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Executive Benchmark
ABA Research Team
Marketing Spend and Return on Investments

Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored marketing spend and return on investments across different marketing campaigns and strategies.

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.

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

Future Priorities in Arts Organizations

As arts organizations safely reopen their doors this fall, arts leaders must leverage this unique moment of return. To help think forward to competing stakeholder demands in a post-pandemic environment, our recent Arts Executive Poll surveyed leaders at arts organizations to understand how they are strategizing for the long-term future.

Benchmarks on Ticket Sale Tactics

As arts organizations open their doors and reopen to the public in this new season, ticket sales are top of mind for audience return. To understand how teams are innovating on this front, our recent Arts Executive Poll surveyed leaders at arts organizations about how they are implementing affordable ticket initiatives to remain accessible to a broad audience and offering complimentary tickets to help fill out houses and venues.

Team Morale

With the start of September, arts organizations are re-centering themselves and launching new seasons once again. To provide a check-in during these beginning stages, our recent Arts Executive Poll surveyed leaders of arts organizations about the prevailing mood among staff as well as ways that leaders are keeping teams motivated amidst the uncertainty of the pandemic.

Redefining the Donor Value Proposition: Accelerating the Donor Shift to a More Philanthropic Mindset

Redefining the Donor Value Proposition: Accelerating the Donor Shift to a More Philanthropic Mindset

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.

Returning To “Normal”

As vaccine roll-outs continue across the world, arts organizations are starting to move more actively into "return-mode." But with the promise of large in-person gatherings comes the challenges of planning for both safety and org success. Our recent Arts Executive Poll surveyed leaders on a variety of topics related to bringing staff, artists, and audiences/visitors back.