The National Center for Art Research at Dallas’ Southern Methodist University released its inaugural report assessing the health of the nonprofit arts sector. The comprehensive report, which is available online at smu.edu/artsresearch, was created by integrating organizational and market-level data and assesses the industry from multiple perspectives, including sector/art form, geography, and size of the organization.The report is the first of its kind for the arts.
The National Center for Art Research is helmed by faculty at Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts and Cox School of Business in collaboration with the Cultural Data Project and a number of other national organizations. The Center’s first study was able to determine the extent to which managerial and artistic experience and decision-making impact an organization’s performance.
The National Center for Art Research’s director, Dr. Zannie Voss, said, “In this first report we took a deep dive into eight of the areas of performance identified, and by studying these averages, tried to answer the question ‘all else being equal, what makes one arts organization more successful than another?’ Some of the findings were as one would expect, but we did find some surprises. Perhaps more than any other industry, arts organizations are driven by managerial and artistic expertise. Being able to estimate the value of this expertise in an organization’s performance is the single most valuable result of our first study.”
In 2014, the Center will partner with IBM to launch an interactive dashboard that will be accessible to arts organizations nationwide. Participants will be able to enter information about their organizations and see how they compare to the highest performance standards for similar organizations. The website will also foster public discussion of best practices and solutions and offer an online resource library with helpful tools and templates.
