Frequently Asked Questions
General Questions
What is The Compelling Employment Offer study?
The Compelling Employment Offer is a first-of-its-kind quantitative initiative examining the employment-offer preferences of arts employees across genres and regions. ABA will be 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.
What is a conjoint analysis?
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:
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.
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.
What is the timeline for the study?
Please refer to the following timeline for activity related to survey and activity related to the analysis of the survey data:
February 2022: Have interested organizations review survey language and pull survey participant data.
March 2022: Survey is launched, and remains open through the end of the month.
June 2022 [ABA MEMBERS ONLY]: Compelling Offer Summit. This multi-day, interactive online conference will include our robust analysis of the survey results, and overall findings of employee preferences across the arts industry.
August 2022: Participating organizations will receive anonymized raw data for their participants. ABA members receive specific cuts for different arts genres.
September 2022 [ABA MEMBERS ONLY]: Participating organizations will receive access to custom reporting tools to analyze their employee data (with guidance) as appropriate. ABA will also hold a session for participants who want a deeper dive into the overall industry-wide data.
September 2022: ABA will run a second round of the Compelling Offer survey for members who were unable to participate in the first round. Contact us if interested in participating.
What will happen with the employee data I provide?
Employee data will be deleted from Dropbox and any other place they are stored at the conclusion of the staff engagement study/survey participation or the end of the year, whichever comes first. ABA will keep the survey response data as long as needed, scrubbed of names and email addresses, with individual responses managed through unique identifiers.
Survey Launch & Completion Process
When is the deadline to participate in the research?
The deadline to formally commit to participating in the second round of the study is September 15, 2022
Which department should manage this internally?
We recommend either running this survey deployment through your HR or Finance function, as employee data needs to be pulled as part of the study.
Note: for US orgs and non-US orgs who can share data with us (see following questions), we also recommend working with staff members in payroll to help provide required portions of the data pull.
Who should I include in the survey?
This survey is meant for all full-time administrative staff and year-round part-time staff. It is your choice to include union staff or year-round contractors; please use our list of tested attributes in the survey language to help you decide which employees are relevant.
What information does ABA need from my organization for us to participate?
For US organizations and non-US orgs when appropriate: we will provide these organizations with a template spreadsheet with validated columns for both required and optional information. This information is crucial for later data analysis in conjunction with the survey responses and will help us with more specific data cuts. Required data includes items such as ID number, department, total annual compensation, birth year, and email. Optional data includes items such as full-time/part-time/contract, tenure in organization, gender, and job title. We also ask that you provide us a few data points on organization size and number of total employees. We will need this information by October 1, 2022 at the latest.
These organizations will be returned with individual survey links for each provided staff member in the list so we can associate survey responses on an individual level.
For non-US orgs observing data privacy laws: we will not ask for any identifying data pieces and will send a template spreadsheet only to ask about a few data points on organization size and number of total employees. We will need this information by October 1, 2022 at the latest.
These organizations will be returned with ONE general anonymous survey link that will be given to all of the eligible staff members at their organization.
What is the difference between deploying with individual links and deploying with one single link?
Individual links allow us to give staff a shorter survey. Instead of asking survey-takers to answer questions about demographic information such as job title, etc., we can link that information (received through the spreadsheet you provide us) back to their individual survey response after they’ve completed it.
Anonymous links – one single link that everyone in a given organization uses – are required in Europe to comply with GDPR. In this case, we ask a few demographic questions in the survey itself, but not so many that an individual can be personally identified.
For organizations outside of Europe, you may need to use an anonymous link if for some reason you cannot do a ‘mail merge’ for those individual links. We expect this to be rare. You would need to have the capability to ensure the right person gets the right link, to use individual links.
Who will send the survey to staff?
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. Deployment will require some mail merging of the survey link, so we defer to your organization over who would be the best contact to do that.
How long will the survey be kept open?
The survey is set to be open across October 2022 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.
Reporting Results
What data will I receive at the end of the study?
All participating organizations will receive the overall results as well as their raw data from the survey.
Do you have a question that was not answered here? Email Diana Wang at diana.wang@advisoryarts.com.