Recently, I had the privilege of speaking with Patrick Fisher, CEO of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, about their journey in leveraging data to gain deeper insights into their vibrant arts community.
The Challenge:
Data That’s “Old the Moment You Get It”
Patrick painted a familiar picture of the hurdles many arts agencies face in assessing sector health. Before their collaboration, the Arts Council’s data collection was a significant undertaking. “The data is often old the moment you get it,” Patrick emphasized, highlighting the inherent obsolescence of many traditional research methods. Beyond being outdated, these processes were “expensive to lead year after year”, consuming valuable time and resources.
A major pain point stemmed from relying on self-reported information. Organizations would fill out “a series of blank form fields with a definition beside them”, which didn’t always align with their actual accounting practices. This led to inconsistencies, errors, and a considerable “time commitment” for the nonprofits themselves. Patrick recounted a personal anecdote where a lack of proper fields made it seem like his organization was incurring a massive deficit when they weren’t. This user-generated data also lacked consistency over time, especially with team transitions, making it nearly impossible to analyze trends or identify outliers.
The Shift:
Towards Timely, Standardized, and Actionable Insights
The Arts Council sought a solution that could provide timely, accurate, and standardized data. ArtPulse, their collaboration with EcoMap, is currently in a pilot phase to optimize the dashboard to benefit user experience and ensure accuracy.
Patrick noted several key benefits of this approach:
- Cost and Time Efficiency: AI “drives down the time commitment, which “drives down the cost”
- Reduced Error Potential: By pulling from standardized public resources, it “is reducing possibilities of error because it’s not self-reported”.
- Consistency and Trend Analysis: The beauty of 990 forms is their consistent structure across organizations and over time. This allows for unbiased trend analysis and “a degree of assuredness that there’s accuracy there”.
This new approach provides insights at both the broad sector level, crucial for advocacy, and the granular organizational level, offering “specific data that relates to them and their operations”.
Empowering the Arts Ecosystem:
Beyond the Numbers
The impact of this data goes far beyond mere reporting; it’s about fostering strategic conversations and responsible growth. The dashboard helps organizations assess their “wellness and sustainability,” guiding priorities beyond just program delivery. For example, it can inform leadership transitions by highlighting needed skill sets like fundraising if revenue diversity is low. It even prompts realistic conversations about liquidity, helping organizations prioritize unrestricted funding over endowments if short-term stability is an issue.
Patrick highlighted how data can inform critical decisions like partnerships and mergers, allowing organizations to see how they truly compare and align, ensuring a merger genuinely improves a situation rather than just being a “band-aid”. At the sector level, this data provides powerful evidence for advocating for change, such as more “trust-based philanthropy” if grants are heavily restricted for organizations facing liquidity issues.
The Arts Council sees its role as a facilitator, not a direct financial advisor. They plan to use the dashboard to have annual “trend conversations” with nonprofits and their boards, helping them identify priorities and connecting them with consultants and funding through initiatives like a “repositioning fund”.
“Ecosystem Intelligence”:
A New Paradigm
Patrick emphasized a shift from viewing the arts as a “sector” to an “ecosystem”. An ecosystem highlights “how all of the parts relate to one another…what you do impacts what I do, and what I do impacts what you do,” underscoring “mutually beneficial relationships as well as mutually devastating relationships”. A healthy ecosystem requires healthy individual organizations, and data provides the “responsibility for intervention so that you can nurture the wellness and health of the ecosystem”.
While financial indicators are a crucial starting point, Patrick envisions expanding “ecosystem intelligence” to include operational, governance, and programmatic indicators, such as employer-covered health benefits or the disparity gap between highest and lowest paid staff. This holistic view is essential for “telling the holistic picture” of ecosystem health, including “equity within your operations”.
Advice for Peers:
Partner, Pilot, and Interpret
For other arts agencies considering similar data initiatives, Patrick offered valuable advice:
- Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: “Don’t feel like you have to create the wheel…turn to experts in your field”. Building in-house solutions can be costly and hard to sustain.
- Prioritize Partnerships: Collaborating with experts “reclaims” internal capacity and avoids the pitfalls of internal development, like intellectual property concerns.
- Create Room for Failure with Low Costs: the Arts Council kept pilot costs low to allow for unbiased assessment, avoiding the “sunk cost” trap that can lead to clinging to ineffective solutions.
Finally, Patrick foresees a growing need for professionals who can interpret this “ecosystem intelligence”. While larger organizations may have in-house capacity, smaller ones often lack it, making the ability to “take the data and make it digestible in like one page or less with a clear here’s what your priority next step should be” incredibly valuable. This suggests a future career path for “chief analyst” roles or independent consultants bridging the gap between data and actionable strategy.
The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council’s journey highlights how strategic data partnerships can transform understanding and support within the arts sector, fostering a more resilient and vibrant cultural landscape.
