Team NAC Project Background

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Background		Data Source		Methodology

Sponsor Introduction

The National Arts Council (NAC) champions the arts in Singapore. The organisation plays a key role in nurturing creative excellence and supporting broad audience engagement, ultimately to develop Singapore as a distinctive global city where the arts inspire Singaporeans and connect our communities.

In supporting the arts scene, NAC has managed to quantify the qualitative in performing an annual National Population Survey which captures sentiments and participation behaviours amongst Singaporeans. As such, with the initial buy-in towards data, NAC is interested in exploring the potential of their databank collection spanning past decade.

By understanding the factors and variables defined by the National Population Survey, which affects a typical Singaporean’s perspective of the arts and culture scene, suggestions can be made to the National Arts Council to raise the nation’s awareness and support of the arts.

Project Background and Problem

The National Arts Council (NAC) champions the creation and appreciation of arts in Singapore. However due to the traditional perspective of arts and culture being non-essential towards one’s livelihood, the arts scene continues to receive little attention from the general public. Majority of attendance to arts events are driven by the nature of arts events being complimentary as Singaporeans continue to deprioritize arts and culture. The Population Survey in 2015 revealed that while eight in 10 Singaporeans attended an arts event, in reality, only four in 10 expressed an interest in the arts.

Therefore, there is a strong incentive for the National Arts Council to jumpstart art appreciation amongst Singaporeans. This lack of attention has led to the arts scene being sustained mainly through government support while local artists are more often than not unrecognised for their contributions. As Deputy CEO of NAC and published poet, Paul Tan speaks out for greater recognition of the role of the artist in society, including a ready willingness to support the arts as patrons, collectors, ticket-buyers and volunteers. Ultimately, NAC is interested in finding a sustainable way to broaden the base of Singaporean audiences, readers and art collectors in the long term. Further research can be found in 11.0 Literature Research.

Project Motivation

With a wealth of data, NAC recognises the potential of data in unlocking insights to achieve their business objectives. They work towards the self-sustainability of the arts and culture scene in Singapore for several reasons:

• Raise public awareness of arts and culture scene and uplift the maturity of Singaporeans in terms of appreciation for the arts
• Local artists are motivated to continue producing content to promote and enrich Singapore arts scene
• Create a vibrant arts scene so as to draw foreign arts enthusiasts or professionals to consider Singapore as a world-class tourist destination for the arts
• To promote Singapore’s global competitiveness and urban development by building a world-class arts and culture scene, so as to attract the world’s best and brightest professionals from an array of industries

Project Objectives

The National Arts Council currently engages an external market research agency to conduct an annual Population Survey with a sample size of approximately 1000 households across the past decade. The commissioned Population Survey on the Arts 2015 Research Paper largely reports on the following summary statistics:

• Public perceptions of arts and culture
• Sources of Information on arts and culture events and activities
• Frequency of Attendance and Participation across different arts forms
• Profiling of Arts Audiences across demographics
• Popular Venues frequented

Despite the comprehensiveness of the Population Survey Research Paper, we are interested in taking a more proactive stance beyond using analytics to ‘watch’ NAC’s impact on a post-event basis. Following our intensive discussions with the NAC representatives, our team has uncovered NAC’s objectives in pursuing the following short and long term goals:

Short Term Goals: Increasing Singaporeans’ level of involvement in arts and culture events
NAC believes bringing arts and culture events to the heartlands might cause people to take such events for granted due to easy access, therefore diminishing its intended value. Therefore, NAC is interested to learn what factors (aside from convenience) will encourage people to attend arts and culture events.

Long Term Goals: To achieve a self-sustaining arts and culture ecosystem
NAC is interested in learning about ways to change consumer behaviours towards the Singapore arts scene by instilling a ready willingness to support the arts as patrons, collectors and ticket-buyers.

Streamlined Project Objectives
In order to improve the current situation, Team NAC intends to:

• Understand the key drivers to typical Singaporeans’ attendance to arts and culture events and activities
• Discover motivations of high value individuals with pre-existing buy-in to the arts
• Examine relationships or correlations between independent variables towards increasing such high value individuals’ propensity towards attending and paying arts events more frequently
• Utilise the insights to convert non-paying individuals or leverage certain high-value art forms to expand revenue avenues

Scope of Project

The scope of the project includes the following phases:
Phase 0: Discovery
Phase 1: Data Preparation
Phase 2: Data Exploration & Model Planning
Phase 3: Data Analysis & Model Building
Phase 4: Communication & Deliverables