** Please allow three to four business days for response to general data requests. Requests for customized data mining, a benefit of membership, must be allowed at least one week. Media and fundraising requests subject to deadlines may be allowed quicker turnaround when possible.**

WHAT TOPICS DO WE RESEARCH?
Comprehensive financial data: This is basically audit information, including Balance Sheets and Statements of Operations (expenses by category and income by category). We gather this data by various sources including the Dance/USA annual Data Survey, publicly available 990 forms and sometimes individualized mini-surveys related to particular topics.

Operations data: This includes such items as numbers of dancers, ticket prices, attendance figures, dancer contract weeks, geographic ranges of performances, size of Board, and various other topics. Sources are widely varied.

Chief Administrators and Artistic Directors: In recent years we have begun to gather information about Executive Directors (or the equivalent title) and Artistic Directors in companies with budgets from $500K and up. Data other than contact information includes length of tenure, race, gender, previous position, and role on Board.

Compensation: We have maintained basic compensation information for AD’s and ED’s since 1983. Dancer compensation was updated annually from 1990 through 2002, then was updated in 2004 and 2005. A new update is now out in the field awaiting returns. Compensation data for smaller companies and for department heads at larger companies was last updated in 2002 and a survey instrument is now in the field for a 2007 update.

Listings: This is perhaps the most important area of research in terms of long-range planning and overall public relations impact. As a field we cannot even begin to look credible until we at least know how many of us there are, and who we are. Beginning in 2003 we have succeeded in developing a comprehensive listing of dance companies with budgets over $1 million and a similar listing of companies with budgets between $500K and $999K. We anticipate completing a listing of those between $250K and $499K by the end of June, 2007. Our target is to add companies between $100K and $249K by December, 2007. Companies below $100K are so volatile and transient that it would be prohibitively difficult to list them and maintain the lists. Notably, the simple maintaining of these lists is itself a significant task.
National: On this level we capture basic data about these companies.
City Censuses: In certain areas (so far Chicago, Washington DC, NYC and the State of Minnesota) we have captured comprehensive listings of dance-making entities (“companies” and other structures) together with related and useful information such as founding year, genre practiced, numbers of dancers, audience sizes, geographic ranges of performance, corporate structure, and about a dozen other topics.

Dancers: Beginning in 2006 we have embarked on a project to capture numbers, genres, ranks (where applicable) and nations of origin for dancers in companies with budgets over $1 million.
Repertoire: Our newest project is to tabulate “seasons” among major ballet companies, including numbers of performances, works presented, premieres, and choreographers. We are seeking to quantify over time (with 06/07 as a baseline year) the trend toward new work versus “warhorses,” with related data such as numbers and timing of performances captured along the way.

Nutcrackers: For five years now, since and including 2002, we have gathered data about attendance, income and numbers of performances of The Nutcracker across the nation. This data-gathering includes both Member companies and non-member companies in order to ensure a credible “national trend” picture.

Assessments: From time to time we are asked to undertake a neutral “outside party” assessment of a particular dance community. Our most recent has been Birmingham, AL. Previous examples have included the San Francisco Bay Area and even New York City, where our assessment was one of the many steps that led ultimately to the establishment of Dance/NYC.

OTHER SERVICES
Survey editing: From time to time staff or members undertake surveys of their own. We are a skilled and experienced reviewer of survey instrument drafts and we do this as a service to the membership.

Company profiles: One of our most common requests from members is that they be placed “in context” relative to more or less comparable companies around the nation. We draw on many of the topics listed above to prepare materials for these member companies.

Special groupings: We are often asked by the media, by funders, and sometimes by other entities to comment on or provide information about particular types or groupings of dance-makers. For example: modern/contemporary companies in communities outside New York. For another example: dance companies with endowments. For a third example: dance companies with “healthy” balance sheets. In each such instance we have to extract the companies matching the requirement, then draw unique conclusions regarding these companies.

Interfaces with other data: We are sometimes asked to create compilations of data that interface with variables outside the dance field, and we do so. For example: cross-tabbing to city size. For example: cross-tabbing to geographic areas.

Review and connection to other research: We receive and review publications of other research related to dance. It is a goal of the strategic plan to make this activity something that translates into capsule summaries and weblinks for the benefit of the membership but we have not yet fully implemented this plan.

WHERE DOES DANCE/USA STAND IN RELATION TO OTHER RESEARCH?
At this point we are the only organization in America conducting systematic research, over time, covering the dance field on a broad basis. There has been no predecessor. Much of what we do is “basic research.” What this means is that we can’t just go on the internet and look it up. If we could, it would mean that someone else (hypothetically such as the NEA or the Bureau of Labor Statistics) had already done the work. This is not the case. We are the ones who are doing this very basic work. Other people will look up what we do. We are the ones who make the factual case for dance in America.