 And on behalf of SMU, the National Center for Arts Research, I thank you very, very much for coming. I guarantee you we're going to change your life today. And in five years, I am sure we will have changed the dialogue that we are having around arts organizations and arts management in this country with this exciting project. First of these thank yous and we'll get going. I'm First Victoria Bailey and the Theater Development Fund who graciously co-hosted this event. And of course to signature theater for hosting us tonight. We are very, very proud to call Jim Houghton of SMU Metas alone. So we're thrilled to be here. Thank you to all of you for coming today. This is a wonderful representation of arts managers from across the city and from different sectors. A testament I'm sure to all the pressures we are all feeling off the new solutions in a challenging arts environment. So our goal at the National Center for Arts Research at SMU is to be a convener, to do what universities do best, which is research. So as you'll hear today from the master, the largest arts database in the country. But that's not the important bit. The important bit is that it's a usable tool for all of you in the field to be able to use every day. People think, well just because you're in the arts, somehow you're not a data person. But we are all data people. We have to be. And so what we want to do is make sure that the artists in our organizations can make the art. Somebody's got to be captain of the bills. So we have a wonderful board. We're here today. But I want to thank our National Advisory Board, Naomi Grable from Carnegie Hall, Kevin Moore from PCG, David Reskin, and I will talk. You all know David. Jill Robinson from TRG Arts. Rebecca Thomas from the Nonprofit Finance Fund. And Beth Toddle from the Cultural Data Project. Thank you for your time today. And that's it for the chit chat. So I'm now very, very pleased to introduce someone I think many, many of you know. A foremost researcher in this field. A theater professional herself. She has a joint appointment in the Cox School of Business at SGU and the Meadows School of the Arts. She runs our wildly important and popular arts management and arts entrepreneurship program, which includes everything from a Mamba, which is an MA plus an MBA. We have a couple of Mamba grads here today. But also the first arts entrepreneurship minor in the country, which is leading us to have the highest employment for art graduates, our undergraduates in the arts. Because when they graduate, they don't only have art skills, they also had to run a small business because you all know most artists are going to be freelancers. So she runs all of this at her spare time. She also directs the National Center for Arts Research. Please help me welcome Zonny Valls. He's dancing as kind of the geek version of Pocket Island. I'm sorry for that. A couple of you would hear that Thomas Cotts, you've got mail. Yes. Well I saw this morning he's got mail and you know there is the, kind of promoting the claims about the theater is dying, the classical music is dying. You know we all realize that there are pressing issues that the arts confront. And I'm like you, I'm very curious. I'm curious about, so what are the pressing issues and are they germane just to as, because they said my background's in theater. You know it's just theater that's feeling these issues. There's really across all arts and cultural sectors. Is it across organizational size? Is it happening just in certain markets? And you know, even understanding what the performance is, what's even more important is understanding what drives that performance. Because until we can start understanding what drives the performance, it's really hard to understand how we're going to improve it. And we also don't want to all be average. You know we really want to look at where is high performance happening within the sector. And what can we learn from the organizations that are high performers. And that's really the motivating part of this research that's what's got us started. So our vision is to act as a catalyst for the transformation and sustainability of the national arts and cultural community. And our mission is to be a leading provider of events based insights that enable arts and cultural leaders to overcome challenges and increase impact. And we've worked with Boston Consulting Group and did a lot of field research before getting started. And this is kind of where our people are held to the fire. It can't just be providing the insights, but we have to figure out how do you get from the insights to enable them. What is it that we can do that will be useful and relevant for arts and cultural organizations? And the mission is really what has driven our scope. So there are many partners out there, there are many data gatherers. Currently we really don't need to get into the business of collecting data. What we want to work is the analysis and the insights that will enable. So the practical tools, the resources that we're able to provide. Where we're still being assured as a center is that we are not getting into implementation. We really don't, we're not trying to be a consulting firm that goes one-on-one with individual organizations. We're researchers and that's what we're trying to invest all of our time. There are so many wonderful consultants, wonderful smart individuals out there in the field who can help to provide the implementation. And so we're having to pass the baton to them. Looking at trying to accomplish the scope meant that we have to start with a lot of different partners. And so currently our partners are COFL Data Project. We have all of the COFL Data Projects data for the past five years upon all arts organizations around the country. Theor Communications Room, so we have the data from TCG's Fiscal and Attendance Survey. And the National Center for Charitable Statistics. We have data on the 40,000 organizations that report through NCCS. Now the CDP and TCG take a really deep dive in terms of the kinds of data they collect. And those of you here who have to complete the CDP know exactly what a proper level is. But that's at the organizational level. We have in total, so we have five years of information, so 230,000 organizational records, which is about 15,000 unique organizations of whom we follow at a time. For cultural policy information, we have the National Endowment for the Arts data, IMLS, the National Assembly of State Rights Agencies. We also have the Serbia Color Participation in the Arts data from the NEA. But then we also wanted to get the Census Bureau because we wanted to look at community involvement and characteristics of communities. And then to help us think through ideas of non-profit finance, fund, TRG Arts, and IBM. And I'll talk about this a little bit more in just a minute. And so once we have our hands on all of this data, we need to think about how you organize it. And so the way we decided to organize it is by modeling the Arts and Cultural Ecosystem. Because when you think of it, arts organizations don't exist in a vacuum. You know, our health isn't only dependent on the activities, practices, and decisions that are happening internally. It's really this complex, interdependent system of understanding what's happening in the community around them. So what are the socio-economic characteristics of your local community? The demographic characteristics. Who else is operating in the market? So are there other businesses? Are there zoos of burying homes and parks? How many other arts organizations are operating in the market? And then what's the impact of the cultural policy on an organization's ability to perform well? And then the health and dynamism of the supply, you know, of looking at the very artists who are responsible for creating the work. You can see that we've then mapped from all of our two-part organizations representation that takes us through each of the parts of the ecosystem. So we've been able to interconnect the data to make it talk to one another. And for us, we kind of stepped back and thought, well, you know, an arts organization that's operating, you know, say in Queens, the Jamaica Performing Arts Center, it's probably not as likely to attract everybody from out the New York metro area. It's most likely to attract those who are in its local community. So what we did is we geocoded, meaning we placed each arts organization in the country in its location. And then we gave it a sense of place. So this is an example. We did something called spatial modeling, where you decided what your diameter was going to be. You know, for us, we looked at one kilometer, thinking within one kilometer, those community characteristics, the people who live in the community, the competing organizations, the complimenting organizations, get the most weight. And then as you move increasingly distant from the organization, we still take into account the characteristics, but we simply weight them a little bit lower. And the attempt again is really to understand what drives performance. So to what extent do these different characteristics affect the performance for this ABC orchestra? So now that we have each of the organizations placed and we understand where it's operating, we can really get going on research. For us, having the data, then if we're going to achieve our mission, what are the important questions that we need to ask about health? What are the important questions we need to ask about impact? And as a bunch of researchers sitting together, we can come up with our ideas of what's important to examine, but what was really implying to us was talking with a group of about a dozen or so arts leaders from various sectors about how do they look at health from their own organizations. Many of you are here today. In addition, we thought through all the financial measures with Rebecca Thomas from Nonprofit Finance Fund to make sure that we were looking at things we really shouldn't be looking at to look at health. TRG Arts worked with us in terms of thinking through what we needed to think through for arts consumption. And it all boils down to one of nine different buckets of health. We're looking at contributed revenue, earned revenue, and expenses, as you would expect. Looking at marketing impact and bottom line, we want to get a sense of the health and the capital structure, so we're looking at balance sheet, community engagement, program activity, and staffing. In total, though, in talking with all of the different individuals with whom we spoke, we actually do it with 184 different ways to measure health. And it just talks to how diverse we are as a center. I'm not going to put you through 184 different findings tonight. In this first report, we decided we're going to tackle eight of them. So once we ask the question, you have to figure out, if I wanted to answer this question, what outcomes would I look at in order to answer it, and do I have to take it and answer it? So this is an example. What is program revenue per in-person attending? And when we talk about program revenue, the way that we define it, was not just what did the organization receive an earned revenue because someone bought a ticket. It's also what did they spend on the ticket, but what also did they spend at concessions? Did they pay for parking and that revenue came to your organization? Was there tuition for educational classes? Was there four sponsorships that you got because somebody was walking through the door? So pooling that all together to the program revenue. We did this in three ways. For each of these indices, we looked at what was average performance, what drives performance from within the arts and cultural ecosystem, and then what drives high performance. So let's start looking at some performance averages. These are some of the findings from within the first report. We're going to look by sector, by size, and by market cluster. And so this was a look at net program revenue per sector. So we've got program revenue for in-person attending, as well as marketing expenses, which includes in this case marketing personnel for attending. And you can see things like over here, you know, Opera clearly earns a whole lot of program revenue for everybody who walks in the door. But they also spend the highest amount for every person who comes. As opposed to, for example, the community-based organizations, which only like 410, but they also only spend $1.42 for every person that's brought in. What surprised me a little bit was actually the similarities in program revenue between art museums and theater companies. I would not have necessarily expected that to be the case. But you think of museums and all of the gift shops and the answer I purchased and that can go on. And it's just coming from different sources. And so if I look at the difference between the two, I can look at where the marketing investment, what's the earned revenue that's coming in because of that person. And we see that there were pretty big differences between the arts sectors with respect to net program revenue. You know, when I first looked at this, I thought, well, gee, I'm just bringing in that much per person in earned revenue, then maybe they're really heavily reliant on earned revenue. But they're not. Within opera companies, the average is 60% of the budget coming from contributed revenue, which is actually the same as other museums, which are science museums, natural history museums, et cetera. But these other museums attract five times the annual average attendance as would an opera company. So you just start getting a different sense of texture on what's happening between the different sectors. With respect to community engagement, in the first report, we looked at engagement indices which are these red bars. And we decided on our first foray that when we looked at community engagement, we wanted to include everybody who had a touch point with the organization. So did they come in the door? Did they consume some sort of digitally offered programming in a virtual space? Was it a reporting? How many volunteers, board members, donors, what are the total touch points? In the second report, which will be coming out in May, we've started examining already, and what we found, if you remove the virtual attendance, you get those blue bars instead in terms of community engagement per the local population. And what you start to see is how much more some of the sectors are engaging in digital activity than other sectors, and what kind of an impact that has in terms of reach. So it's really to me sort of provocative to start saying, well, for the sectors that are engaging, are there ways that they could be engaging that still might be with mission? This is the amount of salaries that are going to artists, and other preliminary personnel, so in the case of museums also includes curators, collectionists. So we get a sense then, yes, opera had really higher revenue per person, but it also has 60% of its total operating revenue going to pay the people who create the art. And it's a new orchestra that figures 63%. You start to see where the investments are different between the different sectors. Bottom line, what's the difference between bottom line between the sectors? Clearly, museums, with respect to bottom line, are struggling more so than some of the other sectors, particularly after you take into account depreciation. So it's looking at bottom line before and after depreciation. What surprised me was that the art museums and the other performing arts organizations, which all tend to be smaller, actually were healthier when it came to bottom line. What's curious when you come to museums though, is even though the bottom line was negative, they had higher positive working capital than the other sectors. So just in terms of the strategy behind how they're operating. If instead we look by size, we see that smaller organizations tend to have healthier bottom lines than to medium sized organizations than to larger organizations. So I'm really curious to delve deeper into figuring out why that is. What happens is it because you start increasing your commitments to capital and to having to operate a building and all the other fixed costs that really make it more difficult to remain stable. Small versus medium versus large. Really medium sized organizations spend a little bit more on marketing than to large organizations. But there's so much more program revenue returned on the investment of marketing expenditures. And it gets even more extreme when you look at large organizations. So it makes me wonder, is it a key to growing from being a small organization to medium sized organizations learning something about how to spend a little bit more in marketing but generate a much higher return in terms of the program I've been in. We also looked geographically at differences and we said let's not predetermine what we compare, but let's have the data tell us where there are clusters of organizations. So what we did was look at population, median income. We looked at number of competitors, arts organization competitors within a market and local funding levels. And what we found was that there were five markets, very large markets that don't compare to anyone else and they don't compare to each other. They're totally standalone markets. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York and D.C. If you go on from there there's a cluster of large markets and these tend to be large more in terms of population than they do in terms of density and arts organizations. Then you get into medium size markets. There were 16 within the CPCG data. Small markets and very small markets. In total there are 189 different markets that we are examining through the research. And some of them, when you think about the spatial modeling, what you see are some really small markets like up there with Ann Arbor. It's actually kind of drafting off of Detroit or maybe in the case of Detroit working in the opposite way from Detroit. Santa Barbara with Los Angeles that's certainly the case. So looking at some of the dynamics of the health of those very small markets that are located close to really large markets. Summary, finding with respect to geography arts and cultural dollar activity per capita. Actually the highest was in San Francisco. I was expecting that it was going to be in New York but it was San Francisco followed by New York. I also thought it was really interesting that these medium sized markets had higher arts and cultural dollar activity than did Los Angeles arts and cultural organizations. Effort budget size Washington, you think all of the large cultural institutions that government supported. Followed by New York. The New York City Arts organizations of all of the markets had the most pressing deficit, both before and after depreciation. Some of you have seen head shaking. Probably have more to do with that one than I am. The large markets before depreciation had the highest positive levels of bottom line. Interestingly, if you took into account depreciation, they were no longer the highest which speaks to me of all of the recent capital investments they've made in arts districts in bricks and mortar. Attendance. So this is the amount of expenses it takes to bring in a person. Look how much more Los Angeles has to struggle to bring in a person versus Chicago or New York. You look at that and it's easy to see the dynamic of urban sprawl how difficult it is to get people to invest in the commute time to actually come. So after we get away from averages, we look at what drives performance and what drives high performance. After it starts getting exciting from our standpoint. When we look at something sticking with the example of attendance, we want to be able to explain variations in attendance while some arts organizations have higher or lower attendance than others. And so that explains it is arts and cultural sector. We know that on average, art museums have higher average attendance than do symphony orchestras than do dance companies. So one thing that I want to look at if I want to understand attendance is I have to take into account what sector it's operating in. But there's actually a lot of things I need to take into account from within that bigger arts and cultural ecosystem. And what we found to get a level playing field is that yes, the sector matters. But organizations that have larger operating budgets, of course that affects it, so does organizational age. The older organizations tend to have higher attendance. Those with more spur footage. Doing premieres increases attendance. Whether it's local premieres, national or rural premieres tends to have a positive kick. The higher the median price, the lower the attendance, but the higher the program revenue. Target audience. What we found was actually something that was encouraged by one of my advisory board members, and that is Drew who runs Dallas Black Dance Theater. We still do dare compare my organization to a big way institutional organization. You have to take into account the fact that we simply look different in terms of how we relate to community. And it played out in what we found that the arts organizations at Target African Americans simply have a smaller footprint. There's a lot of excellence that still happens, but on average the attendance levels are lower. Within the community, when we talk about the brain of the audience, you would respect that median age would strongly affect attendance. And it's not true. The higher the median age in the market, the lower the attendance. So when we think about arts and culture really with the spectrum of arts and culture, it's not that everybody really wants to locate just north of Tampa, Florida. That having diversity with age in the community is actually more positive clearly than any people who are older. More graduate degrees. I thought, you know, education is going to relate. Education does drive attendance, but really only through the undergraduate. I'm not sure exactly what happens. This is working out further after our exploration of, you know, if you get a graduate degree, do you just become so fixated and focused on your area of specialization that you don't spend as much time exploring the interests in other areas? Commute times are bad for attendance. Sports teams and cinemas compete. The more sports teams and cinemas there are in the market, the lower the attendance. It's direct competition. By contrast, one thing you don't see up here is number of other arts organizations operating within the sector. The more organizations operating within the sector did not have an innovative impact on attendance. Federal grants across the board for every outcome measure receiving an MBA or IMLS grant was good for every one of the eight performance measures. It's kind of that imprimatur effect that we've all heard and talked about for a long time, but actually seeing it come into play. So this is controlling. This is trying to get to a level playing field. We want to be able to say, all else being equal, have we explained everything that we can explain that's going to drive attendance? And what we find is, no, that's not true. There's all of these other factors in the system. There's part of it that remains unexplained. But we don't want to just let it go with that because we know within our own organizations there's the local community, there's the decisions we make. But when we look around and think about ourselves and our peers, why is it that some organizations are high performers? We thought kind of deeply about this and really what it comes down to is that intangible? It's the quality of the decision making. It's the talent. It's the relationships that you've built over time in the community. It's the stuff that you really have a difficult time just putting a number on, but we are able to estimate it. And so, what drives high performance is really these key intangible performance indicators. It's the intangibles. Once you level the playing field, they have some organizations rising above. In trying to understand back to some of our initial conversations with people before we got started, when we were just trying to explore talking about the field and how people understood high performance. And these were some of the quotes. The X Museum has realized how to leverage its brand to create more consistent revenue streams. We surveyed audiences in quality was the number one reason they come. It's the same reason we can hire the artists we want. True leadership is tapping our reputation constantly looking to learn new skills, capabilities. Much of our success should be attributed to consistent leadership. So not having a lot of turnover. It's allowed us to build deep relationships in the community in a great reputation. And my favorite was it's about getting your religion working. So after we understood how to get to average, how do we understand how to get to above average. And really that's what we're trying to do. We want to say, based on all the factors from within the arts and cultural ecosystem that are observable and measurable, the dark line is average performance and these Xs are actual arts organizations. How do we understand better those organizations that perform that far above the line? And it's not prescriptive that everybody wants to perform really high on every measure, but deciding for yourself which ones are really important and where do you want to strive. And so within high performance, we're able to provide an estimate based on something we call high performance, it's actually stochastic frontier analysis. While understanding how to measure where an organization is versus the average given all of its characteristics. Organizations that are way up here with a score of 100, those that are at the bottom receive a score of zero. And what we find again is that it's really up to the organization now we're not going to be sharing these scores with anybody who wants to see them on your organization. The scores will be provided through a project that we're working on with IBM. And it's going to be an online dashboard where if you're already a participant in the cultural data project you just need to log in to your account and the cultural data project and your scores will appear. So you'll get to see relative to the field, relative to given your sector, your community, etc. How should performance, where do you want to invest? And to give a little bit better sense of how these play out. So these are two real art museums. One of them down there brings in 100,000 people spends a little bit less than 200,000 for a year to do so. Up here you have an art museum it has the exact same score just about one point off but it's bringing in 500,000 people. And so you would think why did you give them the same score? It's because within an organizational characteristic standpoint this one is 40 times the size of this organization. It provides twice as much program offerings it has a lower average admission fee and it's spending more for bringing in each attendee. So again this is where we're getting into all else being equal. This organization here should be bringing in a lot more than 500,000 people per year to get to exports. So this is just a mock-up. This is what the dashboard will look like we've been working with IBM on a weekly basis. This is a real organization. So for its scores let's do a really well on contributive revenue. If I'm the manager of this organization and I'm looking at it I think okay staffing I know I'm way under-capitalized so I know that's a problem I'm not going to deal with that right now. I was having a better marketing impact than that and we know that the marketing impact is made up of the physical attendance divided by the marketing expenses so I want to say which of those is really the issue here. First I want to look have I always had the score and I can see from within the data that actually it's gotten worse over time and I look at my physical attendance and my score on the attendance it's kind of stable it's actually a little bit improved in the last year. But when I pick that apart and I look at the marketing expenditures I look at my scores the declining from 44 to 33 to 24 over time. So what is it about the way that I'm spending my marketing now where for the increased spend I'm not seeing the increase in attendance that should go with it. So that's the idea behind this being really just a diagnostic tool to help you see where are the pressure points to help enable you to understand a little bit better relative to the field where can excellence happen. So a sense of place these are some of the things we learned from the first report about ourselves and about the data. You know the characteristics of your community how much new work makes a difference unrestricted contributions actually went up with the number of national premieres but down with the number of local premieres so it seems as though funders are really supportive of the really new new work but less supportive of local premier. Premier is a well-known very good attendance and total engagement. Invest in development. A good friend at a theater in Chicago actually looked at this because from his perspective if he invests in marketing people everything gets better and we kind of saw this it does pay off at least a higher contributed revenue and operating revenue like you would expect but also more offerings and more total engagement. So the additional revenue that's generated in more programs. Invest in the art organizations that hire more artists and program personnel have higher program revenue and total operating revenue. Raise the time don't be as concerned about competing arts organizations and the ability to share lists the ability because what we're finding is that there is some competition with respect to contributions to contributed revenue however more within sector competition does not lead to lower attendance or to lower engagement. Compete for the NEA and I am a less brands they pay off everywhere and the power of intangibles how do you raise the bar given what you know about your characteristics within the organization within the community. What we're doing currently we've got online discussion forums social media we had the industry report that came out in December there'll be another one that will come out in May where we're going to look at another set of outcome measures and compare them with the industry report. White papers we recently had a white paper that came out about whether or not there was a wealth transfer from poor to wealthy individuals in communities where there is any new funding. Symposia the online tools and templates in the first year we started out with some initial funding and we're currently right here. We've done the initial research and dissemination we've built resources and tools with IBM we work with them every week the dashboard will be launched this summer and I'm very pleased because in this first period we don't want to just be a bunch of researchers working together we need knowledge from the field and we need to get sounding bored on a regular basis and we now as of this week have our first in-car fellow and it's Kate Levin I'm sure all of you in the room know Kate Levin the former cultural affairs commissioner for the city of New York she's agreed to help to keep us useful help to keep us relevant and make sure that we're listening to the field we're really excited to have her as part of our team and that's what we're up to. I'm happy to take any questions or if Jose if questions for Jose please direct all of the hard questions to him. Yes thank you for the question the question was how do we define small, medium and large and in a very different sector we actually let the data tell us where small, medium and large happen for each sector so if you look at outcomes there are change points per sector so it is a different budget group set depending on which of the sectors we're talking about clearly for dance companies it was going to be very very different than it is for art museums so we didn't want to do sort of a one size fits all assumption across sectors all organizations were going to behave the same as we continue to add new sources of data as CDP continues to expand as we continue to work with other providers of data that may change exactly where these change points happen because as new organizations come online they alter the landscape and we're doing our best to try and accurately reflect what it is that the data has to tell us it's all available online so this is the NCAR website I'm sorry I wasn't able to show it just because you can only use the laptop back there so these are the same outcome measures that I talked about so for instance with arts sectors and earned revenue because if you would just hover over one of the findings so this is giving what they are but we also show on average for that sector what was average program revenue and what was average total in person attendance so you can also get a sense not only for the ratio standpoint but for the numerator and denominator where is your organization by size we provide what those are for sector on the site by geography we show the different performance drivers and if you're the kind of person who says this is all great but I don't really care about all those other sectors I just care about my own you can just say you want to see all the index averages by market cluster or by sector or by size and within the introduction to the report there's a lot of information for how we defined everything all of the methodologies there and for the stuff that we thought was really hard to explain we also did some short videos because we thought maybe some people would rather just to hear it from the person than having to read a dense document how do you define program activity in relationship to an art museum? so program activity for all organizations it is admissions it's also if there are concessions, if there's a restaurant if there's a gift shop if there's parking if there are corporate sponsors where the corporate sponsorship funds come in through earned revenue and it's because it is marketing for the corporation based on people who come again the indices are not prescriptive so ultimately if I am an art museum there's a free admissions policy and I don't charge any tuition for my education courses and I don't really have a store or any kind of concession I may actually want to have a low score on that measure because that really fits with my mission a lot more than trying to strive for a higher score these aren't prescriptive, this is simply information about what's out there I can feel and it's really up to each organization to determine which of these are the most mission relevant yes, back there hi, is there anything in the data that talks about the effect on artists where we are specifically I love this I'm so excited about this but I'm really disturbed by one thing which is the fetishization of the premiere especially in the theater so the idea that you get the first production and you never get another one it concerns me that that would become one of the 5, 10 ends of being a healthy organization is to do premiere, do premiere, do premiere because I think that leaves the artist with no career so you can get one production and nothing goes further so I'm curious about the institution but how the artist fits into this picture it's a great question so it's the premiere artist the one area within the ecosystem right now in terms of the individual artists independent artists we know how essential it is to take that into consideration so yes, we're from a mission standpoint helping to enable artists and cultural leaders but we know that you don't have healthy arts organizations if you don't have a healthy and dynamic ecosystem with artists it's the one area where we need more data of all of the areas we need more data everywhere and the only data that we have on individual artists comes from the Census Bureau the self report of individual artists in the market we would love to be able to get a better sense of the livelihood of the sustainability of independent artists regardless of sector and how that interplays within that complex interdependent relationships with the organizations in the rest of the community so thank you for the question I was just going to ask if you can talk a little bit about what drives what so we did not conduct correlation analysis in this instance we conducted so when I talked about what explains performance what are all those factors from within the ecosystem it was a regression analysis so it is association but it's trying to get at causation when we looked at the high performance indicators what that does is take the output from the regression analysis saying let's take into account everything we can explain and then look for high performance and that was a stochastic frontier analysis so correlation we did use correlation analysis in a recent white paper that we did with the National Enhancement of the Arts quite frankly we have data to do the regression analysis and what we find is there are a lot of other factors that are so much more important than median income and drive attendance that when you look at it from that standpoint we were trying to show a simple correlation so we could tell a simple story based on facts so looking at correlations it's not to say that correlation is causation and there is a big difference there so I was just curious for organizations that fall into maybe multiple of these arts sectors how did you determine where they fall and where their numbers can you turn to the presentation Slade 35 what we base this on is every organization when it files the IRS 990 or does that the CDP itself reports what NTE code it is so we did it by NTE code so you can see what is included in the arts education organizations this is all available on the website you know art museums we did this through a cluster analysis so where they come together on about 5 different measures is how we examine them you know opera, symphony, orchestra, theater those are the standard one others like community included mulking purpose organizations cultural awareness folk arts arts and humanities councils community separations and visual arts oftentimes you see within local arts councils there is also a gallery you know that is a non-profit so that kind of activity got captured there other museums is a whole host of other ones so we again we're not trying to be prescriptive of saying this organization you are this kind of organization we let them tell us what kind of organization they were and that was the genesis of it you find that education was a better predictor than income for this one outcome measure for attendance because we looked across the whole spectrum in different cases you find that income has a different impact than does education so for example if I look at the contributed revenue outcome which was contributed, unrestricted contributed revenue to expenses what we find is that you get the performance drivers and scroll down you can scroll down over there actually there you do get contributed revenue is impacted more by having households with income of 200,000 and above what you don't find is that those households then necessarily attend so it depends on which of the outcome measures you're referring to if you find on the site for each of the numerous denominators we provide the whole listing of all of the drivers from which it's within each of the parts of the ecosystem that we examine and whether they're positive or negative related with each of the outcomes and there's also a button on the top if you look at this and your eyes just glaze over it says you want to see this in narrative form just a bit now in the sentences so we try really hard with the site to put ourselves in your shoes you know there are going to be some data geeks a friend from LARP that really enjoy being able to get into that other people are looking for just telling them what the story is I don't need to see all those numbers to make that possible to satisfy people's reminders of what their religion is I believe in the marketing we have based on the marketing expenses but yes, spending a lot of money doesn't prove the performance of the marketing still so is there a way to assess the marketing quality instead of the marketing expenses it's a great question and hope we believe will happen for example of the dashboard and I think it's not just about the money but I think where you see the quality of how the marketing gets spent comes within those key intangible performance indicators scores, the KIPI scores because it's saying for your budget size for your sector, for the community you're operating in this is what we expect to be average for those organizations that do a lot better than average with a similar spend it's got to be something about the quality of the way they're spending the money, is it the channels is it how well they communicate with a particular target audience so those are all things that we think we're capturing here even if you look at the explain variation and if you look at the unexplained variation of KIPIs for some of these there's still a little bit of random variation, there's some things that even with these two measures you don't capture absolutely everything part of it is because I think there's this reporting that some organizations are reporting some of the numbers that don't necessarily make sense within the context of the marketing conditions other things, when you look at something like attendance there's just weird things that happen that are totally out of anyone's predicted control like rotten leather so how would you capture the impact of rotten leather? that's where some of the random variation comes into play and in the report we show for each of these measures I'm going to explain by each of the different components organizations and non-profits are all the organizations and non-profits yes they are but to drill down performing arts centers if they're presenting if they're presenting for profit material their funding is a non-profit then we have to it's a broad way across America and performing arts centers is in there but Broadway is not Broadway is not in there is in there that's related to Broadway is we do have a number of Broadway visitors where she went and found the data because we figured that for the New York market that has such a big impact has another competitive factor that we have to take it into account somehow so that's the only commercial activity when it comes to competing activity we want to explore whether different other organizations within the community are compliments so the more of them they are the better off everybody is versus substitutes of if they're going to do well then you're going to do bad surprisingly things like public broadcasting stations non-profit media I would have expected a really big bump from our performance measures because you think it's a similar audience if they're interested in non-profit media they're going to be interested in attending arts events and in fact it was the reverse and the only thing I can imagine with that it's worthy of more inspiration is the notion that when people sit at home and watch a performance on television for them they just consume art the arts but they're staying at home and doing it instead of going out and participating as a live audience member I just think it's an area that's right for a lot more exploration as I do most of these findings part of what we're willing to do with the fellow and we hope to add more fellows in the future is to say find five findings here that interest you and think if there are two of them where you really just want to write about it where you want to be able to comment from the field help us all to better understand what it is that the data is telling us would you say a little bit more about the correlation between density of opportunity and attendance especially thinking about the New York market and where you came to the conclusion that ok too many arts organizations competing in a big space will affect contributed income but not necessarily attendance say a little bit about how you came up with that we let the data so the question was why is it that attendance doesn't go down with the more arts organizations per sector operating in the market again we're simply looking at what is the data telling us if you talk to people from DRG arts they have a lot of experience around the country and there's the sense that the more attenders there are the more attenders there are that it develops we're still at a point in the economy where it just develops more people who are interested in going out if I went to your organization then maybe I'd also consider going to another museum versus if there's only one and it's not my claim then I'm just not going to go to museums as opposed to looking at other factors what we did find regardless of measure the more operating revenue per sector in a market so museums for example in New York if I looked at the total operating revenue of all of the museums that's what every museum in that market on every measure so even if there are there's a market where there are a small number of players but a lot of revenue and when I look at the revenue side of it it's really more of a demand issue the organizations were able to get large because there was enough demand in that market for that entity that means it's a pretty good and healthy environment for people who want more of that thing so to try and encourage that rather than discourage other players that there's more to be gained by cooperating one more question yes I'm Ginny Loewis from New York and I've been studying numbers for a long time just about 350 members and I'm really intrigued by your comment about age and size because we've seen that there's the first generation theaters created in the 70s and their first miscreants were $50,000 and then there's the fourth generation theaters whose first miscreants are $500 and so depending on when you were founded there was more money to get you started and it seems like you've got this head start and so I wondered if you could talk about that because does that mean that for the small what I'm worried about the groups in the middle because the smaller groups can survive as application although they don't want to but once they become an institution whether it's they mention office or they build a space suddenly something happens and they don't all get big just because they build a space as your balance sheet you know what we are reporting on is the averages when it comes to what so there are two different things here as a predictor organizational age and organizational size did show a positive causal effect on every one of the performance measures so you know you could say it's because intentionally those organizations wanted to grow and I think that a lot of organizations that have been around a long time and intentionally have not wanted to grow it's not to say large is the nirvana that everybody should strive for but what we are seeing is that with the larger organizations it's a complicated formula the deficits were higher actually the working capital was most most of here was lowest from midsize organizations small organizations had the highest levels of working capital and small so it's not to say that as you get bigger the problems go away but they do tend to have higher performance on each of the measures with age I think it's an area right for more exploration and one last question I don't know, I'm assuming top on the food and drama list so like on the mark my questions are around individual artists which as you send the missing or a piece on this so I'm wondering if there is a way to use these findings for advocacy in some way so I think about the premiere idea that Michael brought up and that idea that it doesn't have to be a national premiere to bump which is important to us though it's a case we would have to make to funders I guess my real question is about are there statistics in there about hiring individual artists versus administrative staff and program staff relative salaries and artistic pay commission money put out for those who do new work or commission artists or playwrights or whoever are there ways to break this down so that those of us who don't sell things who aren't selling tickets who this doesn't really apply to can use it for advocacy for individual artists thank you for the question within the data set so we have three different sources for organizational data national center for chapel statistics we don't have any information on that kind of compensation only for the top five employees or so at an institution within the CDP data we don't have total compensation but we don't have how much you pay on average per artist or what is the range of pay per artist we don't necessarily have that of the three theory communications we've over time has paid the most attention to kind of getting a finer brain level of detail on number of in-house artists versus contracted artists you know with the CDP it's a work in progress and I know that there are going to be changes made to it moving forward that's an area of advocacy if it's important to have that data then to voice that to CDP that's important data to be collected because I agree if there are many many artists in the market but nobody's being paid a livable wage these are also going to be then a left turn and stability is it a community where there are many many artists being hired from the outside but the little artists aren't being hired that data I don't necessarily have to answer because that would seem to me to be an excellence but if you could look at those excellent organizations and see that it also obviously helped and again there are so many different efforts that are about what is the impact of the arts on communities whether it's economic impact studies or there are so many other research centers and efforts going on that are really focused on that we didn't feel the need to recreate that you know they do a great job with it and said what we're kind of looking at is almost the opposite it's how does the community impact the health of the arts organizations and part of that community is you know independent artists and it's an area where we need to do more work I want to thank you all very much for coming this evening thank you very much for your attention we'll be here for a while please join us at the bar First I have Johnny Vosling who sponsors thank you for everything you believe in this project to get it going I remind you this is the beginning this data is still coming in the audience of data from TRG is just coming in and again geocoding for how far away are people from the arts they're consuming this is only going to get better so please visit the website that you can see here smu.edu slash arts research follow us on Facebook or Twitter at arts research we'd love to hear from you tell all of your friends do the CDP all of those things that when we collaborate on this we really can help our sector when we all work together thank you so much for coming we look forward to continuing the conversation thank you