How is Arts Vibrancy Calculated?

Arts and cultural organizations are deeply embedded in their communities. In calculating arts vibrancy, SMU DataArts combines data from nonprofit arts and cultural organizations with data for the communities in which they reside.[See endnote i] By geolocating organizations and linking them to their community’s characteristics in the data, we can identify factors that affect the health and sustainability of arts organizations. The ecosystem-level variables included in this report are important influences on a variety of financial, operating, and attendance outcomes for arts and cultural organizations.

When assessing a community’s vibrancy, we take a data-driven approach, drawing on 13 unique measures which cover aspects of supply, demand, and public support for arts and culture, and are adjusted for cost of living and for population size. With this index, our goals are to provide information about metrics that are meaningful and consequential, and to stimulate a conversation about how cities vary in their arts vibrancy and the forms vibrancy can take. Arts Provider metrics are a gauge of supply and include the number of independent artists, arts and culture employees, nonprofit arts and cultural organizations, and arts, culture, and entertainment firms in the community. Arts Dollar metrics represent a gauge of demand for nonprofit arts and cultural programming, including earned revenue from program activities, contributed revenue supporting the arts, total compensation to artists and staff, and total expenses. Government Support is a gauge of public support for arts and culture, captured as the number and dollar amount of state and federal grants and total government grant dollars in the community. Table 4 below includes additional details on what we measure and the sources of data for each variable.  We adjust revenue and expense figures by a cost-of-living index.

The index is created through a single factor score that combines all 13 of these inputs. The weight assigned to each of these 13 variables is determined by their relative explanatory power concerning the core concept of arts vibrancy. This arts vibrancy factor accounts for 48% of the variance in the underlying variables with factor loadings ranging from .13 to .67.  

 In the table below, the standardized scoring coefficients representing the relative weight of each variable on the arts vibrancy score is reported. This approach serves to enhance our measurement consistency, particularly when facing data availability delays or shifts in individual datasets from year to year. For context, prior to the 2023 index, we generated three separate factors (arts providers, arts dollars, and government support) and applied an a priori weighting scheme (45%, 45%, 10% - respectively) to each of those factors to create rankings. Starting in 2023, all 13 inputs were weighted through the empirical approach described above where the strength of the relationship between each item and the underlying factor determines the weights. 

TABLE 4: Index Components (all per capita measures) (see endnote iv)

*Adjusted by a cost-of-living index

For our community rankings, there are 947 unique MSAs and Metro Divisions, any ranking in the top 40 puts that community in the top 5% nationally. 

Rankings are ordinal measures. This provides the order of the results but no information about the degree of difference between the raw measures. This is an important distinction to keep in mind. For example, a community or state ranked in the top 40 on arts providers might feature a population that is 10% providers while the 41st place community has only 5% of the population who are providers and the 42nd place community has 4.7% providers. The degree of difference between the top 40 community and the 41st is much bigger than the difference between the top 40 community and 42nd community, and yet the ranking makes them appear to be evenly spread apart. 

How Can Arts Vibrancy Be Used?

The Arts Vibrancy Index (AVI) can help arts leaders, businesses, government agencies, funders, and engaged citizens understand the overall intensity and capacity of the community’s arts and culture sector. Past AVI reports have helped communities get the recognition they deserve from their mayors, city council members, and state legislators. Arts leaders have informed us that they use the AVI reports and interactive map on our website to consider where to relocate their operations and what markets are ripe for touring performances or exhibitions. Communities can benchmark themselves against an aspirational set of communities and understand what sets them apart by examining the underlying dimensions of demand, supply, and public support for arts and culture. Numerous funders have engaged with the AVI data to better understand how investments to increase arts vibrancy might be best directed in the communities they serve, given existing strengths and opportunities for improvement. The AVI’s multidimensional framework provides insights as to why two cities that seem very different on the surface might be close to one another in the ranking.

Additional Arts & Culture Ecosystem Resources 

There are valuable frameworks that chronicle a neighborhood’s cultural resources such as the Social Impact of the Arts Project’s Cultural Asset Index, the National Endowment for the Arts’ Exploring Our Town Projects, and the Baltimore-focused interactive tool GeoLoom. There are published rankings that assess the strength of arts and culture as part of a larger look at a city’s attractiveness and livability, and others that focus on the arts and cultural sector’s role as part of creative placemaking. We share some metrics with these other studies and tools but, in keeping with SMU DataArts’ mission, our ranking focuses solely on arts and culture with heavy emphasis on the nonprofit sector.

The measures are drawn from a review of the existing literature on arts and culture indicators and from our Model of the Arts & Culture Ecosystem (see Figure 2), which features a complex and interdependent set of relationships among: 1) artists and arts organizations; 2) their communities; and 3) government funding that influences the production and consumption of arts and culture.

FIGURE 2: Modeling the Arts & Culture Ecosystem

When we look at factors that affect the performance of arts and cultural organizations in our research, we sometimes include socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and other leisure activities like cinemas, professional sports teams, and zoos. We have intentionally omitted these factors from the AVI Index in order to focus the rankings as purely as possible on arts and cultural activity. It would be inequitable, for example, to penalize a community that is relatively low on per capita income but very strong on arts providers, or to elevate a community that has a relatively high number of professional sports teams and restaurants but few artists or arts organizations.