SMU DataArts (2021)

Even before COVID-19’s devastation began in 2020, director Zannie Voss combated a looming wave of challenges for her recently formed organization, SMU DataArts. A research center of Southern Methodist University—a merger between DataArts (formerly the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Cultural Data Project) and SMU’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR)—aimed to do what very few institutions dared dream of: quantify the arts and their impact. Voss knew the importance of arts and culture. After all, she and her staff had spent their entire careers tracking the health of the arts field and championing arts’ intrinsic and extrinsic value not only for individuals, but also for society as a whole.

However, while the United States had begun investing in “Big Data” nearly a decade earlier, the arts remained behind on using data as a tool for showcasing their importance and impact on the broader economy, and for evidence-based decision-making. SMU DataArts struggled to find a foothold in the analytical arts industry: data collection and analysis was not a part of most artists’ and cultural institutions’ vocabulary. With its recent merger, and a lack of adequate buy-in from the stakeholders it served, SMU DataArts’ business operations and finances were not completely aligned. Finite resources, divergent constituency groups, and an unsustainable long-term business model plagued SMU DataArts. Voss knew she had to determine which of the company’s stakeholders—funders and government agencies, arts organizations, and researchers and advocacy groups—it could continue to successfully serve in order to remain a functioning not-for-profit service organization.

At a time when arts organizations were facing an increasingly competitive landscape of entertainment activities vying for people’s attention, Voss considered what structural and programmatic changes SMU DataArts would need to undergo to best serve the arts and culture sector while trying find a sustainable operational model. This was the question that Voss and her team at SMU DataArts pondered as they began contemplating their next strategic planning process.