Local Government Benchmark Report 2022-23

Overview

Background

The Culture Counts Evaluation Platform has helped over 80 governments measure outcomes associated with cultural and community experiences.

Culture Counts supports local government clients to easily and consistently collect data from a range of stakeholders, including communities, audiences, visitors and businesses.

This benchmark report provides a snapshot of results from local government data collected throughout Australia in 2022-23. It shows the total number of local government sector surveys and responses in the Culture Counts database, and insights into the demographic mix, location and experience of respondents. A key focus of the data is the important outcomes generated by local governments through their evaluated events, programs and activities.

Local governments 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 council online insights reports.

Evaluation Services

Culture Counts provides a suite of evaluation services to help councils and their libraries measure outcomes aligned with community, place and cultural planning policies. This includes reviewing the strategic objectives and goals of councils 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 councils 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 councils 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 community and cultural events and activity. 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. Outcomes data collected in Culture Counts can be fed back into Takso, CDN's outcomes planning platform, to demonstrate the success of projects or identify areas for improvement, forming an evidence base of learnings for the sector.

The table below shows all Dimensions and Statements used by local governments in the 2022-23 evaluation period. Note that the non-outcome domains of Placemaking and Library contain sets of Dimensions but do not have associated Outcome Areas. The table also illustrates the number of surveys in which each Dimension is included, and the number of survey responses captured across all surveys for each Dimension.

Outcome Area Descriptions

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

Dimension Outcomes

In the 2022-23 financial year, local governments collected 39,600 survey responses from more than 890 surveys. From these, over 135,000 dimension question responses were recorded. This provides a very comprehensive picture of the outcomes generated by local governments from their evaluated activities, and a strong set of benchmarks to which councils can compare their own results and set targets.

The first set of charts below show the percentage level of agreement for each dimension question, grouped into their appropriate domains using the dropdown filter. Additionally, results are provided by State and Nationally, enabling councils to benchmark against others from their relevant state, from other states, or from Australia as a whole.

The second set of charts provides the average (mean) result for each dimension question, grouped in the same way as the stacked bar charts.

Stacked level of agreement

Change the Domain being viewed via the dropdown selection above.

Dimension Averages

Change the Domain being viewed via the dropdown selection above.

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 all local government survey respondents in 2022-23. Over 19,000 respondents provided their gender, 22,000 provided their age, and 10,000 provided their identity classification. The results are also compared by state.

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 set of charts below shows the percentage of respondents across all local government surveys in 2022-23 who had an excellent, good, neutral, poor or terrible experience with the event, activity or service that was being evaluated. Over 17,000 responses were collected. Results are also provided by state.

The second set of charts shows the percentage of respondents that would recommend the event, activity or service being evaluated to a friend or colleague. Respondents giving a score of 9 or 10 are classified as promoters, a score of 7 or 8 is considered passive, and scores of 0 to 6 are classified as detractors. A net promoter score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Over 16,000 respondents indicated their likelihood of recommending the evaluated activity.

Overall Experience

Would Recommend (Net Promoter Score)

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 2022-23, over 400 local government surveys used this question, collecting over 13,000 responses. The data can assist councils in using or promoting particular marketing methods that generate the greatest awareness or engagement.

Local governments 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 11,000 responses were collected in 2022-23. 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 councils in understanding the typical tourism attraction of local government activities and consider ways to increase the tourism and economic impact of certain events.

The first charts below show the percentage of respondents that selected each marketing method as their primary source of information about the activity being evaluated. The second charts show the percentage of respondents living in each location of residence.

Marketing

Tourism

Talk to us

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Data and Insights by

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.