The National Endowment for the Arts recently released the arts related results of the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. Unlike the Survey on Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) which asks people about their behavior across the previous 12 months, the Pulse Survey asks about people’s behavior in the previous 30 days. They say this provides greater detail of the rate at which people are engaging with arts related activities post-Covid. The Pulse survey was conducted between April – July 2024.

There is both a summary press release and a more detailed report available.

In addition to asking people how often they engaged in arts attendance and arts creation and their perception of the availability of arts and cultural amenities in their community, the Pulse Survey specifically asked new questions related to loneliness and social connection. The data shows the response of attendees, creators, non-attendees, and non-creators to questions about participation in social clubs/activities, phone conversations with family and friends, and spending time with family and friends.

I was somewhat perplexed that they did not address how age and other demographic factors may have impacted whether people spoke on the phone with family and friends as they did with other categories. They only broke down the results in terms of attendees vs non-attendees and creators vs. non-creators.

In terms of loneliness and social support, for the most part those that attended events experienced less loneliness than non-attendees and creators experienced it less than non-creators. Similarly, those who perceived themselves as having access to arts activities also felt loneliness less than those who perceived themselves as having low or no access.

However, there was a noted exception in the creator category:

Adults who created art were more likely to report experiencing loneliness “sometimes” or “rarely” (31.9 and 34.7 percent, respectively) than were those who had not created art (27.2 and 32.2 percent, respectively). However, at least some level of loneliness proved more familiar to creators of art than to non-creators. That is, 18.4 percent of those who created art in the last month reported “never” experiencing loneliness, versus 27.3 percent of those who did not create art.

There were somewhat similar results related to feeling social and emotional support. Those who attended or created art or those who felt they had high access to arts resources felt a greater level of support than those who didn’t attend, create or have access to resources.

Again there was a difference on the absolute end of the scale among creatives (my emphasis)

Adults who created art were more likely to say they usually received social support than those who did not create art (38.8 percent compared to 30.2 percent for non-creators “usually” receiving support). Arts creators were also less likely to say they never received support (4.1 percent versus 10.1 percent of non-creators). However, non-creators were more likely to say they “always” receive social and emotional support than were arts creators (28.8 percent of creators versus 24.6 percent of non-creators).

While I have some theories bumping around my head, I am not exactly sure what all the implications of that might be. On a very basically level of course, the creative act will always require a degree of loneliness associated with it. Even if you are in a large orchestra, there is a lot of time spent practicing alone. Even in a small music group the folks writing the words and lyrics may feel isolated from other members of the group. And the creative who hasn’t felt they don’t have social and emotional support for their endeavors are few indeed.

Museums As Progress sponsored a talk with John Falk today on a chapter from his upcoming book Leaning Into Value: Becoming a User-Focused Museum.

The chapter  addressed the value of data to museums, but I was obviously approaching it from the perspective of the value of data for all sorts of organizations. Falk mentioned many museums aren’t really clear about what to measure. They often don’t understand what data points matter most to their organization.

He acknowledged most institutions don’t have the resources to have a data focused team on staff or engage an entity to help them collect and manage their data. He felt there must be a collective effort through some of the larger museum service and advocacy institutions to collect some of this data. Though at the same time, individual entities must work on collecting data that is specifically relevant to their communities.

A person attending the session asked how organizations can survive and thrive executive leadership transitions. Falk’s response was that middle managers needed to identify the data that is most persuasive to leadership, not just colleagues and one’s self. He noted that the financial bottom line is often the most persuasive factor for executive leadership so you often have to show how your ideas and data will advance that concern.

This suggestion gave me a little pause because it felt like it reinforces short term goals over long term changes to culture that will have impact. One of the real issues facing both commercial and non-profit entities is the adoption of the flavor of the week. This also seemed to advocate for catering to the HiPPO in room (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).

I am not sure that Falk was advocating for catering to the highest paid person’s opinion because the conversation soon turned to the need to break down internal organizational silos. People mentioned that often data is difficult to acquire because internal parties gatekeep access to it. Falk said that leadership is responsible for opening access to data across the organization both in the direction of top down, from the bottom up, and internal to each department pressing to de-silo that information. There is a need to share data and understand each other’s data.

When asked what the most desirable qualities of a museum leader were, Falk said it was a degree of numeracy. He said people didn’t need to be statisticians or a data wonk, but needed to at least appreciate the value of data in decision making. Ideally they should have some ability to analyze and employ data. Discussing an example from his book where someone thought the most important knowledge set for a museum executive was art history, Falk said you can hire people who know art history but as an executive leader you need to know how to work with data.

He also felt it was important for a leader to have the capacity and judgment to hire staff who possessed the people skills to serve an audience. Museum success is all about people after all so you need a staff which is adept at creating a welcoming environment for attendees.

As much as the conversation for the session revolved around data, Falk emphasized the value of co-creation with the community. He said you can build an exhibition designed to achieve certain learning objectives and it might meet those objectives. However, it is far, far, far better to go to the community and say we can create an exhibition around X subject or concept, what would you want this exhibit to help you learn about this subject? While this is much more time and labor intensive, Falk felt that the outcomes are far greater when the end user is involved with the co-creation.

I felt like this really dovetailed well with my post yesterday about the length and content of labels in museum exhibits. One of the final passages I quoted from the article mentioned that museum staff would observe how people interacted with labels and question them about whether they derived the information they wanted from the labels. I think that is probably a good practice regardless, but it might not be necessary to revise the labels so much if some of the target audience had provided input about desired outcomes of an exhibition.