ArtsWave has created the new Arts Atlas online tool that integrates data on arts organizations and their programming with community demographic data. By narrowing down a zip code, address, or other identifying criteria, users can search the database for both community data like household, age, ethnicity, and income, and organization data including partnerships, services, and locations.

"As ArtsWave shifted our funding approach, we started to think about data around community impact: how to collect it, how to analyze it, what that would look like," ArtsWave Chief Impact Strategy Officer Tara Townsend says. "Arts Atlas evolved from the need for a place to collect and analyze data while also understanding the gap in access to the arts around the region."

To make sure that the information is up-to-date, ArtsWave is partnering with PolicyMap, a national data collecting organization. While ArtsWave’s target audience for now is arts organization, it eventually hopes to attract the attention of everyone from parents and educators to Realtors and funders.  

“We view Arts Atlas as strategic tool to help justify where ArtsWave is making investments and for arts organizations deciding where they invest their time and energy in terms of their programming,” Townsend says. “We are also currently using the Arts Atlas to provide information about which schools have art and music teachers and which don’t for the Cincinnati Public Schools’ subcommittee on arts and culture as they advocate for how CPS’s new equity policy should relate to arts education.”