How do we understand, measure and express the value of the arts? What contribution do the arts make to society, the economy, health and wellbeing, education, innovation and civic life? The Arts Value Forum at the Canberra Theatre Centre brought together leading experts and practitioners in health, economics, culture and the arts to explore these questions—including Culture Counts CEO Michael Chappell.

John Berger’s 1972 essay, Ways of Seeing explores the idea that where and when we look at something directly affects what we see. Our evaluation of the artistic quality and impact of an artwork is fundamentally influenced by context. This blog post explores how these relationships manifest. By filtering and analysing data by different event and audience classifications we gain significant insight into if and how different contexts shape experience.

Many organisations we work with have limited staff resources and competing evaluation needs. Along with cultural data, they must collect social, economic and tourism impact data for events. This has encouraged us to broaden our outcomes framework in conjunction with the Cultural Development Network (CDN), so organisations can measure the impact of arts and culture across economic, social, civic, environmental and cultural domains.

Australian artists and galleries achieved record visitor numbers in 2016. Patricia Piccinini had the second most popular exhibition globally and the NGV was 19th most visited gallery in the world. While visitor numbers reflect healthy audience engagement they are just one of the many measures of success. Alison Lasek, Marketing and Client Manager, looks at how organisations can tell a stronger story about audience engagement.

What would we measure? How would we measure it? Art criticism is subjective, not objective. How do we remain subjective and still make meaningful measurements? Chris McCormick, Chief Technology Officer, goes back to the conception of Culture Counts and offers new insights into the organisation and the way our system has developed.

We’ve all had experiences that move or inspire us, make us reflect on a work’s relevance to the world, or those that leave us wanting to know more about the creator of that work. This blog explores the challenges of describing these experiences clearly and consistently to produce important insight for the sector.

Ever thought about sharing your results with like-minded organisations? Culture Counts’ cultural clients, both old and new, are starting to act in interesting ways around shared approaches to evaluation and benchmarking.

Running an effective product pipeline means investing in the right tools for the job, and for us, that’s all about enabling staff to use the the tools that they feel most comfortable with (both digital and physical). To give some insight into how we work, we thought we’d share some of our favourites.

“Impact investing” is a buzz phrase amongst some of the world’s biggest financial institutions. Basically, it’s all about investing in things that not only provide a financial return but also produce significant and measurable social and economic impacts.

There seems to be some fears floating around the arts sector about quantitative measurement of audience experience. Will the use of metrics mean that all of the rich thoughts and feelings generated by arts and culture are reduced down to boring, meaningless numbers?