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Signature Research | Custom Research | Executive Benchmarks
Global Signature Research Initiatives
Membership-wide research initiatives designed to find breakthrough solutions to the issues that ABA members identify as their most relevant and challenging.
In our post-pandemic arts world, many arts organizations are discovering that most of the patrons that are going to come back have come back already. Even organizations with healthy audiences right now are facing challenging budgeting environments, so the need to build a new base of customers and to increase attendance by casual audiences and visitors is acute.
ABA is deploying a survey of marketing resource deployment, activities and other behaviors in order to assess quantitatively the marketing drivers behind healthy attendance.
At a time when the labor market is heating up, arts organizations must find ways to resonate better with the needs and expectations of employees in order to build employment offers capable of competing in a tight labor market.
The Advisory Board for the Arts used conjoint analysis (also known as trade-off analysis) in order to give arts leaders a much clearer picture of what employees want, and what they are willing to trade off in order to get it.
We surveyed more than 5,000 donors to arts organizations and interviewed over fifty development leaders from arts organizations around the world.
In our analysis, we found that donors clustered into three segments: Benefits Donors, Arts Lovers, and Community Donors.
We learned how organizations can engage the different categories of donors most effectively while contributing to community engagement.
Learning from the accelerated digital shift of the COVID-19 closures, our initiative examined how arts organizations can use digital content not only to build audiences and keep patrons loyal, but also to generate necessary funding for future activities.
While direct revenue may be less likely for new digital offerings, there are important benefits beyond earned income such as donation success, audience learning, and future value.
Custom Research Projects
Individualized research studies developed for a member organization or group of member organizations to answer their specific questions. The results are shared among the membership through anonymized reports (except in cases that require confidentiality).
Examples:
Description: We are working to design and facilitate a strategic planning process to coincide with the arrival of their new CEO. The scope includes defining the artistic vision and developing a growth strategy to increase the festival’s international presence whilst connecting with its local community. Through their ongoing membership, we are supporting the execution, implementation, and monitoring of the plan.
Member Genre: Festival
Region: North America
Date: Ongoing
Description: We design and analyze all post-performance surveys for them in order to understand why attendees choose the performance, the effectiveness of activities additional to performance and the overall satisfaction towards the audience experience.
Member Genre: Opera
Region: North America
Date: Ongoing
Description: Management Fundamentals is a series of interactive onsite or online trainings to help arts and culture leaders tune-up their managerial and coaching skills.
Covering a variety of topics from communication styles to managing difficult conversations, participants have the flexibility to work through the entire series or to select the sessions most relevant to them.
Member Genre: Multiple
Region: International
Date: Ongoing
Description: A museum ABA member in Switzerland wanted to better understand its visitors. For that purpose we developed an audience survey using the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework. JTBD is a marketing school of thought based on the premise that every consumer (visitor in case of a museum) wants to get a job done when they purchase something. Understanding what job a given visitor wants to get done when they visit the museum can help the museum to improve the way to attract and retain them.
Member Genre: Museum
Region: Europe
Date: January 2024
Description: An ABA member recently earned a grant to build a new media lab for their constituents, which drove ABA to explore practices for opening and keeping a publicly accessible media lab. To fully understand how a lab is built and managed, ABA identified nine organizations with lab spaces that explore the intersection between arts and technology. ABA interviewed five of these organizations and profiled the rest through public information.
Member Genre: Arts Center
Region: North America
Date: June 2023
Description: After an ABA member requested our support in proposing a new process for their annual review system, we gathered some key principles of performance reviews that organizations of any genre can use to engage team members around professional growth and development — without tying to promotions or compensation.
Member Genre: Performing Arts Center
Region: North America
Date: June 2023
Description: We helped them define their donor case and develop a one-year strategy and implementation plan, by conducting internal and external interviews, creating a donor survey and analyzing existing data.
Member Genre: Opera
Region: Europe
Date: May 2023
Description: We trained and managed a volunteer corps to collect feedback via on-site intercept survey during the festival, resulting in a 30% increase in number of responses from the organization’s best previous year.
Member Genre: Performing Arts Center
Region: North America
Date: May 2023
Description: We did a study to answer the following question: what is the optimal way to manage a large, geographically dispersed board? In particular, what are the characteristics and board-participation commitments that other organizations employ with such boards?
Member Genre: Opera
Region: North America
Date: March 2023
Description: We helped our member define and refine its customer journey maps for new and casual audiences through hands-on workshops and customized test-and-learn scenario development. Through use of our Arts360 predictive-modeling software tool, this member has discovered new audiences who are likely to be interested in their programs and has improved internal reporting capabilities on the demographics and customer behaviors of their existing audience.
Member Genre: Opera
Region: North America
Date: March 2023
Description: Per a request from an ABA Museum member, we set out to learn about the overall process of planning a museum expansion and renovation project, from building ideation and vision, to architect selection, space design, timeline and budgets. We spoke with 8 cultural institutions across the United States (including several university affiliated museums) that are either in-process or have recently completed major renovation and expansion projects to learn from their experiences and insights.
Member Genre: Museum
Region: North America
Date: February 2023
Description: We designed and analyzed a survey to understand why some attendees decided not to return. We looked at the history with arts and culture attendance of the person, the rationales for not attending, and what would make them return.
Member Genre: Music, Dance, and Theatre
Region: North America
Date: February 2023
Description: An inquiry from a Canadian-based ABA member about creating impact statements about their organization kicked off an ABA research effort to create an analysis tool to effectively store, manage, and utilize annual CADAC data.
Member Genre: Ballet
Region: North America
Date: February 2023
Description: We set out to learn more about best practices for cultural institutions undertaking capital projects that result in either partial or full building closures. We conducted in-depth interviews with 9 museums and performing arts institutions who had recently undergone construction work (or, in some cases, were in the middle of renovation projects) to learn about their common opportunities and challenges faced in this work.
Member Genre: Museum
Region: Europe
Date: December 2022
Description: At the request of an ABA opera member, we explored how organizations across the performing arts are envisioning and delivering their community engagement initiatives, as well as how they are staffing and funding these growing efforts. We organized our results into a qualitative report and a quantitative benchmark.
Member Genre: Opera
Region: North America
Date: December 2022
Description: To help our member achieve its goal of attracting a younger and more diverse audience, we helped them to understand best practices around the world both internally (e.g., hiring practices, training, decision making processes) and audience-facing (e.g., programming, visitor experience, communications).
Member Genre: Venue
Region: Europe
Date: October 2022
Description: We examined why and how institutions outside of the United States establish “Friends of” programs in the US to support development and identified best practices to make them successful.
Member Genre: Orchestra
Region: Europe
Date: September 2022
Description: An inquiry from an ABA member into how arts organizations should strategize the launch of a naming rights campaign kicked off an ABA research project that included data from our widespread arts executive poll, interviews with key institutions, and secondary research. Our research uncovered key strategies in determining the naming duration of various spaces/items, how to appeal to donors, the roll out of naming right initiatives, and more.
Member Genre: Performing Art Center
Region: Asia
Date: May 2022
Description: As part of their strategic planning process, we interviewed 22 music organizations, grant- making incubators, and fellowship programs to synthesize key elements of successful, artist-led community engagement programs. Our findings are helping our member develop a program that marries artistic inspiration to community needs and aligns those to the organization's overall mission and strategy.
Member Genre: Orchestra
Region: North America
Date: March 2022
Description: At the initiative of our member, we put together a consortium of seven other museums in Spain to coordinate a major research project. We interviewed twenty major museums and leading experts from around the world to answer the question of how museums can monetize digital opportunities and integrate their digital strategy into their overall mission.
Member Genre: Museum
Region: Europe
Date: March 2022
Description: A venue asked ABA to benchmark rentals from large venues, to understand relative income from resident companies, repeat bookers and other sources. We interviewed eight large performing arts venues across the US, Canada, and the UK to understand their rental philosophy and best practices.
Member Genre: Performing Arts Center
Region: Asia
Date: February 2022
Description: At the request of our member, we facilitated a series of roundtable discussions with executives of performing arts organizations in the United Kingdom and United States to identify opportunities to reduce the environmental impact and financial sustainability of touring.
Member Genre: Opera
Region: Europe
Date: September 2021
ABA Executive Benchmarks
The Advisory Board for the Arts offers biweekly arts and culture executive benchmark surveys on priority focus areas that are top-of-mind to leaders. Benchmark yourself against your peers by participating in surveys and gaining insights from the results. All data is published in our ABA Spotlight newsletter.
Recent Benchmarks
Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored the state of subscriptions and memberships at arts and cultural organizations.
Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored the management of education programs at arts and cultural organizations.
Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored the state of corporate fundraising at arts and cultural organizations.