This is be a sobering time to reflect on what the general public think about the arts and what value they find in it. In 2019, Culture Counts presented some initial research at the RMIT Cultural Value Forum. A summary of this research is available here.

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else." - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

One common question that we hear is if surveys are truly representative of the views of an entire audience. This is a wonderful question that gets to the heart of statistics! Is the data 'true'? We thought we'd have a look at our big data set and see what came out!

Culture Counts’ new Client Manager Natasha Mian shares some reflections on the history of museums and their changing role and influence today. Natasha has worked in a variety of arts and cultural organisations in Melbourne and London, most recently in Development roles where her interest in advocacy for the arts has grown and lead her to join the Culture Counts team.

Now is a great time to take a few minutes out of our busy lives and ask yourself not only about your own mental health, but the impact your organisation’s activities have the mental health of its audience/participants. In this blog article, Culture Counts' Kathryn O'Brien reflects on the significance of Mental Health Week, and how our relationship with art - namely music - can impact our wellbeing.

Kathryn recently joined Culture Counts’ Melbourne team as a Client Relationship Officer. Prior to joining, she worked for a major performing arts company across the operations, artistic, education and community outreach teams. She has also worked in different types of libraries, including the specialist library for the arts company, public and academic libraries. Today, she talks about libraries and their ever-changing role in today's world.

Sue Williamson, Arts Council England's Director Libraries and Birmingham, looks at how the libraries using the Impact and Insight toolkit are championing diversity, while re-defining what a library is, and what it can be.

​We’ve dug into our Culture Counts data set to identify how people hear about the events our clients put on. Here are some of our findings.

For those seeking to extract more meaning from any data they have at their disposal – or even just hoping to minimise the mental or cognitive effort required of the audience, be it stakeholders, clients, customers, or even your bosses! – Storytelling with Data is an invaluable resource.

It’s important your data is reliable if you want to make evidence-based decisions with confidence. A common roadblock to this is survey bias sneaking into evaluations and skewing results. We asked our resident Data Scientist to walk us through 6 common types of bias, and how to combat them.