Innovation to ensure culture counts

An app co-developed in WA could revolutionise the way organisations around the world measure the impact and intrinsic value of arts and culture programs. 

A software system co-created in Western Australia and the UK may provide an innovative solution to a perennial problem facing arts and culture organisations – the need to provide governments with real-time measurements of the benefits of financial support.

CBD-based business Culture Counts has developed a web-based evaluation application of the same name in a public-private partnership with the Department of Culture and the Arts (DCA).

The app allows organisations to track their performance via the survey-based system, which collects and combines real-time, standardised crowd-sourced feedback on elements such as relevance, captivation and connection, from the organisation and artists involved, as well as from the public.

Events or activities can also be measured over time and benchmarked against other organisations.

Culture Counts managing director Michael Chappell said the benefits and impact arts and cultural activities produced were often intrinsic.

As a result, he said the sector was vulnerable to efficiency dividends and funding cuts in times of austerity because it didn’t have evidence-based data.

“We looked all over the world for a system that could help measure this, but nothing existed out there,” Mr Chappell told Business News.

“So we made a prototype and that became Culture Counts.”

DCA director of arts and cultural development, Colin Walker, said the idea for the app emerged due to the need to provide a measure of quality in the arts, a major challenge the sector faced.

“Trying to get high-quality data on the impact of the arts was virtually impossible, for both artists and governments, making it tricky to justify any expenditure in this space,” Mr Walker told Business News. 

“The difficulty was quantifying that value in terms the government could understand; if they spent ‘x’, their dividend would be ‘y’.”

In 2011, the DCA contracted WA-based company Pracsys Economics, which Mr Chappell also heads, and the Intelligence Agency (UK) to undertake research into how a system could measure and generate data on the public value created by cultural experiences.  

In Australia, Mr Chappell said, the research found that less than 1 per cent of local government expenditure was spent on the evaluation of funded programs.

The software framework was developed after more than 120 consultations with artists and members from the sector, both locally and in the UK, about what quality meant to them, data collection, international testing and academic validation of standard quality metrics.   

“We have codified what the sector thinks quality means, and then offered those assessment dimensions back to them on a digital platform,” Mr Chappell said.

Since launching at the end of 2014 and undergoing pilot trials last year, the framework has been used by more than 360 organisations across Australia and the UK, including the Arts Council England, Arts Queensland, the Fremantle Arts Centre and Black Swan State Theatre Company.

Organisations in the US, Canada, Singapore and China have also expressed interest, with plans under way to develop a Chinese-language version.

Culture Counts is now part of the formal assessment process in WA through the DCA. It is free for affiliated state organisations and has already saved the sector close to $1 million on market research costs.

Mr Walker hopes the usage of Culture Counts will drive efficiencies and transparency for arts and cultural organisations, as well as for funding bodies.

“One of the reasons we did this was to try and deal with the issue of people who’ve never experienced an arts organisation making funding decisions (relating to those organisations), a particular problem with Federal funding,” Mr Walker said.

“Federal expenditure on WA over the last decade has had hardly any fluctuations year on year; we are well below our population percentage and you would expect some variation if we were on an equal playing field judged on quality. 

“We hope we can influence that debate.

"This provides an opportunity to give peers more information about things they haven’t experienced.”