve formed an internal task force to work on this project at a deeper level of engagement throughout the year. Affectionately called the Data-Driven D.O.G. Force (the “D.O.G.” stands for Data Over Gut), the group will meet every 6-8 weeks to receive calibrated probability assessment training, identify real-world decisions of consequence to use as case studies, and come up with measurement experiments to gather information relevant to those decisions. In doing so, we’ll be using a modified version of a methodology called Applied Information Economics as described in Douglas W. Hubbard’s book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business. One major advantage of AIE is that it explicitly takes into account the cost-benefit of measurement strategies by calculating something called the value of information, which we’ll be exploring further in a future post.

At the end, we’ll attempt to formalize a process for identifying decisions of consequence in the future and fitting measurement strategies to the situation at hand. We’ll also present some recommendations for building infrastructure in the form of ongoing data collection, to address those questions that are likely to be asked again and again. And through it all, I’ll be writing about it here – so that anyone who wants to can learn alongside us.

Learning in Context: Why Philosophy Matters as Much as Performance

Data-driven decision-making isn’t just about crunching numbers. It’s a practice that requires certain values in order to work. The hard part of being data-driven is not the “data” but the “driven” – you have to be willing to question your assumptions and actually change your behavior in response to the new information coming in. Put another way, a learning organization is, well, open to learning new things -even things that suggest that the way that we’re currently doing things isn’t working as well as it could, or that we’re missing important opportunities to increase our impact.

It’s much easier to attain that kind of open stance if we train ourselves to expect failure upfront. In general, organizations as well as people have a tendency to be far too risk-averse. Being a learning organization means embracing a culture of intentional experimentation and productive failure: we’re likely not going to hit upon the secret sauce the very first time we try something – or, sometimes, at all.

Being a learning organization similarly requires that we think about ourselves from a system perspective – how are we making a difference in light of what everyone else is doing? And how can our experiences shed light on those of others? That’s why we’re not just going down this path on our own and in private. If the specific activities of the pilot project turn out to be a big waste of time (and I can’t guarantee that they won’t), we won’t be able to hide that from you or the world. But even that would ultimately be a good thing – because, in true learning organization fashion, it would cause us to reconsider the limitations of a data-driven approach. Embracing change is hard, but one of the very best things about it is that it can allow us to extract just as much (if not more) value from failure as success.

For me, personally, this project is very exciting. Of course I’m eager to find out what we’ll learn. But more than that, Fractured Atlas as a Learning Organization is an opportunity for us to exercise leadership in a way that reaffirms our highest standards for ourselves and for the field. I’m looking forward to sharing our journey with you.

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Australia is relatively fresh off the adoption of a national cultural policy, and with that policy come calls for new ways to measure culture’s intrinsic value.
• Fractured Atlas has created a simple but useful infographic explaining what ObamaCare means to individuals, including artists.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• Kris Tucker, Executive Director of the Washington State Arts Commission, has announced that she will step down in January. She has held the position since 1999; her successor will be chosen by the Governor following a search process led by the Commission.
• At Cincinnati-based ArtsWave, longtime president and CEO Mary McCullough-Hudson will step down next August. As part of a standing succession plan, current Chief Operating Officer Alecia Kintner is expected to become President and COO.
• The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City has chosen a new executive director to succeed founder David Hughes: Julie Gordon Dalgleish took up the post this month.

BIG IDEAS

• Why we need a GiveWell for the arts: bioethics professor Peter Singer applauds “effective altruism” or evidence-based grantmaking, and, in the process, slams the idea of donating to an art museum. The article has provoked several responses from Adam Huttler, Janet Brown, Laura Zucker, and Linda Essig. Before we get tangled in semantics (isn’t “effectiveness” beside the point of true altruism?) GiveWell thoughtfully unpacks what the term means to them.
• Nonprofit executives both in and outside of the arts, meanwhile, aren’t putting much faith in data-driven strategies. According to a poll by Infogroup Nonprofit Solutions, executives consider “using data and analytics to drive strategy”  by far and away their least important nonprofit fundraising practice.
• The second batch of guests at the much-anticipated Arts Dinner-Vention Project  — Kristin Thomson, Salvador Acevado, Devon Smith, Lex Leifheit, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Meiyin Wang — weigh in on what a “new movement around the arts” would look like.
• Kerry Lengel explores the challenges and opportunities present in the battle for relevance and ticket sales for arts presenters in Arizona, and everywhere really.
• Think tanks in DC have increasingly focused on advancing a pre-existing agenda, raising funds, and political advocacy. Is there still a place for objective research in policy decisions? We’d like to think so.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• Three trustees of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation claim the foundation owes them at least $60m; foundation staff asks, “What are they thinking?” Florida courts will decide.
• Amid the controversies over how little musicians are paid from streaming services, Doug Wolk takes a big-picture look at the revenue flows of sites like Spotify and Pandora to explain who is and isn’t getting paid by whom, and whether it really matters.
• Maryland’s Forum Theater, in an attempt to make its work more accessible, is allowing audience members to determine the price of their tickets next season. The strategy may prove to be wishful thinking, but raises the question of whether it’s more effective to ask audiences to “pay what they can” or to “pay what they each think a performance was worth.”

IN THE FIELD

• Amid national discussion surrounding recent lawsuits by unpaid interns, Fractured Atlas’s Jason Tseng offers concise takes on the history, legality, and possible future models for internships in the arts.
• Another Fractured Atlas staffer, Tim Cynova, interviewed 26 top professional leaders over the past several months about what it takes to attract and retain stellar staff members. He shares their responses in a video compilation here and will be releasing videos of each interview on his #StellarStaff website over the next month.
• Book lovers sound off on the Justice Department’s recent suit against Apple and publishing companies for conspiring to raise e-book prices. Meanwhile, independent bricks-and-mortar booksellers appear to be back on the upswing.
• Good news for cinephiles outside New York and LA: you may no longer need to invest in home theaters. A new website called Gathr allows users to band together to bring independent films to theaters across the country with a Kickstarter-like crowdsourcing engine.
• Bad news for cinephiles outside: drive-in theaters across the country are imperiled by the need to invest in expensive new digital projectors. Honda will save a few based on online votes; some theater operators are turning to the internet on their own to stay in business.
• Non-news for cinephiles: the general public is more complimentary of films than professional critics. How much more? The New York Times has a nifty analysis of Rotten Tomatoes scores from critics versus average moviegoers over the last ten years.

RESEARCH CORNER

• Look out, Rick Perry: the Cultural Data Project is coming to Texas.
• The Nonprofit Finance Fund and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have released two reports on their Leading for the Future experiment, which granted $1m in “change capital” to 10 leading arts organization to improve their capitalization. The summary report highlights factors that contributed to or limited success (stable finances and a well-informed board help; a major recession does not); the more interesting case studies of each organization offers detailed information on how they defined and evaluated success.
• NewMusicBox’s Rob Deemer follows up on our recent item about the NEA’s artist workforce research to argue that there should be a separate occupational category for composers. Meanwhile, the NEA has a new research report out on industrial design. The sector is large, growing, and apparently very versatile: nearly 40 percent of people named in design patents are also named in utility patents, implying they have a penchant for invention.
• A new report on the music industry in Nashville finds that the city has by far the highest number of music industry jobs per capita and the second-highest average salary after LA. This handy infographic breaks it down.
• If you’re looking to get up to speed on everything important that’s been written on the arts and Big Data so far, here’s where to start. Chris also has a review of “Counting What Counts: What Big Data Can Do for the Cultural Sector.”