COMMUNITY IMPACT ARTS GRANTS: USING ZIP CODES AND CENSUS DATA TO MEASURE COMMUNITY REACH

About the Program

Category: Arts, Culture and Historic Preservation (Best in Category)

Year: 2020

When the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture launched a new pilot grant program designed to provide arts services to residents who do not typically have access to the arts, we were faced with the challenge of measuring impact quickly, at low cost, and without putting a significant data reporting burden on the nonprofit organizations that receive those grants. We addressed this challenge by creating a new “community reach” metric that utilized data, tools, and staff we already had on hand. With this new metric we discovered that the new grant program was achieving its goals and were able to communicate that to our authorizers and to the public in a timely manner. We are now using this metric to evaluate other programs and are training others in the field – both locally and nationally – on how to replicate it for use in their own programs.