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The purpose of the 2015 Local Arts Agency (LAA) Census was to characterize the different ways that LAAs perform their vital roles in every community. LAAs share the goals of enabling diverse forms of arts and culture to thrive locally, ensuring broad accessibility to the public, and building healthier communities through the arts.

The census provides details about LAA staffing and oversight, services and programs, partnerships and collaborations in the community, grantmaking, diversity within staff/volunteers/board and diversity in programming, marketing and communications practices, arts education, services for the military, and operating revenues and expenditures, and more. For a more detailed listing of question groups, please refer to the Description of Variables below.

This study contains data from the two forms of the surveys (Full and Abbreviated--a subset of the Full survey). These surveys were distributed online to 4,377 individual Local Arts Agencies in the United States which were known to Americans for the Arts in 2015. A total of 1,127 LAAs responded to the census survey. 641 submitted the Full survey; 486 completed the Abbreviated survey. The overall response rate was 26%.

The data is contained in two separate datasets comprising results from the two surveys. The Full Survey (dataset 1) contains data from the 641 respondents who completed the long survey. The Combined Surveys (dataset 2) contains responses from both the 486 respondents of the abbreviated survey as well the corresponding 641 responses from the full survey for a total of 1,127 respondents. The rate of response from large and mid-sized LAAs was very high, while small and volunteer-driven LAAs were underrepresented in the survey respondents.

The Local Arts Index was developed in response to an interest in "scaling-down" the National Arts Index (NAI) to the community level and to the growing demand for comparative information on arts at the community level. The LAI was developed in partnership with arts leadership organizations in over 100 communities and is comprised of a variety of indicators to understand who we are as a community and how that manifests itself through cultural activities and participation. Indicators are a systematic data collection initiative that is conducted regularly over time. The LAI compresses many arts indicators into one number that is calculated the same way and at regular time intervals, making it easy to compare performance between time periods.

The LAI collected county level data such as nonprofit arts revenue and expenditures, creative businesses and nonprofit arts organizations per 100,000 residents, arts share of businesses, employees, establishments, and payroll, estimated expenditures on arts equipment, number of visual and performing arts degrees, and adult population attending arts and culture activities. Demographic information includes median measures of age, household income, and year housing was built, as well as population density, and population share that was over 65, non-English speakers, and non-white.

The National Arts Index (NAI) was developed in the mid-2000s by Americans for the Arts as a way of tracking the health and vitality of arts and culture in the United States over time. Annual NAI reports were published in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016.

NAI's main features included:

• A policy index providing a summary annual score which aggregated 81 individual indicators of arts finance, capacity, participation, and competitiveness
• A compendium of data with detail on each indicator including its origin and an interpretation of its significance accompanied by a chart representing change in the indicator over time.

Americans for the Arts seeks to build recognition and support for the extraordinary and dynamic value of the arts and to lead, serve, and advance the diverse networks and organizations and individuals who cultivate the arts in America.