Impact of the Pandemic on the Financial Structures of Nonprofit Dance Organizations

hello and welcome to discussing dance data where we will explore the impact of the pandemic on the financial structures of nonprofit dance organizations my name is Crystal Collins I use they and she pronouns and I am the leadership and learning specialist at dance USA I am a 20-some brown skinned non-binary black American wearing a pink turtleneck sweater in just a few minutes you'll hear from dance USA's director of research Sarah Morrison and SMU data arts's director zanie Voss they will share

findings from two different data sets exploring the impact of the pandemic on non-profit dance organizations they will examine data from before during and after the pandemic thank you to interpreter now for providing ASL interpretation to adjust your closed captioning navigate to the meeting controls toolbar and click the show captions icon there will be time to ask questions and engage in the findings so when a question arises we encourage you to use the zoom Q&A function during the Q&A portio

n you can also raise uh use the raise your hand function to say your question out loud this webinar is being recorded and it will be available for playback immediately following the webinar we'll ask you to fill out a very short feedback survey this will ensure that your idea your ideas of the dance ecosystem is accurately represented in dance USA's programming and events thank you in advance for your feedback now I present to you dance USA director of research Sarah Morrison thank you Crystal u

m and welcome everyone uh it's a delight to be here to share uh this very large data set that I've been swimming in for the last couple of months uh I'm really happy to have zie here as well from SMU data Arts uh they've been doing this work for many many many years and uh to see some sort of breakouts from the dance ecosystem in conjunction with our uh analyses for from a separate data set is really exciting uh so we can sort of see where there's some overlaps and also while dance USA is going

to be presenting a sort of large swath overview from 990 data uh zie will be able to get into a little bit more of the details from uh their surveys that they conduct so I suppose I should introduce myself first I'm Sarah Moran and I am the director of research at dance USA I have light skin long brown hair I go with she her pronouns I'm zooming in from the land of the Eerie people Cleveland Ohio I have a beautiful photo of Lake Erie behind me I took this photo in an area down the street from wh

ere I live on my commute sometimes to uh some rehearsals after work and I can see a beautiful sunset there uh I would love to actually now share go ahead and uh Crystal if you could bring up the first slide um so you see research at dance usa.org that email is there um I I really do believe in communicating uh I know data can sometimes be very exciting and methodological for the people who deal with every day and then for people who don't deal with it every day I can kind of see like a lot of in

formation and uh a lot of things to go through in terms of the methods and and the context uh so I really encourage anyone who has questions on methodology on you know what we were looking at why we were looking at it how it might apply to you please if I don't answer any if we don't get to your questions today please email me I would love to talk about this further um with anyone who's interested uh I will be out of town for a couple of weeks after this so it might take me a little bit to get b

ack with you but I'm always very excited about other people who are excited and curious about data so always feel free to reach out uh via email with that said I'm going to give a lot of context um for some of you this may be very interesting for others it may be a little bit glossy eye glossy but hopefully um it will sort of stay in the middle uh so dance USA collected data from uh 990s so those are the government forms that nonprofit organizations are required to file to the IRS um and uh ther

e are three types of forms there's the 990 postcard the 990 e and the full 990 um before we begin I would like to sort of explain how we pulled our sample from this overall sample from nonprofit data uh so on the slide here it says where the data comes from for this analysis uh you see a table you have three columns in the in the top and you have six rows on the side the columns on the top read all nonprofits in the US all nonprofit dance organizations in the US and nonprofit dance organizations

sampled for the main analysis in the left hand uh in the in the rows you see sort of a list of different budget sizes um these budget sizes were picked because um candid and also formerly known as guar uh created a report that is uh listed keyx on us nonprofits from 2021 that actually listed the percentage of nonprofits in these different budgetary categories so the reason we've chosen these categories for this particular table is because we want to replicate so we can see how our data Compares

with the full nonprofit dance ecosystem um and then the nonprofit dance ecosystem which we would call in this case our population or our universe so in the um left-hand column all profits in the US we see about 76% in the budgetary range between Z and $100,000 annually we see about 133% in the budgetary range between 100,000 and 500,000 annually about 3% between 500,000 and a million about 5% between a million and 5 million and about 3% who make over $5 million on an annual basis or who spend o

ver $5 million typically budgets are based on expenses um but you should always check when you're looking at the data so all Prof all nonprofit profit dance organizations in the United States would be the second column we see so the total number of nonprofits that are not dance organizations all nonprofits is 1, 34,990 the total dance nonprofit organizations as designated by nte codes so those are government codes assigned to dance a62 or ballet a63 is 4762 uh of which about 77% are between 0 an

d 100,000 15% between 100 and 500,000 3% between 500,000 and a million 3% between a million and 5 million and about 1% over 5 million so not too different from the full nonprofit population with a little less on the um higher side I'm going to go ahead and share what our sample looks like because it's important when you look at data to know that the sample may not be a perfect random sample in other words we're not just picking people randomly and getting a a really nice representation but we mi

ght be getting a little bit of a smooshed representation um our sample is very large however so we're hoping that it does represent the population in general uh because we can't use postcard data five uh 990 ns are organizations who make less than $50,000 annually are not required to file um informational numbers so because there's no there are no numbers we can't use them in any kind of analyses so even though we re ize that 50% of the United States nonprofit dance ecosystem is within that grou

p uh they are not included in this particular analysis because we can't access that data with that said we do have a pretty large population under 100,000 which is about 35% um because people who make under $50,000 a lot of them still file uh because it it benefits them in some cases for grant writing and and also of practice um we have about 39% between 100 and 500,000 about 11% between 500,000 and a million about 11% between a million and 5 million and about 5% in the 5 million plus um and you

can look at the numbers as well there so we have uh you know most of our our sample is in the in a smaller budgetary range representing sort of the larger ecosystem as a whole um the reason this is important it's for several reasons one our sample size is very large so it's more likely to represent the entire population uh the second thing is that because the distribution is is rather simil similar to the distribution of the ecosystem of the population or Universe it is more likely to represent

uh that information um so next slide please couple of other things just to be aware of um I did mention that the organizations who filed the 990 or 990 e are included we could only include the folks who fire filed five years consecutively so in order to make an Apples to Apples comparison as they like to say um we wanted to make sure that the the folks that we compared were the same exact people from year to year one of the challenges with dance data um is that sometimes uh people will make com

parisons when different people are in the sample um so that also narrowed down our sample size um we narrowed down based on the nte codes and then we did not include the 990n filers for the reasons I already suggested and then we did make sure that we only included uh so 2018 is kind of our Baseline that's what we're looking at as like this is this is the Baseline we're going to compare to um if they didn't spend at least a dollar in 2018 we did not include them because the Assumption was that t

hey weren't kind of really active um and even if it was a low amount we considered them active because there is such so much variability in the field of dance between the accordion budget which we like to say which is like one year they might spend and make a lot the next year they might kind of reduce and even on the smaller end it can be quite substantial so we also in order to try to get a sample that's a little bit more performance oriented because these do include um all nonprofits who are

um self- assigned dance or ballet we elim we uh we excluded um folks who had the following modifiers in their name booster club friend Guild parent teacher team and uh we can go ahead to the next slide so uh on the right you see a map it's a heat map with a sort of pretty lavender colors and the darker areas we see we actually see representation from all of the states except for Wyoming um but even the states where it's hard to see South Dakota and Iowa we have some folks from there um but the r

eason I'm sharing this is to kind of share that the geography is very um it does kind of represent the geography of our distribution of dance uh organizations we see the sort of hotter spots in California and New York and then we see a lot of different activity going on throughout the rest of the country um at various levels we have a breakout of 486 organizations who who identify as dance organizations that's a62 and we have 220 organizations that identify themselves as ballet organizations um

I will mention that this is not as clean as it looks um when you look at the this kind of organization um a lot of people identify different ways that kind of cover different ranges so keeping that in mind as of 28 2018 uh wow that would be a lot of data to look at as of 2018 the years of operations ranged from one to 65 years so we had organizations who had only been or in in h existence for years year and others for 65 years and the median was about 22 so half the organizations were less than

22 years old half the organizations were more than 22 years old uh the budgets range from $144 that's in expenses from 2018 to $89 million uh as you can see it's a very large range uh the dance dance ecosystem likes to be very variable um and the median is $177,000 so half of the organization sampled made less than or spent less than $177,000 in 2018 and half spent more than $177,000 in 2018 next slide please what's being reported I promise we're going to get to the data the values reported are

the total sums for each analyzed group so that basically means um for all 78 when I show that it's going to be if revenue is reported the revenue of all of those organizations so every year we can kind of see that adjustment based on the total and not an average or a median or any other kind of normalized uh data set um because they're the same organizations every year uh we decided to just go with the summation comparison uh years reported are fiscal years this is going to be the case with almo

st every status that you see um but just as a reminder each year is represented on the graph uh features some slide so um that includes that includes data that's not necessarily from the calendar year so this is why looking at the graphs overall for change is the important variable so for example in 2019 some organizations or 2020 some organizations are reporting the full year of 2020 and other organizations are reporting half of 2019 and half of 2020 so just keeping in mind it's more of a Conti

nuum rather than discret years all data reported and graft has been adjusted for inflation this is really important to take take note of because um The Adjustment was about 177% from 2018 to 22 22 so it makes a huge difference so all of the comparisons that I'm going to show unless otherwise noted are for comparable dollars and the worth and the value of the dollar and these come from the confu Consumer Price Index and again you can reach out to me if you want more details on that next slide oka

y final one I promise but this is the most kind of uh nitpicky um for statistical analyses we Ed some uh we we about R of outliers of positive plus or minus three standard deviations from the data set uh this usually resulted in the exclusion of one to five outliers in the upper or lower uh 0.15% of each variable so to give you an example uh one of the organizations that was removed from the data set was an organization that received between $300 to $3,000 annually in contributions and in 2022 t

hey received $742,000 in contributions so it's hard to say whether that's a typo or they had a wonderful tremendous windfall that year but either way that data doesn't isn't likely representative of the entire population or even the sample so we did the math and the statistics to try to make sure to identify those those really extreme VAR variations um so that we could remove those from our analyses so that they wouldn't um unnecessarily adjust everything although I would try to I would love to

figure out what that company did to get that extreme difference in 2022 when comparisons were made between the 2018 figures those are the pre-pandemic figures and the 22 2022 figures which we're calling the post pandemic figures each variable was evaluated using what we call a t test which is basically a comp comparison of averages but also it takes into account the variability of each set so it kind of says you know this is really extremely variable so the difference is not likely uh statistica

lly relevant um but it does all that for us uh through wonderful mathematical Transformations that um are fun for me to do but not necessarily for everyone and uh we determine statistical significance with a P value of less than or equal to 05 um with that final concept a report of NSC means no significant change but in this case significant refers to the statistical definition which is very different from the standard definition that you hear on a daily basis the statistical definition means th

at the results were unlikely to have occurred by random chance alone so it's unlikely that you just had a different sample that had a different effect than what the normal population would have suggesting that there's a real IM meaningful relationship of the effect being observed so if there's no significant change reported it's suggests that the figures have returned to prepandemic values um and drum roll we're gonna get to the data let's go to the next slide okay here it is so we have a lot of

stuff going on in this graph I'm going to take a moment to describe it because most of our graphs after this are going to look similar in the way that they're uh presented even though they're different uh groups this graph we have a line graph appearing on the screen showing an overall picture of changes in expenses and revenue types from 2018 to 2022 and this is our full sample of 708 nonprofit dance organizations in the United States on the Y value we have a sum of all organizations sampled a

djusted for inflation that y value goes from 0 to 1 $1 billion and it includes all of the um monetary amounts added together for each for all of the organizations we see lines representing total revenue total expenses contributions and grants program service Revenue other revenue and investment income these are all uh words that are used on the 990 and can be defined very specifically and if you are interested in those specific definitions and those on line items you can email me and I can send

those to you or they will be included in our final report which will come out in the end of April we see our Revenue line is the highest on this particular chart um and we see in 2018 it's it's above expenses in 2020 2019 it starts to it goes down a little bit um and then in 2020 it starts to dive and then 2022 it hits that Valley hits the bottom and then it starts bouncing back up in 2020 I'm sorry I said 2022 I meant 2021 let me start over 2018 to 2019 a slight dip 2019 to 2020 an increased dr

op 2020 to 2021 we see that dive down to the bottom 2021 to 2022 we see a rebound that we're hoping in 2020 2023 that everyone is experiened last year is hopefully even higher on the rise this is a good time to mention that a lot of times this data is a little bit behind because it is public data and it takes some time to to get and then it takes some time to clean and it takes some time to analyze going to our total expenses we see a similar drop off but we see a much larger decline during the

pandemic years so people are spending a lot less money uh which makes complete sense because there was a shutdown and uh production fees were no longer being made um and most cases some cases people still paid um and you know this is so this is at any rate I'm trying to figure out okay so it's it's it makes perfect sense that the expenses were dropped and then we see them rebounding but not up to the expenses that we saw in 2018 uh looking again because 2022 is still climbing out of that pandemi

c and some people weren't quite up to the same uh classes that they were offering performances that they were offering and other programs that they were offering we look at program service Revenue uh it shows the same pathway this large drop off in 2021 and rebound uh and then we look at other revenue and investment income we're not seeing a lot of change there contributions and grants actually for this large sample uh shows a very slow and steady increase from 2019 to 202022 uh and most of that

can be explained by the uh large amounts of government support that were um infused into the organizations predominantly organizations who had employees because most of the government support was to um retain employment next slide please so you see two rectangular boxes around the 2018 data and the 2022 data and that is to indicate that the analyses that were completed we're comparing those two data points so it's kind of a pre and a post and if you could go to the next slide we'll see what tho

se numbers look like sorry chryst of a quick one okay on the right you see a table and the table matches the colors of the lines on the graph and uh the total revenue for this group of people we see no significant change uh part of that well I'm going to go down to gra the table and then I'll explain that in a moment total expenses have dropped about 10% from 2018 total contributions in Grants are up about 27% program service revenue is down 32% and there was no significant change in other reven

ue and investment income um it might take everyone a moment to process this but while you're doing that I would like to say that the the the no significant change in total revenue um is because of a reversal in uh where that revenue is coming from at least in this particular graph and I think when SMU data Arts is able to share more um data they can actually show some of those details about um how as an ecosystem everyone managed to kind of fill in the cracks and many different ways uh but speci

fically in this graph you can see that the contributed revenue and the um program service Revenue kind of do a reversal in terms of the amount that's coming in um and so hope we're we're looking at that possibility of why the total revenue had not changed from 2018 to 2022 and next slide please so we all know that sometimes different budgeted organizations operate extremely differently um so in an effort to kind of look at this analysis across different budgets sizes rather than sort of creating

budget sizes and putting them onto the group that we sampled we figured we have 708 people let's tell let's have the data tell us what those uh different sizes are so we split them into quartiles we have four groups of 25% each um I'm the the numbers are there but I'm going to go ahead and go to the next slide because we are I'm kind of taking a little bit of time and I want to make sure that we move forward and on this slide it shows the equivalent budget bugets of 2022 so that you can kind of

put yourself in this realm um so group one would be folks uh making the equivalent of7 or spending the equivalent of $170 to $888,000 annually group two 88,000 to 207,000 group three 207,000 to 57,000 and group four 57,000 to 104 million and I think we're having a change over here next slide please maybe not okay all right so this is group one um so I the reason I'm sharing this is because each of you here you're in you're in this you're doing it and um I think it feels good uh I also directed

a very small Organization for 25 years it feels good to feel like you're in a group that's being shared so you can say hm that looks exactly like what's happening to us or you can say hm that looks totally different than what's happening to us uh but it kind of gives you a reference point that you can start being curious about in terms of your own um your own data uh so these folks are are having a similar similar ramp as all of the the whole data set and we've seeing similar things we're seeing

that drop off in in Revenue expenses and program service Revenue um we're seeing almost a stability in contributions and grants it does show an 18% increase I will say that that did not meet statistical significance completely but it is approaching at 09 P value if anyone again wants to talk about what that means with me I also teach statistical analyses so I'd love to talk to anyone who wants to learn more um the I have added on this graph the net assets because one of the exciting things to s

ee even though this data is kind of all over the place which is not surprising um um is that every single group is showing an increase in net assets over the fiveyear period and whether it's an intentional um preparation crisis preparation or it's an unintentional um savings due to the reduction in expenses is hard to say uh but we are seeing a little bit of a strength there in terms of um having some extra savings and folks having paid down some liabilities we're seeing a an overall decrease of

total expenses of 8% contributions in increasing 18% program service Revenue still down 21% for this group in 2022 but that assets showing a positive 22% increase and next [Music] slide group two we are covering uh folks who have budgets between 88,000 and 207,000 again I'd like to reiterate a lot of the these groups are project oriented uh organizations which probably makes up the bulk of our dance ecosystem um so a lot of the reason that these numbers may feel small to some and big to others

is that um there are many organizations that operate very much on a project uh to project basis um so we have our y scale going up to 28,000 now for the total sum we have similar drop offs in Revenue expenses and program Ser service Revenue in 2021 with similar rebounds occurring in 2022 again the hope is that it's still going up in 2023 um and we see a slight increase in net assets with a significant change from 2018 of 25% over what it was contributions in Grants is it's sort of stable but um

we see a 16% statistically significant in increase from 2018 um so again showing similar Trends the total revenue isn't quite back up to um the 2018 Revenue uh but but it looks like it's getting there and I don't want to go too quickly because I want everyone in each group to get a moment but we should go to the next slide and there will be a report at the end of April and this is record so group three 207,000 to 57,000 again showing the similar Trend Revenue expenses and program service Revenue

doing the downward dip and the bounce back up hopefully continuing to 2023 we see our net assets increasing gradually we see in this group contributions and grants starting to show an even more clear visual increase on the graph uh again this is likely because this is the range of budgetary size where where folks are probably starting to see employment numbers over one um the other groups are likely if they have employees it's it's typically one person who's employed for multiple tasks and then

contracted out for different kinds of projects in this group we see no significant change in total revenue a drop in total expenses of 7% a 36% increase in contributions and grants a drop in 24% program service revenue and an increase of 37% in net assets next slide please this is our last and final group um for this particular comparison typically this is the group you would most likely see in most data reports that are um voluntary uh a lot of times for people to be able to voluntarily provid

e this information typically means that they have a staff member and they have capacity to capture and record and then share this information um so this group is between 57,000 and 104 million um again I should reiterate that we did uh we did run some outliers before we ran the analyses so it may not have included everyone in this group um we see the biggest difference in this one that we see is that net assets has always been a little bit higher than everything else and part of that is because

the savings is is much more um it's much larger relative to their uh revenue and expenses we do see this same drop in revenue and expenses and the same drop in program service Revenue uh that we saw in both other groups we see the same rebound um and we do see an increase again in contributions in Grants in the lines let's go ahead and look at the numbers so total revenue shows no significant change total expenses is down 10% contributions and grants is up 33% program service Revenue down 21% an

d net assets up 28% and next slide please this is sort of an interesting comparison what I did is we just compared 2018 to 2022 without all the middle stuff in the leftand chart you see a comparison if someone just popped up the numbers without adjusting for inflation so um you see everything going up uh in terms of the cash value except for the contributions in Grants and program service revenues which have an exact reversal pretty much so maybe not exact sorry A reversal um so that reversal is

probably what contributes to some of those revenues not being significantly different from 2018 and 2022 it is really interesting to note that in the second graph on the right you see a little bit of a drop in areas where you saw an increase particularly the revenue and the expenses um and that is because of inflation so uh if we so inflation is really kind of where we are right now uh next slide um I'm going to talk a little bit about this but I think SMU data Arts has a little bit more um gra

nular data here so that's exciting uh government contributions we do not have data for groups one or two uh because they are not required to report this as a separate line item in their 990 easy for group three we see 167% increase in government contributions which is uh equates to a $5.7 million increase that is comparing for the same um uh dollar value for each year in group four we see a 346 per increase and that uh equates to a total sum dollar value of 9.6 million uh non-government contribu

tions again same things for groups one and two we don't have that information but I think sm. Arts will be able to share some of that so that's exciting we don't see a significant change in groups three and four but I did go ahead and report the dollars because um they are negative uh the reason I didn't the reason we might not be seeing a significant change statistically is because it might be so variable that it's hard to capture whether or not this is a change that's occurring to the entire p

opulation or just to some particular um individual organizations within this sample um investment income is required as a it's a line item on all of the 990s but uh we didn't have enough people or organizations who have investment income to to have any um we had insufficient data for analyses except for in the last group uh we had 60 out of 176 although as a data analyst and researcher I sometimes find this information uh just as interesting as the um variables that are being looked at uh and 60

we went ahead and compared that there was no significant change um in investment income uh between 2018 and 2022 next SL slide last one again this is a little bit informational very broad umu data Arts is going to have some more information here uh but for group one we see no significant change in program service expenses group two we see a drop of 15% in program service expenses uh group three we see a drop of 9% group four uh has the biggest drop of 47% likely because um many of their Product

ions are much more expensive so that drop and and not bringing back those uh Productions is is a lot more um is a lot larger administrative expenses we don't have the data for groups one and two and we don't see a significant change in group three there's my timer and we see a 17% drop in group four and I believe that is the last slide Crystal let me know if I made it just under the time I did thank you and we are going to be taking questions I'm sure Crystal has been taking all the rolling ques

tions this whole time that I haven't been able to see but I'm hoping to be able to answer uh many or all of those and I also do hope that while you're here you can help us provide some context to this data because you're the ones out there doing the work um feeling these changes and figuring out ways um to to balance these things so uh without any further Ado I would like to um switch to zie Voss from data artarts who is going to be able to take us a little bit deeper in some of those numbers th

at the 990s just don't cover thanks so much sah thank you very very much uh let's see want to make sure we're all good here okay um that was really fascinating thank you for sharing that uh thank you to Sarah to Crystal to all the team at dance USA for organizing for hosting the session I'm Zan Voss I I use she her pronouns I'm the director of SMU data arts and a professor at SMU and I want to First acknowledge the indigenous people's past and president whose ancestral and unseated territory we

occupy at SMU data Arts we specifically honor the Apache the C the kamanchi the kusada the Tonkawa Wich Affiliated K Ki the wo Tawakoni and the Lenny lappi peoples upon whose traditional territories We Now operate um I am a multi-racial woman and I have light brown skin dark brown hair and eyes today I'm wearing a white sleeveless top and a necklace that's both green and black I'm in a white room with pink and yellow uh a pink and yellow painting behind me and for those of you who are unfamiliar

withu data Arts uh we're a national Center for Arts research that exists to provide and to engage both organizations and individuals with the evidence-based insights needed to collectively build strong vibrant inequitable Arts communities and thinking about strong inequitable Arts communities I want to just start with a quick reflection on you know has your organization moved on from the pandemic entirely in living through this experience are things better off now than they were before or are y

ou still feeling many of the lingering effects and if so how where is that appearing and for many Arts and Cultural organizations there's no going back to the way things were before the pandemic started and so the questions then are um you know what do the past few years help us to understand about the context for the present and how will we go forward in new and stable ways so I'm going to share some highlights about Trends in the finances and operations in a a bit of a more granular dive uh we

don't have the market cornered on Arts research or good ideas so I've infused this presentation with research of uh some colleagues whom I'm going to recognize so we analyzed Trend data on the same set of 129 uh nonprofit dance organizations from 2019 through 2022 they're in 12 states with budgets ranging from 9500 to 33 million in 2022 their average budget size was 1.4 million and their median or kind of the midpoint smack in the middle dividing the the set in two the midpoint in the range was

a budget of 260,000 so you can see there's some skewing going on at the upper ends all our organizations that submitted this data to a funer through the cultural data profile so a huge thank you to all organizations whose time and whose effort uh was invested in the CDP and it allows us to share these findings with you today this is your story I'm going to report on findings overall and you'll hear me slicing and dicing it by two different lendes by budget size and then again by Mission focus w

hen I refer to budget size uh here you have the pie chart of what is the the distribution of sizes of the 129 um we're going to consider small under 100,000 medium 100 to basically 500,000 and then over 500,000 so these are really similar to Sarah's sample um in terms of distribution of organizations by size um in terms of mission Focus within these organizations 29% self-identify as being of by or for black indigenous or people of color communities or itions 71% do not so there are too few orga

nizations rooted in a particular cultural single Heritage or tradition to report out on them separately so you're going to hear me refer collectively to non-bac and bipac organizations at times acknowledging that the term is imperfect and imprecise I do want to start by pointing out here you have average budget size for both of these two cohorts in 2022 uh the average nonb P's budget was 2.5 times that of a bipac organization back in 2019 it was three times the size so it tells us two things you

know that Gap has narrowed slightly which is good news but overall they had neither the same average starting Place nor the same ending place so any notion of this really leveling a playing field is still not reality and I also want to consider that Equity uh is not just in percentage changes but magnitude of the values that are changing so you know if you go from $100 to $200 for a line item that's a doubling of that value but it's still only $100 so take that into account um like Sarah we loo

k at inflation what cost a dollar at the end of 2019 cost a115 at the end of 2022 and so the charts that I show are going to reflect the raw dollars pre-inflation but the percentages um are going to tell the story of whether or not those dollars have the same buying power over time so let's dive in with expenses expenses good news is spiked Grew From 2021 to 2022 um as organizations reopened their doors reinstituted in person programming uh expenses were 2% higher in raw dollars but buying power

was 11% lower so 11% growth falling short of inflation you know there are tangible goods and services that cost more there's fabric there's shipping the growth in general and administrative costs exceeded inflation by 1% driving that were things like interest expense uh interest expense was 40% higher as interest rates Rose in the marketplace and organizations had to pay mortgages tap lines of credit fundraising expenses were 25% lower and program expenses 14% lower again as doors were reopened

opening when we look at who grew interestingly bipac organizations grew their budgets 14% above inflation while non- bipac organizations cut their total expenses by 15% and this isn't due to size uh the growth in bipac organizations budgets wasn't a phenomenon uh felt by all small and medium budget organizations for both budget categories overall expense growth lagged inflation by 6% and that for large organizations was 133% so this is really not something that's just due to size and so let's t

ake a look at the biggest budget item which is paying people you know regardless of budget size compensation counts for about 60% of all expenses for the average dance organization and here we find that on average permanent staff became larger mainly through the addition of part-time positions they began adding permanent staff in 2022 once the doors reopen they went from an average of 17 permanent positions full in part-time in 2019 to an average of 24 in 2022 the mix of workers shifted you see

that in the chart with part-time workers accounting for 6% more of the permanent Workforce over time this pattern was the same for medium and large organizations to different degrees small organizations though had a different reality they averaged zero full-time permanent positions and one part-time permanent position every year so consider that with respect to organizational capacity control straints what we know is as organizations increase in size they tend to make the shift from majority par

t-time staff to having as many full-time staff as part-time staff so that's the story for permanent staff and yet we know there's a lot of hiring that happens on a temporary basis so let's take a look we find that cuts were made to seasonal staff the average two full-time seasonal workers went to 1 in 2020 and remain there the 11 member part-time seasonal Workforce was reduced to five uh by 2021 went back up to 9 in 2022 for an overall 11% reduction not shown in the CH is uh independent contract

ors uh the hiring dipped but basically in 2022 it was exactly back to where it started in 2019 as part of the total numbers small and large organizations small and large hired fewer artists over time whereas medium budget organizations actually hire 11% more artists over time let's add in personal expenses so although stabs in total were like 133% larger Personnel expense was up 9% in raw dollars but growth fell 5% behind inflation despite a 45% jump in 2022 after two years of consecutive contra

ctions so more people but less compensation flow to them in real inflation adjusted dollars you know part of that's due to the fact that there's more uh presence of part-timers now than full-timers but it's important to recognize that inflation isn't just an organizational phenomenon uh those employed feel the effects of inflation in their own personal lives so this is an area of a bit of a cause of concern breaking it down a bit further um if we look at different programmatic areas so 90% of pe

ople paid are related to program delivery and their compensation fell short of inflation 4% included in that line are artists whose pay actually Rose 5% above inflation meaning that other program related Personnel were disproportionately affected General administrative Personnel expense growth exceeded inflation by 12% fundraisers uh was 24% below inflation Now growth in Personnel expenses is inversely related to budget size so large organizations payment to People Fell 7% short of inflation med

ium organizations 3% but for small organizations and remember they had zero full-time permanent and one part-time permanent position small organizations actually had growth in Personnel expenses that topped inflation by 7% we know what a big subject this is the ability to attract and to retain employees has really become quite a flash point for the Arts it puts added strain on people who are often overburden um who are there who are likely burned out after having weathered the stress and managin

g through recent crises in 2022 averaging a across all nonprofit arts and culture disciplines including employees and freelance artists uh in another study we found that the average annual salary in the United States was $33,135 well a majority of that came in the way of investments in people their personnel growth outpaced inflation U by 16% whereas non-bac organizations Personnel expense growth actually fell short of inflation by 9% let's take a look at Revenue we're going to look at the magni

tude and the composition kind of at a 30,000 foot view right here of unrestricted operating revenue and we found that there was nominal or kind of raw growth uh in total operating Revenue but its buying power was 9% lower and its composition shifted the composition of where the money came from shifted the dance organizations became and remain more dependent on contributed revenue for survival it's the revenue engine the trends that you see here were similar regardless of organization size so typ

ically the percentage of total revenue that's contributed tends to decrease with or organizational size and the organizations in the study are no different in that respect small and medium budget organizations went from about 56% contributed to 6 6% contributed in 2022 and let's unpack it and look more closely at the sources of revenue and how they've changed I'm going to start with earned Revenue earn Revenue did Rebound robustly in 2022 over 2021 but it's still has a long road ahead to get to

recovery uh in the last slide we saw that it was lower as a proportion of show Revenue it was also lower in absolute terms for organizations of every size there's good news in that it more than LED um but it was still 30% lower over time in inflation adjusted figures for the average organization in the study um I don't want to re on the recovery parade but this represents a huge hold to fill and everyone's hurting in this area but to varying degrees and in different ways uh total earned Revenue

was down by a third for non-bac organizations and by a quarter for bipac organizations and I want to unpack and drill down on earn Revenue a bit further um since ticket and membership admissions Revenue it's an important part of total earned revenue for the average organization in normal times let's strike there the finding attendance ticket revenue and low prices were lower by double digits in-person attendance uh was down 38% emissions gener generated Revenue overall naturally slowed to it tri

ckle during the pandemic uh it rebound it in 2022 but it was still 32% lower than it was pre- pandemic in real dollars and I want to look at it through the two lenses when we look by budget double- digigit reductions in single ticket Revenue was the case for organizations on average across all sizes with the losses increasing as budget size went down so a loss in single ticket revenue of 22% for large organizations going up to 51% for small organizations total participation in in-person programs

was down 40% % for non-bo companies 31% for bipac companies and given that kind of put a couple of pieces together here given that attendance is down more than single ticket Revenue we can infer that there's a bit more volume being sold towards the high- end of the single ticket prices than at the low end it's driven by large organizations their drop in attendance was actually 42% over the 5year period but their drop in ticket Revenue was only 22% and you're saying so this is all fine you're sh

owing us 2022 didn't things turn turn around in 2023 um our partners at TRG Arts whose data tends to skew more more to kind of medium and large Performing Arts organizations they recently redu uh released an update on the recovery status of ticket sales and ticket Revenue through December of 2023 so just a couple of months ago and compared to 2019 organizations that they study uh sold 11% fewer tickets in 2023 still at the end of the year but saw ticket Revenue go up 5% the question mark now is

how long will the attendance Plateau or is this going to be a continue slow rebuild a slow burn it remains to be seen and of course Co was a major factor in the attendance drop off but in a lot of ways it actually intensified declining trends that existed pre- pandemic uh you know the nea's 2017 surve survey of Po partic IP ation in the artarts reported 15-year declines in the percentage of us adults who attend ballet and other dance this was topped in the 2022 report release that showed attenda

nce dropping even further since 2017 and I want to just point out this subscription Revenue down 67% number of subscribers down 51% this is an area that appears to be permanently scarred not just for dance but across performing art sectors I can share that in theater over the past 20 years theater subscription sales National were at their highest point in 20 2005 2005 it's been a slow and steady decline ever since then so enough about ticket sales let's see how else did these organizations earn

Revenue they did it from diverse activities uh here you're looking at 2022 figures for small medium and large organizations uh what we see is that Revenue earned from education programs the the blue size it was a bigger slice of the earn Revenue pie than ticket sales the Ros and orange slices there for small and medium organizations and the reverse was true for large organizations education Revenue was down 38% considering inflation across the board regardless of organization type by the end of

2022 revenue from contracts and tours the yellow slice plays an increasingly important role as budget size decreased and this is really kind of interesting the the bipac and non- bipac organizations had nearly identical average revenue from tours and contracts in 2019 the same starting place two different trajectories the bipac organizations grew their tour and contract Revenue by 12% whereas revenue from this activity was down by more than half for nine pook organization let's turn to contribut

ed Revenue uh contributed Revenue raised for operations uh this really saved organization growth exceeded inflation by 11% so that's 27% growth without inflation and it was almost eily consistent for organizations of every size impressively bipac organizations contributed Revenue growth exceeded inflation by 38% whereas that of non-bo organizations did so by only 7% the question is you know for all is that level of growth really sustainable and to answer that question we need to dig deep deeper

to see where the revenue came from so let's look at Trends to see if there's a story of consistent growth from some Revenue engines um that can be expected to continue out into the future I'm going to start with private philanthropy did it come from private philanthropy and what we see is no private philanthropy for the nonprofit dance organization studied was lower in raw dollars and 27% lower considering inflation it peaked in 2021 uh at the height of the pandemic then plummeted from 21 to 22

and so was the downward Trend across all private giving sources I let's lift up the hood and look among the major private sources none provided funding that kept fa face with inflation um I'm going to show figures for both unrestricted and restricted giving sort of the entire outpouring of commitment from these different funding sources and I encourage you to reflect and share whe whether the trends that I I show you today really resonate with your organization so here's the story corporate and

kind of non- truste what we call other individual support were at a four-year low in 2022 even before adjusting for inflation you know that's particularly important regarding other individual support since that was a category that constituted 40% of private support in 2019 and only 30% in 2022 both individual and trustee support peaked in 2020 at the start of the pandemic uh and then you see a little bit of fatigue setting in the average medium small and large budget organization all experience

double- digit decreases in giving from other individuals so it's not a size issue and corporate giving just about disappeared for small and medium dance organizations in this study it was down by 80% so here we show the real inflated adjusted uh percentage decreases by source and I know it's really sobering um is it donor fatigue or are we seeing a generational shift in donor preferences according to uh 2023 this is a survey from CCS fundraising while arts and culture is second on a list of baby

boomers giving priorities it doesn't even make it to the top three for genxers Millennials and gen Z they say that there's a distinct lack of Engagement and also simply a lack of awareness of the Arts and cultural landscape both from new money particularly in the tech industry and from younger Generations whose parents supported the Arts you know if we look at trustee giving we see that trustee giving uh it grew in nominal terms but it was 9% lower in real dollars I want to focus now for a seco

nd on Foundation giving foundations now play a bigger role in supporting these dance organizations than do individuals it's a reversal 35% of private support was from foundations in 2019 going up to 45% in 2022 Foundation support peaked in 2021 it Rose in raw doar over the period but its impact was muted by cost precence so it fell 6% below inflation however this real dollar loss in Foundation giving it was not the experience of organizations of every size or of every Mission Focus the trend act

ually belies the experience of the average small and medium budget organization whose support from foundations Rose more than 50% back in 2020 and then remain that high over subsequent years Foundation growth for bipo organizations specifically was 27% higher so foundations have been their private philanthropy Revenue engine large organization support on the other hand was higher overtime in nominal terms fell short of inflation and what we're seeing here for larger organizations is kind of stag

nant Foundation funding so what was the big Revenue growth uh Revenue engine for growth as Sarah alluded to its exceptional Government funding it drove the rising contributed Revenue uh it supported an increasing level of the average organization's expenses over the past four years going up from covering 5% of expenses to 23% of expenses in 2022 everyone made out well but to varying degrees and in different ways so small and medium organizations government support growth surpassed inflation by 6

7 and 87% respectively and that sounds really good right well large organizations saw five-fold growth in Government funding so viewed through their different lens the nonb organizations were much bigger winners in terms of government funding again on average five-fold increase for bipac organizations it was a two-fold increase and there are further nuances with respect to organization size um small organizations tend to cover more of their expenses with Government funding um they have a greater

tendency to serve organizations without great wealth they saw only a minor boost directly from federal funding but they saw higher average funding in 2022 from State agencies in terms of regranting large dance organizations were the biggest beneficiaries of exceptional Federal support from PPP program The shuttered Venue operating grants they also gained State support So for them it went from 4% of their expenses to 2019 to 22% in 2022 Federal programs kept a lot of organizations of float durin

g the pandemic saved jobs in the Arts fulfilling their intended purpose those dollars were one time and are not likely to continue so once this trickle down of federal funding makes its way through lower levels of government through regranting programs what's going to be that future Revenue engine to sustain recovery are we seeing EV any evidence of that on a consistent basis for the set of organizations you know think about what we've seen you know is there really a revenue Source poised to gro

w support at a pace that keeps up with Rising costs which are rising at a much slower rate now but they're still Rising you know large organizations in particular are vulnerable since their biggest and only contributed Revenue growth came from Government funding it was exceptional again but unlikely to continue uh you know referring again to our partners at TRG Arts they report that through December of 2023 there were 5% fewer individual gifts made to Performing Arts organizations and gift Reven

ue was 31% lower so smaller gifts being made by fewer people you recovery in individual gifts began installing back in the summer and didn't see uh the Boost in the fall and the year-end surge that they've seen in years past companies are likely to scale back if private contributions ticket revenue and education program sales uh remain this repressed good news again inflation has cooled substantially uh it remains to be seen what's going to happen in 2024 so let's put two and two together quickl

y and look at bottom line I I put these two side by side uh because I think it's really important to see that organizations did a remarkable job of living within their means during the crisis uh it big fluct fluctuations in activity were met with uh you the ability to to be nimble and to be flexible and to live within means you see average surpluses every year there's good news in that fewer dance organizations ended 2022 with a deficit then did in 2019 and annually the majority ended the or the

year in the black when we dig deeper though we see a little bit of difference we find that 11% more small organizations ran a deficit over time uh in the field whereas for medium organizations was about the same proportion running deficits for 18% fewer far fewer large organizations ran a deficit at the end of the period compared to the beginning so it's really kind of clear that the large organizations benefited more than the small ones from substantial enough levels of support to keep them af

loat and when I think think about 2023 we we've looked at 2023 Trend data for about 250 organizations on a variety of disciplines across the country and when it comes to deficits we're seeing deficits start to seep back in as organizations are dealing with expenses fully coming back to pre-pandemic levels if not exceeding it while operating growth isn't keeping Pace the duration of the government relief funding hasn't quite matched that slower rebuild and return experienced by most organizations

who are still in the process of recovery look quickly at working capital lastly uh think about you know has your organization ever been cast strapped and what did that feel like you know if your organization's ever been cast strapped you probably know more about working capital than you would like to know it's not the kind of thing that people you know wake with excitement over um but it is the kind of thing that when it's not there you lose sleep over it so it's a measure of liquidity that rep

resents unrestricted resources available to meet day-to-day obligations it's it's readily accessible cash there are different ways to calculate it we use unrestricted current assets less current liabilities and a metric that's kind of Handy is months of working capital it shows how long an organization could survive at its current expense size in the absence of revenues and as one organization um who had interviewed earlier this year for a project stated liquidity like CL cash flow it sounds sim

plistic but it lets you dream big and really think ahead about strategic growth which you can't do if you can't turn the lights on it relieves the not sleeping at night issue let you get Beyond basic needs it's where resiliency begins so this really unsexy topic really has some profound implications what's the trend with Government funding pouring in doors closed unrestricted current assets grew 85% and current liabilities shrank by 35% so that's that big growth in in net assets that Sarah was r

eferring to small and medium organizations in particular particular benefited from a surgeon Foundation funding huge boost to working capital recall that operating surpluses were the norm uh from 20 to 2020 to 2022 for all organizations and you know here we're seeing the the substantial uh cushion that organizations are current feeling in terms of liquidity you know again the question is this is great but is it the new reality is this new level of liquidity realistically sustainable um or are we

going to see in 2023 and 24 an erosion in working capital as savings are used to plug holes and revenue projections that don't materialize from a really strong Revenue engine so how are organizations creating a plan B and growing and I'm going to end here with some recommendations for stabilizing and restoring health uh for funders we this is um work that we had done in collaboration with Rebecca Thomas of Rebecca Thomas and Associates support flexibility and reimagining in rebuilding we encour

age fund to support strategies for new business models and adaptation that help organizations shift Dynamics encourage creation of a plan B that doesn't count on a once-in-a-lifetime level of government support invest in capacity building that addresses human capital G gaps um you know think of this as unrestricted multi-year capacity building funds for salaries and for staff positions so organizations can really earnestly address gaps in adequately paid human capital particularly in the areas o

f fundraising and marketing before encouraging growth in programs uh you know some research we did with the Wallace Foundation it was really clear that small organizations don't all want to remain small but they lack dedicated staff expertise in generating earned and contributed revenue and they've historically faced barriers to accessing higher levels of funding which frequently are focused on developing new and new programs without increasing staff reinforce new business models as organization

s enter 2024 with demand for in inperson programming still down they're going to need a mix of flexible support signal trust by making the unrestricted gifts and for longer periods of time um and contribute to working capital and to savings for the organizations know your financial risks assess and project cash levels and flows uh you know can you afford a deficit this year if one materializes how are you going to deal with it you know are you doing monthly forecasts of predicted and actual cash

receipts versus expenditures for the next year you know explore a few a few different alternative Pathways develop at least two scenarios for a surplus plan to redo your plans uh if we've not learned anything over the past two years it's that the environment can quickly change and are you prepared for it this uncertainties are given monitor results regularly and be prepared to implement a plan B if necessary and then start setting a savings goal be realistic be patient assemble your board to di

scuss realistic goals you know if you want to eventually save for three months of working capital budget for a surplus equal to one month of expenses in each of the coming years here are a number of different areas where we do research in data Arts financial and operating health bipu organizations in equity audiences we look at demand prediction and Dei and we apply research in community on a broad scale I encourage you to go to our website and check out some of these resources um you know the s

tory for 2024 remains Unwritten time is going to tell whether resiliency exhibited by dance organizations in the wake of the previous crises are going to Prevail and whether this is going to prove to be a crisis like no other I think it really hinges on embracing and adopting new models building and bolstering relationships within the community with artists and thinking rethinking how to understand and meet needs of the folks whom we serve and with that I'm going to stop my screen share and I'm

going to encourage Sarah to join me and uh hear what resonated for you whether you found some uh finding surprising or counterintuitive and answer any questions thank you so much Z I think um crystal is going to moderate the uh questions coming in so we can we can have a bit of a discussion uh and uh I'm excited about what people have to ask or say or Crystal you wanna yes let me look through so first question came in um from two different people so I will ask and this was specifically Sarah whe

n you were presenting um does this study capture organizations that may not have continued to file because they went out of business during covid and then someone um asked in a similar way um let me just find it oh did stats from organizations that close permanent permanently between 2018 and 2022 get factored in first of all I love those questions and um the challenge with most Arts research is that it's a retrospective research uh so it's always sort of done after the fact um ideal research wo

uld be prospective so you could get like say 200 organizations to agree to fill out surveys for the next 10 years and then you can kind of track them and see who falls out and and why um those are great questions government data IRS data unfortunately to close an organization it can sometimes take up to three or four years through forms and um registration and acknowledgement so there's really no way to tell from government data when someone has officially closed um if it's not in the IRS War ye

ar for that year you can assume several things one they just didn't get it in on time and they're going to get it in late uh two they've gone out of business and they're filing for closure three they've gone out of business and they're not filing forclosure uh but typically those kinds of things only come in three or four years after the fact and and that's usually only if the government is really paying close attention to track that information so the short answer is that no uh we are not able

to actually track through this data uh organizations who who were shuttered and closed down and it's a really important um uh it's a really important factor to bring up because already because we're including organizations that filed all five years we're already skewing our sample to organizations that are healthy in the eyes of like the large picture um I would love to sometime get funding to do a prospective study and be able to compensate organizations or Just Dance ensembles whether they're

nonprofit or for-profit llc's uh to follow them over a 10year period of time or longer um there have been lots of studies in the behavior sciences that have done this um usually funded by large organizations like the NIH um but would it be great if we could get some Arts funding to provide some uh um compensation for this kind of information so that the folks spending so much time having hybrid careers and trying to run a dance company could also give us some information that could tell us more

about their life and their survival you're here there were two questions did I answer them both yeah they were very similar I just wanted to add um say them because they were asked in two different ways so this is zanie or Sarah do you think that one-time relief funding played a role in The Rebound in total revenues a lot of that came in during 2021 and 2022 and so this person wonders if we will see a dip in 2023 because of the type of Revenue that makes it appear that there was a rebound yes ab

solutely in the answer to the question uh the federal relief you know as I had shown was kind of the Saving Grace it was the revenue engine during those years from what we've seen from the 2023 data for organizations you we've got about 250 organizations across a wide variety of of Arts and Cultural uh disciplines is that the federal relief has come way down in 2023 but what we see is the increase in local and state funding and it's because a lot of the federal funding I see zil's on on on the c

all today I went out for redistribution through local agencies and through state agencies there were also other Federal initiatives some of which came to our local Arts agencies um without necessarily being set up for arts and culture so from a city they decided to allocate some that's where we're seeing the growth in 2023 you know ultimately that's likely to to dry up as well to um contribute to that uh because there was that reversal of service related service related revenue and contributor R

evenue the additional hope and what we're seeing in a much smaller sample um is that uh service related revenue is continuing to climb back now whether or not it's going to be able to readjust you know I mean the hope is that this was a plug and a sort of a temporary stop hold um but I think we're seeing that that's going to play out the understanding of that is going to play out through 2023 and 2024 and and onward what I'd really love to see Z I don't even know if it's available I'd love to se

e like 10 years of data to see what the variability looks like in in normal years and to see if some of the challenges we're dealing with are the challenges of our industry and or the challenges of our industry Within this time period and or the challenges of the time period and trying to disentangle those things is really complicated with retrospective data and also not having the same data for large groups of people over a long period of time well and Sarah too you know your point about you kn

ow being able to do prospective study you know I say here here because I think part of the difficulty we we can look back 20 years but it becomes way skewed towards large organizations that have the capacity on an annual BAS basis to provide that kind of data so we can report out but it's really not the truth for the field at large it's the truth for um for a set of larger organizations yeah exactly and the larger organizations that have continued yeah that that have continued I will say that we

're doing some um we'll publish within the next couple of weeks a report where we did 11 case studies of redistribution of federal funding by local Arts agencies of covid funding and for some of them it's really inspirational in that they have gained momentum within their City councils within their their communities with the hope that the elevated levels of support will have some positive impact on future levels of appropriation thank you both and for this portion of the Q&A I'll just ask um tha

t anyone has that anyone who has an additional question just use the raise hand function in the bottom in your menu bar and then I will um take you off mute to ask your question so we've got one that has come in so um I thought it our group our company with the Louisville Ballet we instituted a ballet bound program um during the pandemic and we're trying to raise money to sustain it going forward and we were interested in knowing whether or not you were beginning to track bipo programs within no

n bipo organizations I can speak for SMU data Arts that's not data that we collect so I don't have programmatic level data with respect to those kinds of decisions I have things like number of programmatic offerings and we do ask organizations two different questions on the survey itself but it's more at the organization level about whether they their mission is rooted in a particular cultural Voice or tradition and a separate question asking if they primarily serve primarily a particular um dem

ographic but we don't have one saying are you doing any programming uh kind of with that rubric and collecting separate data on that programmatic activity relative to other activity okay and the other comment I was going to make is we did a peer group study um using data from dance USA and and calibrating it between one half to two times our budget and within and and all and that would all fall into what you've discussed throughout this program as large companies and with within that group The t

he earned Revenue was 60% and the contributed Revenue was 40% so I think I I guess what I'm saying what I'm thinking is in order to be sustainable over the long term organizations need to be focused on earned Revenue because that's how you rebuild your donor base through strong schools through strong programming that people want want to attend and that's where we're placing our emphasis and and you know just to share that across Performing Arts disciplines it's the norm for organizations to be m

ore reliant on earned Revenue the larger they become part of that's tied to the ability to bring in more people but part of it is tied to to higher ticket prices hello um I had a question I think this pertains to Sarah's presentation did you find a difference in ballet company data compared to modern dance companies uh tap dance companies is that data available ailable again I love your question because I was very interested in that myself um I was able to do a comparison on the nte codes um how

ever when I looked at the codes they're not really used very well so the data was not really um representative of reality for example a lot of Valley companies um uh coded themselves as a62 which which is dance non ballet and a lot of uh a lot of even dance organizations who are performing organizations code themselves with Performing Arts organizations so a different code Al together uh so while this data set is very large and and and it does encompass hopefully even those outside of this codin

g um I was not able to actually do that comparison with any kind of meaningful outcome but I will say that when I did the comparison it didn't show much of a difference across the variables and that allowed me to look a little closer because I do know that they operate extremely differently I know B especially the larger Valley companies tend to be um homebased and so they have homebased um presentations and smaller organizations tend to tour a little bit more including smaller valet organizatio

ns um but the short answer is no I could not uh look at that difference uh but I did I did attempt to because the data appeared to be there but it was not um it was not really a valid comparison so again a prospective study would allow us to look at that much more much more accurately definitely thank you and H for zany uh just a clarifying question you saw or we saw a incre or decrease in the attendance to live dance performances but uh the the revenue drop didn't was less than the drop we saw

attendance was that due to increased prices of tickets or what what was reasoning for that it's a question of how many tickets were sold at which price points so we saw that on average both the low and the high ticket prices were actually lowered by the dance organizations in this study but because the revenue is a bit the revenue drop was less than the attendance drop we can assume that there's probably more volume sold at the higher prices Donnie I actually have some interesting sort of inform

al not completed data on that great um in a small sample of what I was looking at for 2023 it appeared as though uh people were giving far fewer complimentary tickets than they had in the past uh so audience capacity was was disproportionately representative of the revenue um and I don't know why I haven't been able to ask we organizations this number this question but my my personal assumption uh would be that perhaps because people were still concerned about spacing and you know um social dist

ancing uh maybe they weren't giving away as many of the uh complimentary tickets as had been done in the past but again this is all very theoretical and you know that's why we're here though right is to discuss these possibilities all right and one more question cor has her hi I um thank you and thank you for all of the information and you said it might feel tedious in the beginning but it felt really great it was just um for me so thank you um I'm kind of wondering about sort of the lack of inv

estment of Corporations and if you guys have any further uh information around that like why that is is and then if you can just answer that that's great but then my other question is did you see any move in um sort of organizations switching from earned Revenue like not relying so much on ticket sales but finding other ways to create earned Revenue thank you I'm gonna answer the the second question first and that's just to say we are seeing greater Revenue diversity earned Revenue diversity um

as I said for the bipac organizations in the study the tour and contract Revenue growth was was really quite impressive um coming out of the pandemic it it's not that the numbers are necessarily going up because there was less Revenue earned overall yet proportionally there was more of a diversified portfolio emerging and I think that's really important uh seeds to plant for future health I it as I said there was more education Revenue earned than ticket Revenue earned by small and medium organi

zations which kind of came as a surprise to me perhaps not at all as a surprise to you with respect to corporate giving that's been on the decline for arts and culture for quite some time it was one of the areas that coming out of the Great Recession uh it was on the decline and then took a precipitous fall it was permanently scarred and hasn't come back the pandemic was another kind of inflection point where it took yet another dive uh it fell off for organizations of every ilk most for small a

nd medium organizations and a bit less for large organizations as to the why I think there are a lot of different there's a lot of different competition for corporate attention particularly during social crisis of why aren't they supporting uh you know those who are homeless or poverty or the ways that people throughout the country are being immediately affected uh it'll be interesting to see in the future whether that's something that can open up a bit of discussion amongst corporate leaders lo

vely Sarah quickly anything on that before we end I know we're at time so again I just invite anyone to reach out if they have questions or want to have more conversations uh just with a little patience because I will be out of town but my my email door is always open and uh I'm I'm always willing to discuss uh dance data thank you so much zanie and Sarah for sharing this data with us and I encourage everyone on this call to stay connected to dance USA again this recording will be made available

for playback I know a lot of you had questions about whether the slides would be available so we'll get you that answer as well in the meantime I hope that you are doing well and stay connected to dance USA thank you all so much have a good rest of your day thank you thanks everyone