The Compelling Employment Offer is a groundbreaking research initiative examining the employment-offer preferences of arts employees across genres and locations. ABA is using conjoint analysis (also known as trade-off analysis) in order to give arts leaders a much clearer picture of what employees want in a job, and what they are willing to trade off in order to get it. The results of conjoint analysis gives employers a map for deploying resources to create the most compelling employment offer possible using available resources.

Conjoint analysis is a form of statistical analysis that analyzes how individuals value different components of product offers. Particularly, this form of analysis can only be done through special modeling software, a technique that cannot be easily or cheaply done through typical regression or driver analyses. Organizations that deploy conjoint analysis in order to understand staff preferences about their employment offer can answer a whole range of questions that are difficult or impossible to assess accurately using other approaches. Particularly, conjoint analysis elucidates true preferences of respondents, forcing a series of trade-offs that separates out the “must haves” from the “nice to haves” and illuminates what is most critical to have in a compelling job value proposition.

Conjoint analysis generates two kinds of quantitative outputs that are extremely useful to anyone trying to allocate scarce resources in order to create the most perceived value for employees:

1. Importance Scores measure the relative importance that individuals place on different elements of the employment offer, making it possible to force-rank attributes of the value proposition and assess how much more individuals value certain attributes more than others.

2. Utility Scores measure the usefulness to an individual of different quantities of a given element of the employment offer.

Harvard Business Review provides a helpful in-depth overview of the technique, which you can read here.

All ABO member organizations can participate, at no charge. The survey will be open from June 25 through August 3, 2024.

This survey is meant for all full-time administrative staff and year-round part-time staff. Union staff and year-round contractors may also be included.

Depending on the size of your organization, we recommend the executive director or head of HR to communicate with staff about taking the survey.

ABA will contact you with detailed instructions, suggested scripting for your survey launch, and the link that your staff will use to take the survey.

For more information or any further questions, contact Rebecca Eldridge (Rebecca@abo.org.uk) or the ABA team (survey@advisoryboardarts.com).

• June 25–August 3, 2024: Survey is open to all ABO members.

• October 2024:

  • Digital report of the overall findings sent to all participants.

  • Unveiling of the key findings

We will not be collecting any individually identifiable data. All data will be collected anonymously and then will be grouped together to ensure confidentiality.

The deadline for participation in the survey is August 3, 2024.

Depending on the size of your organization, we recommend the executive director or head of HR to communicate with staff about taking the survey.

This survey is meant for all full-time administrative staff and year-round part-time staff. It is your choice to include year-round contractors. Please use our list of tested attributes in the survey language to help you decide which employees are relevant.

The survey will be deployed by the arts organization on behalf of ABA. We will provide suggested scripting for your survey launch and reminder emails with language that ensures the highest level of protection and confidentiality over your staff members’ responses.

The survey is set to be open from late-June through early-August 2024 for all participating organizations, with some flexibility around the timeline. For each organization, we recommend a timeline of 2 weeks upon the initial survey launch email. Within those two weeks we also recommend 2 reminder emails, for which ABA will communicate with you about and provide you suggested email scripting as well.

All participating organizations will receive a digital report of the overall results. Participating organizations that become ABA members will receive additional, in-depth access. For more on becoming an ABA member, click here or contact Nico Daswani at nico.daswani@advisoryarts.com.