Press Release Site

A new online survey set up by Arts Council England has made it faster and easier for organisations who receive funding to submit their annual figures.

Developed with the market research agency ORC International, the Arts Council web application has seen 99% of organisations complete their submission within six weeks, compared to 85% in six months in previous years.

The submission process, which previously was completed on an Excel spreadsheet consisting of nearly 1,000 data points, had been revamped last year after ORC International was appointed by the Arts Council to process their annual data.

This year Arts Council England decided to set up an online tool to increase the response rate, reduce the amount of manual data processing and error checking that was required and create a more user-friendly process.

ORC International worked closely with Arts Council England on the data collection application which enables organisations to securely work on their submission, and then finish it at a later date.

Mike Tickner from ORC International said: "Our clients are increasingly finding that online methods take away from the drudgery of trawling through spreadsheets, and provide swifter, more accurate results

Arts Council England can also keep track of progress using administration pages, which allows them to delve deeper into each individual submission.

In addition to significantly increasing response rates and speeding up the timeframe, for the first time Arts Council England released the annual submission data as Official Statistics. Arts Council England supports over 800 organisations every year, ranging from the Royal Shakespeare Company to individual artists, who are all required to submit yearly activity data.

Kelly Pettitt, Senior officer for RFO Data and Reporting, Arts Council England said, The system that ORC International has devised for us has made a huge difference to the way we manage data and it has enabled us to make the figures submitted to us universally available via our website.

For more information, please contact:


2.Mike Tickner, ORC International. Tel: 020 7675 1059;
email : Mike.Tickner@orc.co.uk
3.Emma Russell, Media Relations Officer, Arts Council England. Tel: 020 7973 6890 or emma.russell@artscouncil.org.uk
Notes for editors:
1. ORC International is the global research operating unit of Opinion Research Corporation. Headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, Opinion Research Corporation was founded in 1938 to apply public opinion polling techniques to business issues. It has been a public company since October 1993 and has UK offices in London and Manchester.

2. Arts Council England works to get great art to everyone by championing, developing and investing in artistic experiences that enrich peoples lives.

As the national development agency for the arts, we support a range of artistic activities from theatre to music, literature to dance, photography to digital art, and carnival to crafts.

Great art inspires us, brings us together and teaches us about ourselves, and the world around us. In short, it makes life better.

Between 2008 and 2011, we will invest £1.3 billion of public money from government and a further £0.3 billion from the National Lottery to create these experiences for as many people as possible across the country.

www.artscouncil.org.uk