Crowdfunding the arts during COVID

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Leslie Wells

Written by: Michael Weigel

As a graduate research assistant at the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab at the IU Center for Cultural Affairs, much of my work in the past two years has focused on economic factors that influence artists who use crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter to finance and showcase their work.

Kickstarter is the dominant platform in the United States and around the world, with more than 18 million investing in excess of $5 billion to fund almost 200,000 successful projects. Analyzing data from their site can help us understand online crowdfunding dynamics on the whole. According to a Pew Research Center study, almost 1 in 4 Americans have contributed to a crowdfunding project, which serves as an indication of the reach and importance of online crowdfunding platforms for creative workers in a variety of sectors.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has upended and changed our economy in ways that are unpredictable and continuing to evolve. Arts and culture crowdfunders have felt the effects of this upheaval at the platform level and on an individual basis.

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Cultivating creative sector discussion during COVID-19

Posted on July 13, 2020 by Leslie Wells

Written by: Michael Weigel, O’Neill MPA student

While many people were quarantined at home, the Center for Cultural Affairs and the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab at the O’Neill School worked diligently to bring those in the creative sector together to look toward the ever-evolving future of the arts in a post-COVID world.

On June 9, 2020, CCA organizers hosted a virtual research workshop entitled Leveraging Creativity. The event included presentation and discussion of new scholarly work from dozens of researchers around the world focused on arts, entrepreneurship, and the creative sector. Even while remaining socially distanced, the event was a successful opportunity for dynamic discussion of pressing topics within this discipline and strongly contributed to the advancement of arts entrepreneurship research.

Several of the papers focused on the role of arts organizations, interventions, and entrepreneurs in the field. Their topics ranged from their impact on student development to professional settings to communities at large.

At the undergraduate level, one study looked at arts education through theater courses has been shown to help college students from all majors develop empathetic traits in ways that reinforce the importance of arts education for students, employers and education professionals.
Once those students graduate and enter the workforce, more new research explored the ways in which an artist’s presence impacts decision-making dynamics in the public sector. The results of that experiment indicated that residency programs allowed for intrapreneurial artists to enhance organizational innovativeness via the creativity and novelty of their contributions to public-sector problem-solving. The figure below shows the disparities in how experts rated the contributions of control groups versus groups with artists in the dimensions of creativity, novelty, and usefulness.

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The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on artists

Posted on July 6, 2020 by Leslie Wells

Doug Noonan wearing a suit and tie in a breezway — O’Neill IUPUI Professor Doug Noonan

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the global arts sector in unprecedented ways. Museums had to close their doors. Concerts were cancelled. Artists who perform on urban streets were forced indoors due to stay-at-home orders.

O’Neill IUPUI Professor Doug Noonan and colleagues from the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation (AEI) Lab are working to understand how the outbreak has impacted the arts sector. They hope it will help inform conversations about what the industry will be like after the pandemic.

A key focus of the AEI Lab is on the gig economy—characterized by the lack of an ongoing relationship with a single employer and made up of freelancers and independent contractors. The term gig economy might bring to mind images only of ridesharing drivers, but the concept of a gig economy actually comes from the arts sector. The connection between that type of work and the COVID-19 outbreak is all too relevant.

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Measuring the effectiveness of the Indianapolis-Marion County City-County Council

Posted on June 29, 2020 by Leslie Wells

By Amanda Rutherford and Cullen C. Merritt

As the nation continues to rely heavily on local governments to respond to a range of issues—from cybersecurity threats to the spread of infectious disease—knowing what local officials do and whether they manage their resources effectively is vital for understanding how policy influences the daily lives of citizens.

Unfortunately, there has been no clear way to assess the performance of local governments—until now. In 2019, our research team began developing a first-of-its-kind process to review the effectiveness of the Indianapolis-Marion County City-County Council in Indiana. That assessment focused on hearing from those who are directly involved in and impacted by the council’s work. Nearly 600 residents, in addition to city and county leaders, from across Marion County participated in an online survey, interviews, and focus groups to provide their perspectives of the strengths and weaknesses of the consolidated city-county council.

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Communities need to plan now to rebuild economies after COVID-19

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Leslie Wells

Written by Tom Guevara, Director, IU Public Policy Institute

IU Public Policy Director Tom Guevara stands in a hallway in a suit — IU Public Policy Director Tom Guevara

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, our attention has been rightfully focused on keeping our families and communities safe from a global pandemic threatening our health, relationships, and economic well-being. Focusing on economic recovery while responding to attack from an unseen enemy is especially difficult. COVID-19 is not only changing our social and economic landscape now, it could change economies at all levels—local to global—forever.

Yet civic leaders must also find a way to focus on economic recovery planning if their communities are to bounce back from this viral threat. The first step is to build a recovery plan—a hard task when there’s no pandemic playbook to follow. Having worked in a federal agency focused on improving economically distressed areas and now leading an institute that helps communities make better economic decisions, I have seen what it takes to build an economic recovery plan.
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