Many organizations have increased their commitments towards their communities in recent years. We wanted to check in on these efforts, looking across institutional priorities and ongoing program initiatives, as well as staffing and volunteer management practices. Our latest arts leader survey asked arts leaders to benchmark themselves about the current state of community engagement and volunteer management.
Highlights from the survey include:
Community engagement has become a pillar for many organizations, with a majority of organizations building into strategic plans and increasing budget allocated to community activities.
Primary and secondary school education is the most popular focus of organizations’ community engagement programming, followed by adult classes.
Qualitative data and anecdotes from participants and partners, along with overall attendance numbers, are the most-used forms of data to measure success of programs.
Most organizations require volunteers to attend an in-person training session, but a majority do not require participants to re-train to stay on the volunteer roster after periods of inactivity.
