Welcome, 2016! 2015 was an exciting year for Culture Counts and our member organisations and we can’t wait for another big year of growth and collaboration. Here is a quick recap of the past year:
ACE Quality Metrics Trial
UK National Portfolio Organisations and Major Partner Museums were invited to take part in a sector-wide trial of the Culture Counts platform from November 2015. Supported by Arts Council England, 150 organisations are using Culture Counts to measure the artistic quality of events until April 2016. The trial spans many art forms, including dance, theatre, visual arts, music, museums, literature, and combined arts.
WA Rollout
In 2015, Culture Counts became a formal part of the artistic assessment process in Western Australia, with many key WA organisations using the platform to measure and gather evidence for their Organisations Investment Program funding applications mid-year.
Queensland Pilot
Queensland was one of the first states to pilot Culture Counts in 2015, with sixteen events evaluated across twelve organisations between February and July 2015. The pilot captured over 2,000 public and 60 peer survey responses, contributing to a big database of sector insights.
Victorian Pilot
Creative Victoria sponsored a Culture Counts pilot from August to December 2015, in which 22 organisations evaluated events, exhibitions and festivals throughout metropolitan and regional Victoria. Culture Counts worked with these organisations to capture and interpret cultural value data for one or more significant events in 2015, with all organisations continuing to use the platform in 2016.
Development
Our development team was hard at work with extensive product features and enhancements, including:
- Introduction of the organisation dashboard, where users can manage their own event evaluations, creating, editing and distributing surveys
- A streamlined peer management system, in which survey invites can be sent to peer assessors directly from the dashboard, enabling tracking and follow ups
- A range of support options including handy walkthrough tips and explanations to help on-board new users
2016 Priorities
As we jump straight back into 2016, some of the key priorities for this year include:
- Adding key input/output data (such as attendance numbers and box office revenues) to evaluations via the dashboard, to compare and correlate with intrinsic opinion data
- Filtering and grouping evaluations by key characteristics (location, artform, size) to allow greater aggregation and sector benchmarking
- A range of new report charts, including time-series, event comparisons, and dimensions filtered by demographics and custom questions
- Survey builder improvements including the option to view and choose from recommended intelligence questions, ability to hide demographic questions and question logic
- Design improvements to improve navigation, including sorting and grouping of evaluations
- Improvements to the peer invite system including automated reminder emails for peer/self surveys
- Introduction of dimensions covering outcome areas in social and economic domains, enabling audiences to be surveyed about the impact of arts and culture in additional outcome areas through the survey tool
We look forward to working with and learning from fantastic cultural organisations around the world this year, and wish you all a very successful 2016.
