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Executive Benchmark
ABA Research Team
HR Priorities, Trends & Practices

Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored HR policies, trends and practices at arts and cultural organizations.

Executive Benchmark
ABA Research Team
Board Governance

Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored board governance structures and procedures at arts and cultural organizations.

Signature Study
ABA Research Team
The Compelling Employer: Attracting and ...

This season ABA is launching The Compelling Employer, a groundbreaking research initiative examining the employment preferences of arts and culture employees across genres and geographies. This work will build on ABA’s 2022 work on The Compelling Offer. The pandemic may be behind us, but staff acquisition and retention remain core industry-wide concerns. ABA is revisiting this initiative to understand how staff preferences have changed and what organizations can do to attract and retain high performers.

Our Compelling Employer survey uses conjoint analysis (also known as trade-off analysis) to give arts and culture leaders a much clearer picture of what employees want in a job, and what they are willing to trade off to get it. This newly updated survey will seek to understand what staff value in their managers, pay structures, culture and office environments. In addition, we will profile best practices in improving manager quality, shifting to pay for performance, and cultivating culture change from both inside and outside the arts and culture industry.

The Compelling Employer: Attracting and Retaining Arts and Culture Professionals
Executive Benchmark
ABA Research Team
Community Engagement

Our latest ABA Executive Benchmark explored community engagement at arts and cultural organizations.

Signature Study
ABA Research Team
Driving Attendance Post Pandemic: Marketing ...

In our post-pandemic arts world, many arts organizations are discovering that most of the patrons that are going to come back have come back already. Even organizations with healthy audiences right now are facing challenging budgeting environments, so the need to build a new base of customers and to increase attendance by casual audiences and visitors is acute.

ABA is deploying a survey of marketing resource deployment, activities and other behaviors in order to assess quantitatively the marketing drivers behind healthy attendance.

Driving Attendance Post Pandemic: Marketing Practices that Accelerate Audience Growth

Education; Community Engagement and Learning

Community Engagement and Volunteer Management

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.

Education Programs

As schools and communities across the globe return to more pre-pandemic activities, arts organizations are looking to better serve their communities through education programs. Our latest arts leader survey asked arts leaders to benchmark themselves about the state of their current education programs, investments in digital education programs, as well as how revenues and costs around education programming have changed since pre-pandemic years (i.e., 2019).

Youth Education Programs (i.e., K-12)

With more mask mandates and COVID restrictions being lifted across the globe despite persistent cases, cultural organizations are reevaluating their K-12 education initiatives as they rebuild from programs adjusted during the pandemic. Our latest Arts Leader Survey asked arts leaders to benchmark themselves on changes to the structure of school programs surrounding education budgeting, strategies around student interactions, and operational policies regarding on-site and off-site visits.

Community Engagement

Community engagement, equity, and inclusion featured highly among arts leaders’ top priorities according to our 2022 Hot Topics survey, as arts organizations place increasing importance on relevance in their communities. Our latest Arts Executive Poll asked arts leaders to benchmark themselves on how they execute programs that engage diverse constituents in their communities.