2015 Local Arts Agency Census, United States

The purpose of the 2015 Local Arts Agency (LAA) Census was to characterize the different ways that LAAs perform their vital roles in every community. LAAs share the goals of enabling diverse forms of arts and culture to thrive locally, ensuring broad accessibility to the public, and building healthier communities through the arts.
The census provides details about LAA staffing and oversight, services and programs, partnerships and collaborations in the community, grantmaking, diversity within staff/volunteers/board and diversity in programming, marketing and communications practices, arts education, services for the military, and operating revenues and expenditures, and more. For a more detailed listing of question groups, please refer to the Description of Variables below.
This study contains data from the two forms of the surveys (Full and Abbreviated--a subset of the Full survey). These surveys were distributed online to 4,377 individual Local Arts Agencies in the United States which were known to Americans for the Arts in 2015. A total of 1,127 LAAs responded to the census survey. 641 submitted the Full survey; 486 completed the Abbreviated survey. The overall response rate was 26%.
The data is contained in two separate datasets comprising results from the two surveys. The Full Survey (dataset 1) contains data from the 641 respondents who completed the long survey. The Combined Surveys (dataset 2) contains responses from both the 486 respondents of the abbreviated survey as well the corresponding 641 responses from the full survey for a total of 1,127 respondents. The rate of response from large and mid-sized LAAs was very high, while small and volunteer-driven LAAs were underrepresented in the survey respondents.