The Compelling Employer is a groundbreaking research initiative examining the employment-offer preferences of arts employees across genres and locations. ABA is using conjoint analysis (also known as trade-off analysis) to give arts leaders a much clearer picture of what employees want in a job, and what they are willing to trade off in order to get it. The result of conjoint analysis gives employers a map for deploying resources to create the most compelling employment offer possible using available resources.

Conjoint analysis is a form of statistical analysis that analyzes how individuals value different components of product offers. Particularly, this form of analysis can only be done through special modeling software, a technique that cannot be easily or cheaply done through typical regression or driver analyses. Organizations that deploy conjoint analysis in order to understand staff preferences about their employment offer can answer a whole range of questions that are difficult or impossible to assess accurately using other approaches. Particularly, conjoint analysis elucidates true preferences of respondents, forcing a series of trade-offs that separates out the “must haves” from the “nice to haves” and illuminates what is most critical to have in a compelling job value proposition.

Conjoint analysis generates two kinds of quantitative outputs that are extremely useful to anyone trying to allocate scarce resources in order to create the most perceived value for employees:

1. Importance Scores measure the relative importance that individuals place on different elements of the employment offer, making it possible to force-rank attributes of the value proposition and assess how much more individuals value certain attributes more than others.

2. Utility Scores measure the usefulness to an individual of different quantities of a given element of the employment offer.

Harvard Business Review provides a helpful in-depth overview of the technique, which you can read here.

You can now register your interest in deploying the survey at your organization by registering here. Once registered, ABA will contact you with detailed instructions, suggested scripting for your survey launch, and the link that your staff will use to take the survey.

• September 23 – November 8: Register to participate in the survey

• October 15 – November 28: Deploy survey at your organization

• November 8: Deadline for registration

• December 6: Survey closes

• January–March 2025:

  • Digital report of the overall findings sent to all participants.

  • Unveiling of the key findings in a series of webinars

  • Customized, benchmarked participant report

  • Consultation with your ABA member advisor to explore the practical implications for your organization of the Compelling Employer insights and to create a plan of actionable strategies

We will not be collecting any individually identifiable data. All data will be collected anonymously and then will be grouped together to ensure confidentiality.

The deadline for participation in the survey is November 8, 2024.

Depending on the size of your organization, we recommend HR or Finance function to communicate with staff about taking the survey.

This survey is meant for all full-time administrative staff and year-round part-time staff. It is your choice to include unionized staff or year-round contractors. We will provide you with a list of tested attributes in the survey language to help you decide which employees to invite to participate. We recommend either running this survey deployment through your HR or finance function.

The survey will be deployed by the arts organization on behalf of ABA. We will provide suggested scripting for your survey launch and reminder emails with language that ensures the highest level of protection and confidentiality over your staff members’ responses.

The survey is set to be open from mid-October until the end of November for all participating organizations. For each organization, we recommend a timeline of 2 weeks upon the initial survey launch email. Within those two weeks we also recommend 2 reminder emails, for which ABA will communicate with you about and provide you suggested email scripting as well.

All participating members will receive the following:

• Customized, Benchmarked Participant Report

• Key Data Insights from the Global Membership

• Tools and Tactics to Improve Manager Quality

• Out-of-Industry Best Practices to Strengthen Talent Acquisition and Retention