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Executive Benchmark
ABA Research Team
Earned Revenue Sources- F&B and Rentals

Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored earned revenue sources outside of ticket sales, with a special focus on food and beverage services and rental opportunities.

Executive Benchmark
ABA Research Team
AI & Digital Usage

Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored the Digital and AI usage in the arts and cultural sectors.

Executive Benchmark
ABA Research Team
Financial Health, Budgets & Operating Costs

Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored the financial health of organizations, looking back at operating costs and budgets for 2024 compared to the previous year, and projections for 2025.

Signature Study
ABA Research Team
The Compelling Employer: Attracting and ...

This season ABA is launching The Compelling Employer, a groundbreaking research initiative examining the employment preferences of arts and culture employees across genres and geographies. This work will build on ABA’s 2022 work on The Compelling Offer. The pandemic may be behind us, but staff acquisition and retention remain core industry-wide concerns. ABA is revisiting this initiative to understand how staff preferences have changed and what organizations can do to attract and retain high performers.

Our Compelling Employer survey uses conjoint analysis (also known as trade-off analysis) to give arts and culture leaders a much clearer picture of what employees want in a job, and what they are willing to trade off to get it. This newly updated survey will seek to understand what staff value in their managers, pay structures, culture and office environments. In addition, we will profile best practices in improving manager quality, shifting to pay for performance, and cultivating culture change from both inside and outside the arts and culture industry.

The Compelling Employer: Attracting and Retaining Arts and Culture Professionals
Signature Study
ABA Research Team
Driving Attendance Post Pandemic: Marketing ...

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.

Driving Attendance Post Pandemic: Marketing Practices that Accelerate Audience Growth

2023

Marketing Pulse Survey

As many organizations finalize their upcoming fiscal year budgets, we wanted to learn about how organizations are planning their marketing budgets - looking across overall budgetary spends, and specific areas of investment such as digital marketing efforts. Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark asked arts leaders about marketing budgets and changes due to the increased importance of digital.

Mid-Year Strategy and Finances

As we move into the second half of 2023, we wanted to check in on how arts institutions are faring, the overall state and sentiment about the last 6 months, how organizations are preparing for the remainder of the year, and the overall outlook for the sector. Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark asked arts and culture leaders to share the current state of their organizations’ ticket/membership sale health, operating budgets, and financial forecasts.