The Arts Data Handbook

You don't need a data team to answer the question, "How did we do?"

The Arts Data Handbook gives arts and culture professionals a practical path from raw CRM exports to metrics and dashboards their organizations can trust and use.

Drawing on more than two decades inside arts organizations, Amy Bruce walks readers through choosing the right questions, defining meaningful measures, extracting and structuring data, building useful dashboards, and presenting results without overstating what the numbers mean.

Designed for performing arts centers, theaters, museums, galleries, zoos, aquariums, gardens, science centers, historic sites, and other admissions-based organizations, this guide requires no statistics, coding, or new software budget.

You'll learn how to:

• Identify useful revenue, attendance, retention, membership, and giving metrics

• Build clear, repeatable reporting files from CRM exports

• Turn organizational data into dashboards people actually use

• Present results with the context leaders need to make decisions

• Maintain reporting systems after the first dashboard is finished

• Use AI in data work without compromising accuracy or privacy

The book also includes a quick-reference section, practical resources, and a plain-language glossary.