Arts & Culture Benchmark Report 2023-24

Overview

Background

The Culture Counts Evaluation Platform has helped arts and cultural organisations measure outcomes associated with events, activities and services since 2012.

Culture Counts supports arts and culture clients to easily and consistently collect data from a range of stakeholders, including participants, audiences, visitors and businesses.

This benchmark report provides a snapshot of results from a selection of cultural sector organisations in 2023-24.

A key focus of the data is the important outcomes generated by arts and cultural organisations through their evaluated events, programs and activities. It also provides insights into the demographic mix, location and experience of respondents.

Organisations in the arts and culture sector can use this benchmark data to gain confidence in choosing the right metrics, compare against their own results, and set KPIs for the coming year. Contact us to discuss incorporating benchmarks into your reporting.

Evaluation Services

Culture Counts provides a suite of evaluation services to help organisations measure outcomes aligned with cultural, social, economic and community outcomes. This includes reviewing the strategic objectives and goals of organisations and aligning them with appropriate outcome areas and evaluation measures within a Strategic Alignment document. This process ensures that all evaluations are designed and executed in accordance with the agreed strategic direction and all data collected can be linked to important and agreed success factors.

Culture Counts helps organisations to plan best-practice evaluations through the creation of evaluation schedules, development of survey templates, distribution plans and the ongoing monitoring of response rates throughout the survey period. Evaluation planning maps out the data collection strategy across programs to ensure a rigorous process is followed and the broad range of benefits and impacts of programs are captured.

Culture Counts can assist in drafting survey templates for review by organisations using measures provided and agreed as part of the strategic alignment exercise. A selection of surveys can be prepared to enable feedback to be collected in an easy and streamlined way from public event attendees, participants, visitors, businesses and other stakeholders.

Culture Counts surveys typically contain a range of ‘dimension’ questions developed and tested in collaboration with industry, practitioners and academics to measure the impact and value of arts and cultural events and activities. Dimensions are assessed using a Likert scale, in which respondents move a slider to indicate whether they agree or disagree with the dimension statement. An example of this question format as used in the Culture Counts survey tool is displayed below.

Dimension Framework and Usage

The Culture Counts Evaluation Platform contains in-built sets of metrics, designed to measure outcomes associated with cultural and community experiences. Metrics have been developed, tested and refined with the sector, and enable easy data collection from audiences and communities. The use of standardised language and consistent collection methodologies enables data to be aggregated, providing this opportunity for sector benchmarking and big data insights.

Culture Counts' metrics have been adapted from the Cultural Development Network (CDN)'s measurable outcomes schema, enabling measurement across cultural, social, community, environmental and economic domains. By using an agreed set of outcomes across these domains, it is possible for all investments or programs to be evaluated using the same criteria, to identify where the greatest change is occurring and where best to direct limited funds to achieve maximum benefit.

The table below shows the Dimensions and Statements used by the selected arts and cultural organisations in 2023-24. The table also illustrates the number of surveys in which each Dimension is included, and the number of survey responses captured across the selected surveys for each Dimension. To be included in the benchmark set, a Dimension had to be used in at least 10 surveys.

*'Benchmark' refers to the median survey result in the Arts & Culture benchmark dataset.

Outcome Area Descriptions

The table below describes each of the 19 outcome areas within the framework. These reflect the changes that arts and culture organisations seek to generate for their communities through the services, facilities and experiences they provide.

Dimension Outcomes

In 2023-24, selected arts and cultural organisations collected 93,181 survey responses from more than 500 surveys. From these, 464,994 dimension question responses were recorded. This provides a very comprehensive picture of the outcomes generated by arts and culture organisations from their evaluated activities, and a strong set of benchmarks to which they can compare their own results and set targets.

The set of charts below show the typical range of survey results for each dimension question, grouped into their appropriate domains. This range is known as the interquartile range, and represents the "typical" result that can be benchmarked against. The solid line is the median result. Additionally, benchmark ranges are provided by artform, enabling organisations to benchmark against others from their relevant category, or from organisations across the entire sector. You can toggle on or off the individual survey results (coloured by artform) using the checkbox below the 'Overall' chart to see the spread of results that go into making the benchmark range.

Respondent Profile

Gender, age, postcode and identity information is collected in a standard way via the Question Bank feature in the Culture Counts survey builder. This enables demographic data to be aggregated across the database and filtered to understand trends and differences in engagement and outcomes by demographic.

The charts below show the gender, age and identity breakdown of arts and culture survey respondents in 2023-24. Over 25,000 respondents provided their gender, over 53,000 provided their age, and over 15,000 provided their identity classification. The results are also compared by artform.

Gender

Age Group

Identity

Experience

The Culture Counts Evaluation Platform contains a Question Bank of in-built questions that sits alongside the outcomes dimensions. These cover topics such as tourism, demographics, marketing and patron behaviour, using best-practice question formats. Two experience questions have been used by organisations consistently for many years, and are designed to measure overall experience and likelihood of recommendation (net promoter score). The consistent format enables data to be aggregated for benchmarking and filtered to understand trends and differences across variables.

The first chart below shows the typical range of results for arts and culture surveys with respondents who had an excellent, good, neutral, poor or terrible experience with the event, activity or service that was being evaluated. Almost 200 surveys, and more than 31,000 responses were collected. Results are also provided by artform.

Overall Experience

Would Recommend (Net Promoter Score)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a standard marketing metric that can be calculated by grouping respondents who answer the question "How likely is it that you would recommend this event to a friend or colleague?" into categories of 'Promoter', 'Neutral', and 'Detractor'. The NPS value is the proportion of Promoters minus the proportion of Detractors, and can be between -100 and +100.

The chart below shows a benchmark range of NPS scores for arts and culture organisation surveys in the Culture Counts database, also broken down by artform. This dataset contains over 200 surveys, and over 46,000 individual responses to the net promoter score question.

Marketing and Tourism

The Culture Counts Question Bank contains a marketing question that asks respondents how they heard about an event, activity or program. In 2023-24, 30 arts and cultural organisation used this standard question in their surveys, collecting over 5,500 responses. This data can assist organisations in using or promoting particular marketing methods that generate the greatest awareness or engagement.

Organisations carrying out economic impact assessment or wanting to understand the tourism impact of their events or activities ask respondents for their location of residence. More than 16,000 responses were collected in 2023-24. This measures the percentage of respondents living in the local government area, as well as those travelling from the wider metropolitan area, other parts of the state, interstate or overseas. Events with greater proportions of non-local attendees often bring additional expenditure into the local area, which can in turn boost the local economy. This data can assist organisations in understanding the typical tourism attraction of local activities and consider ways to increase the tourism and economic impact of certain events.

The first chart below shows the benchmark range for each marketing method as a respondent's primary source of information about the activity being evaluated. The second chart shows the benchmark range for respondents' primary location of residence.

Marketing

Tourism

First Nations

Australia has a long and rich history of arts and culture, and First Nations peoples have been creating art in many forms for thousands of years. Currently, a range of organisations use Culture Counts to collect data on the outcomes of their programs and events across a range of disciplines.

To highlight these outcomes, we have split First Nations organisations into their own section. Despite coming from different artforms, we have found consistencies amongst the Dimension statements chosen.

Dimension Outcomes

Respondent Profile

Gender

Age Group

Experience

Overall Experience

Would Recommend (Net Promoter Score)

Talk to us

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Data and Insights by

This report has been prepared by Culture Counts.

We would like to thank the following organisations for providing the images in this report:

Strange Festival (Photo: SoCo Studios)
Windmill Pictures (Photo: Claudio Raschella)
L2R Dance (Photo: NamChop)
Everybody Now! (Photo: Claudio Kirac Artwork Agency)
Victoria's Pride (Photo: Suzanne Balding)
SxSW Sydney (Photo: Jodie Barker)
The Push (Photo: Tanya Volt)
Ballarat International Foto Biennale (Photo: Garth Oriander)
West Australian Opera (Photo: West Beach Studio)
Fremantle Arts Centre (Photo: Pixel Poetry)
Artrage (Photo: Miles Noel Photography)

This report has been prepared by Culture Counts.

We respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognise the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, and to Elders past and present.