Impacts and challenges of cultural venues in New Brunswick: Key findings of a recent survey
Insights into venues’ contributions to the cultural community and all residents, as well as their financial health and human resources
This post summarizes a longer report that highlights important findings from a recent survey of operators of cultural venues in New Brunswick. The goals of this groundbreaking survey were to better understand venues’ contributions to the cultural community and all New Brunswickers, as well as their financial health and human resources. These are topics that had not previously been thoroughly researched in the province.
The report is part of a larger project that is investigating the impacts and post-pandemic challenges of the arts, culture, and heritage in New Brunswick. Other activities and reports in the project include:
A statistical profile of the 2,700 professional artists in New Brunswick in 2021.
Interviews with operators of 13 cultural venues (a brief “satellite report” on the interview findings is planned for May).
An analysis of other data on the arts and culture in the province.
A fuller report on the entire project, which is planned for September of 2024.
The research project is intended to produce results that will inform the province’s arts, culture, and heritage sector for the next decade. The project’s partners will use these resources to further their information sharing, policy, and advocacy activities for the betterment of the sector as a whole.
The project partners are ArtsLink NB, Association acadienne des artistes professionel.le.s du Nouveau-Brunswick (AAAPNB), and the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University. We want to thank the project’s supporters: the Canada Council for the Arts and the Government of New Brunswick.
Responses from 71 cultural venues
The survey received 71 responses that were complete enough to retain for analysis, including 38 in English (54% of the total) and 33 in French (46%). The survey was open from June 16 until July 31, 2023. Because the survey was not based on a random sample, it is not possible to estimate a margin of error.
A wide variety of venues responded to the survey. Responses were received from:
Arts, culture, and heritage organizations of many sizes, types, and locations within New Brunswick, plus a few individuals with a venue.
Renters or owners of one or more venues (i.e., physical spaces), as long as the respondent operates the venue.
A senior staff or board member (only one response per organization was retained).
The survey was designed by Kelly Hill of Hill Strategies Research in collaboration with the project partners. The median time to complete the survey was 34 minutes.
Hill Strategies and the project partners wish to thank the respondents for taking the time and effort to complete the survey.
Beyond organization names, the survey responses are being kept confidential. Our reporting only provides overall statistics about the responses to each question. Respondents could skip most questions, and the percentages in this report represent the percent of people responding to that question (which is usually less than 71).
Respondents are based in 29 different cities and towns across New Brunswick, as shown in the graph below.
Additional statistics about the types of venues that responded are at the end of the full report.
Key findings
The survey results provide evidence of many aspects of the well-being of cultural venues in New Brunswick. Regarding their top strengths and concerns:
Community engagement is perceived as a key area of strength for cultural venues.
Funding is an area of significant concern (both government funding and earned revenues).
Details about venues’ engagement in communities across the province include:
Most venues have recently increased their community engagement activities. Common engagement activities include artist or author talks, professional development activities, and participatory creative experiences.
Almost all cultural venues (94%) collaborate or are engaged with other groups or businesses. Many engage with schools, organizations that welcome newcomers, governments, and business associations. (See graph below.)
Venues see themselves as playing a major role in enhancing the arts, heritage, and creativity in their communities: 91% believe that they have a very important role in connecting people with the arts, culture, and heritage; 82% believe that they have a very important role in fostering individuals’ creativity; and 71% believe that they have a very important role in developing and supporting artists.
In addition, most venues believe that they have a very important role in enhancing community well-being (69%), fostering a sense of identity (69%), supporting intercultural exchange and dialogue (56%), contributing to economic development (55%), attracting and retaining residents (53%), as well as improving residents’ health and well-being (52%).
Over 500,000 attendees were reached by the 40 venues that responded to that survey question.
Cultural venues in New Brunswick tend to be small, and they have many challenges that may be related to their size:
4 is the median staff contingent for responding venues. Staff capacity is the third most common area of concern among venues. Venues struggle to offer competitive salaries and benefits. Roughly one-in-five venues (19%) said that they have no specific HR policies in place.
In most venues, staff members do extra unpaid work: 78% of respondents (mostly senior staffers) reported that they or other staff members do unpaid work, in addition to their regular tasks.
Other important findings regarding human resources in N.B. cultural venues include:
Most venues believe that they foster a culture of trust and belonging among staff (reported as a strength by 62%), but many struggle with human resource planning, including succession planning (reported as a concern by 44%).
Volunteers are vital to the survival of many cultural venues. Overall, responding venues have 3 times more volunteers (1,537) than staff members (514).
Regarding their physical condition, the survey found that roughly one-quarter of responding cultural venues are not in good physical condition.
Concerning venues’ support for artists:
Venues predominantly support artists from New Brunswick: 2,160 of all 3,532 artists with which 45 responding venues worked hail from New Brunswick.
Many venues struggle to adhere to minimum industry fee scales for artists (e.g., CARFAC, SOCAN): 29% of venues who work with professional artists do not adhere to minimum fee scales, and another 23% do so only sometimes. The remaining 48% always adhere to minimum fee scales. Of note, all 7 venues who work only with professional artists always pay minimum fees.
The survey probed a number of equity-related issues:
Regarding who created the works that venues produced or presented, most venues produced and/or presented works that were created by women (71%), youth (68%), LGBTQ2SIA+ people (54%), and the Francophone minority in New Brunswick (54%).
Relatively few venues produced and/or presented works created by disabled people (17%) or unhoused people (5%) during their most recent fiscal year.
In terms of the subject matter of the works, two-thirds of venues said that they produced and/or presented works that were focused on youth, while exactly one-half produced and/or presented works focused on the province’s Francophone minority in the past year.
Few venues produced and/or presented works focused on low-income people (20%), disabled people (18%), responding or adapting to the climate emergency (15%), unhoused people (11%), or neurodivergent people (9%). Just over one-quarter of responding venues (28%) indicated that they do not focus on any of the equity-seeking groups listed in the question.
The full report on the survey contains many more details.