I had mentioned before that Colleen Dilenschneider was making weekly posts on an ongoing cycle of surveying about how Covid-19 is impacting intention to visit cultural organizations.
The post she made yesterday was especially interesting because she included a regional breakdown of attitudes. She grouped the different states according to similarity in attitude. She pointed out that while Washington, Oregon and California have similar attitudes, for some reason North Carolina residents are distinct from South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
For all her data sets, she provides survey results from the same time periods in 2019 as a basis for comparison. In 2019, the data for NC, SC, GA, & FL were roughly equal. This year the difference in attitude is much larger.
She hypothesizes that these differences result from the fact Covid-19 is not impacting every region equally and the public policy of each region also varies.
While the national data is helpful for a broad diagnosis of the sector as a whole, COVID-19 is not impacting regions equally at the moment. New York has seen over 3,500 deaths and is bracing for a particularly difficult week, but Georgia’s governor has reopened its beaches and South Carolina is one of the few states still holding out on a stay-at-home order at the time of the data collection. These sentiments may be informed by what’s happening on the ground (i.e., how dire is the situation in the local communities), and by prevailing public policies.
She says some of the good news is that the overall survey results are stable over the last couple weeks. If you look at the bar graphs, everyone, regardless of region expect a return to normalcy at the three month horizon onward.
Just in general, I think this survey data indicates something we have probably long suspected –that government policy at every level creates a context which impacts our successful operations. It isn’t just funding decisions, but the aggregate influence of policies that apply to everything from infrastructure, licensing, agriculture, food, housing, transportation, education, and on and on.
All the more reason to have close ties with your chamber of commerce, convention and visitors bureau to become aware of decisions that are being made. Look for opportunities to learn about and provide advocacy for areas of the local & regional economy that may not seem to have a direct impact on you. If you are on webinars with other local government, business and community leaders trying to figure out if you are eligible to apply for funding available to small businesses, take opportunity note of who is in the virtual room, especially if any appear across multiple sessions, with the goal of cultivating relationships at some point in the future.